9,740 research outputs found
The weight of matter
Einstein's traceless 1919 gravitational theory is analyzed from a variational
viewpoint. It is shown to be equivalent to a transverse (invariant only under
diffeomorphisms that preserve the Lebesgue measure) theory, with an additional
Weyl symmetry, in which the gauge is partially fixed so that the metric becomes
unimodular. In spite of the fact that this symmetry forbids direct coupling of
the potential energy with the gravitational sector, the equivalence principle
is recovered in the unimodular gauge owing to Bianchi's identities.Comment: LaTeX, 11 page
Breaking a secure communication scheme based on the phase synchronization of chaotic systems
A security analysis of a recently proposed secure communication scheme based
on the phase synchronization of chaotic systems is presented. It is shown that
the system parameters directly determine the ciphertext waveform, hence it can
be readily broken by parameter estimation of the ciphertext signal.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure
Rudiments of Holography
An elementary introduction to Maldacena's AdS/CFT correspondence is given,
with some emphasis in the Fefferman-Graham construction. This is based on
lectures given by one of us (E.A.) at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid.Comment: 60 pages, additional misprints corrected, references adde
Solcore: A multi-scale, python-based library for modelling solar cells and semiconductor materials
Computational models can provide significant insight into the operation
mechanisms and deficiencies of photovoltaic solar cells. Solcore is a modular
set of computational tools, written in Python 3, for the design and simulation
of photovoltaic solar cells. Calculations can be performed on ideal,
thermodynamic limiting behaviour, through to fitting experimentally accessible
parameters such as dark and light IV curves and luminescence. Uniquely, it
combines a complete semiconductor solver capable of modelling the optical and
electrical properties of a wide range of solar cells, from quantum well devices
to multi-junction solar cells. The model is a multi-scale simulation accounting
for nanoscale phenomena such as the quantum confinement effects of
semiconductor nanostructures, to micron level propagation of light through to
the overall performance of solar arrays, including the modelling of the
spectral irradiance based on atmospheric conditions. In this article we
summarize the capabilities in addition to providing the physical insight and
mathematical formulation behind the software with the purpose of serving as
both a research and teaching tool.Comment: 25 pages, 18 figures, Journal of Computational Electronics (2018
Unimodular cosmology and the weight of energy
Some models are presented in which the strength of the gravitational coupling
of the potential energy relative to the same coupling for the kinetic energy
is, in a precise sense, adjustable. The gauge symmetry of these models consists
of those coordinate changes with unit jacobian.Comment: LaTeX, 23 pages, conclusions expanded. Two paragraphs and a new
reference adde
Gravitational shocks as a key ingredient of Gamma-Ray Bursts
We identify a novel physical mechanism that may be responsible for energy
release in -ray bursts. Radial perturbations in the neutron core,
induced by its collision with collapsing outer layers during the early stages
of supernova explosions, can trigger a gravitational shock, which can readily
eject a small but significant fraction of the collapsing material at
ultra-relativistic speeds. The development of such shocks is a strong-field
effect arising in near-critical collapse in General Relativity and has been
observed in numerical simulations in various contexts, including in particular
radially perturbed neutron star collapse, albeit for a tiny range of initial
conditions. Therefore, this effect can be easily missed in numerical
simulations if the relevant parameter space is not exhaustively investigated.
In the proposed picture, the observed rarity of -ray bursts would be
explained if the relevant conditions for this mechanism appear in only about
one in every core collapse supernovae. We also mention the
possibility that near-critical collapse could play a role in powering the
central engines of Active Galactic Nuclei.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure
Breaking a chaos-noise-based secure communication scheme
This paper studies the security of a secure communication scheme based on two
discrete-time intermittently-chaotic systems synchronized via a common random
driving signal. Some security defects of the scheme are revealed: 1) the key
space can be remarkably reduced; 2) the decryption is insensitive to the
mismatch of the secret key; 3) the key-generation process is insecure against
known/chosen-plaintext attacks. The first two defects mean that the scheme is
not secure enough against brute-force attacks, and the third one means that an
attacker can easily break the cryptosystem by approximately estimating the
secret key once he has a chance to access a fragment of the generated
keystream. Yet it remains to be clarified if intermittent chaos could be used
for designing secure chaotic cryptosystems.Comment: RevTeX4, 11 pages, 15 figure
The multiplier approach to the projective Finsler metrizability problem
This paper is concerned with the problem of determining whether a
projective-equivalence class of sprays is the geodesic class of a Finsler
function. We address both the local and the global aspects of this problem. We
present our results entirely in terms of a multiplier, that is, a type (0,2)
tensor field along the tangent bundle projection. In the course of the analysis
we consider several related issues of interest including the positivity and
strong convexity of positively-homogeneous functions, the relation to the
so-called Rapcs\'ak conditions, some peculiarities of the two-dimensional case,
and geodesic convexity for sprays.Comment: 25 page
Societies against the Chief? Re-examining the value of ‘heterarchy’ as a concept for examining European Iron Age societies
Carole Crumley’s (1979; 1995a; 1995b; 2015) explorations on the applicability of heterarchy as a concept within archaeology have been highly influential in Anglo-American discourse on social organization. Despite largely emerging from Crumley’s work on Iron Age France (Crumley, 1979), however, the relevance of heterarchy as a concept for challenging hierarchical models of European Iron Age societies has largely been restricted to Britain (e.g. Moore, 2007a; Hill, 2011), where evidence for “elites” seems most obviously lacking. Northwestern Iberia has also been a locus for discussion of acephalous and nonhierarchical social forms (Fernández-Posse & Sánchez-Palencia, 1998; González-García et al., 2011; González-Ruibal, 2012; Sastre-Prats, 2011), but one where explicit discussions of heterarchy have rarely featured. More recently, it has been argued that almost all European Iron Age societies can be regarded as “broadly heterarchical” (e.g. Bradley et al., 2015: 260), although the wider implications of this have yet to be explored. What is the place, then, of heterarchy in Iron Age studies? Has it merely become a label for all nonhierarchical models (Fernández-Götz, 2014: 36), creating various Iron Age “societies against the state” (Clastres, 1977), or does it offer ways of exploring not just alternatives to hierarchies but thicker descriptions of how all Iron Age societies worked
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