Multiple Components in Narrow Planetary Rings

The phase-space volume of regions of regular or trapped motion, for bounded or scattering systems with two degrees of freedom respectively, displays universal properties. In particular, drastic reductions in the volume (gaps) are observed at specific values of a control parameter. Using the stability resonances we show that they, and not the mean-motion resonances, account for the position of these gaps. For more degrees of freedom, exciting these resonances divides the regions of trapped motion. For planetary rings, we demonstrate that this mechanism yields rings with multiple components.Comment: 4 pages, 7 figures (some in colors

The turbulent spectrum created by non-Abelian plasma instabilities

Recent numerical work on the fate of plasma instabilities in weakly-coupled non-Abelian gauge theory has shown the development of a cascade of energy from long to short wavelengths. This cascade has a steady-state spectrum, analogous to the Kolmogorov spectrum for turbulence in hydrodynamics or for energy cascades in other systems. In this paper, we theoretically analyze processes responsible for this cascade and find a steady-state spectrum f_k ~ k^-2, where f_k is the phase-space density of particles with momentum k. The exponent -2 is consistent with results from numerical simulations. We also discuss implications of the emerging picture of instability development on the "bottom-up" thermalization scenario for (extremely high energy) heavy ion collisions, emphasizing fundamental questions that remain to be answered.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

Interminiband Rabi oscillations in biased semiconductor superlattices

Carrier dynamics at energy level anticrossings in biased semiconductor superlattices, was studied in the time domain by solving the time-dependent Schroedinger equation. The resonant nature of interminiband Rabi oscillations has been explicitly demonstrated to arise from interference of intrawell and Bloch oscillations. We also report a simulation of direct Rabi oscillations across three minibands, in the high field regime, due to interaction between three strongly coupled minibands.Comment: 13 pages, 16 figure

Radiative and Collisional Energy Loss, and Photon-Tagged Jets at RHIC

The suppression of single jets at high transverse momenta in a quark-gluon plasma is studied at RHIC energies, and the additional information provided by a photon tag is included. The energy loss of hard jets traversing through the medium is evaluated in the AMY formalism, by consistently taking into account the contributions from radiative events and from elastic collisions at leading order in the coupling. The strongly-interacting medium in these collisions is modelled with (3+1)-dimensional ideal relativistic hydrodynamics. Putting these ingredients together with a complete set of photon-production processes, we present a calculation of the nuclear modification of single jets and photon-tagged jets at RHIC.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, contributed to the 3rd International Conference on Hard and Electro-Magnetic Probes of High-Energy Nuclear Collisions (Hard Probes 2008), typos corrected, published versio

Electroweak Bubble Nucleation, Nonperturbatively

We present a lattice method to compute bubble nucleation rates at radiatively induced first order phase transitions, in high temperature, weakly coupled field theories, nonperturbatively. A generalization of Langer's approach, it makes no recourse to saddle point expansions and includes completely the dynamical prefactor. We test the technique by applying it to the electroweak phase transition in the minimal standard model, at an unphysically small Higgs mass which gives a reasonably strong phase transition (lambda/g^2 =0.036, which corresponds to m(Higgs)/m(W) = 0.54 at tree level but does not correspond to a positive physical Higgs mass when radiative effects of the top quark are included), and compare the results to older perturbative and other estimates. While two loop perturbation theory slightly under-estimates the strength of the transition measured by the latent heat, it over-estimates the amount of supercooling by a factor of 2.Comment: 48 pages, including 16 figures. Minor revisions and typo fixes, nothing substantial, conclusions essentially unchange

Jet quenching in shock waves

We study the propagation of an ultrarelativistic light quark jet inside a shock wave using the holographic principle. The maximum stopping distance and its dependency on the energy of the jet is obtained

New Universality of Lyapunov Spectra in Hamiltonian Systems

A new universality of Lyapunov spectra {\lambda_i} is shown for Hamiltonian systems. The universality appears in middle energy regime and is different from another universality which can be reproduced by random matrices in the following two points. One is that the new universality appears in a limited range of large i/N rather than the whole range, where N is degrees of freedom. The other is Lyapunov spectra do not behave linearly while random matrices give linear behavior even on 3D lattice. Quadratic terms with smaller nonlinear terms of potential functions play an intrinsic role in the new universality.Comment: 19 pages, 16 Encapsulated Postscript figures, LaTeX (100 kb