2,769 research outputs found
Hearing the grass grow. Emotional and epistemological challenges of practice-near research
This paper discusses the concept of practice-near research in terms of the emotional and epistemological challenges that arise from the researcher coming 'near' enough to other people for psychological processes to ensue. These may give rise in the researcher to confusion, anxiety and doubt about who is who and what is what; but also to the possibility of real emotional and relational depth in the research process. Using illustrations from three social work doctoral research projects undertaken by students at the Tavistock Clinic and the University of East London the paper examines four themes that seem to the author to be central to meaningful practice-near research undertaken in a spirit of true emotional and epistemological open-mindedness: the smell of the real; losing our minds; the inevitability of personal change; and the discovery of complex particulars
Even-Odd Correlation Functions on an Optical Lattice
We study how different many body states appear in a quantum gas microscope,
such as the one developed at Harvard [Bakr et al. Nature 462, 74 (2009)], where
the site-resolved parity of the atom number is imaged. We calculate the spatial
correlations of the microscope images, corresponding to the correlation
function of the parity of the number of atoms at each site. We produce analytic
results for a number of well-known models: noninteracting bosons, the large U
Bose-Hubbard model, and noninteracting fermions. We find that these parity
correlations tend to be less strong than density-density correlations, but they
carry similar information.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures. Published versio
Magneto-immutable turbulence in weakly collisional plasmas
We propose that pressure anisotropy causes weakly collisional turbulent
plasmas to self-organize so as to resist changes in magnetic-field strength. We
term this effect "magneto-immutability" by analogy with incompressibility
(resistance to changes in pressure). The effect is important when the pressure
anisotropy becomes comparable to the magnetic pressure, suggesting that in
collisionless, weakly magnetized (high-) plasmas its dynamical relevance
is similar to that of incompressibility. Simulations of magnetized turbulence
using the weakly collisional Braginskii model show that magneto-immutable
turbulence is surprisingly similar, in most statistical measures, to critically
balanced MHD turbulence. However, in order to minimize magnetic-field
variation, the flow direction becomes more constrained than in MHD, and the
turbulence is more strongly dominated by magnetic energy (a nonzero "residual
energy"). These effects represent key differences between pressure-anisotropic
and fluid turbulence, and should be observable in the turbulent
solar wind.Comment: Accepted for publication in J. Plasma Phy
- ā¦