What we do understand of Colour Confinement

A review is presented of what we understand of colour confinement in QCD. Lattice formulation provides evidence that QCD vacuum is a dual superconductor: the chromoelectric field of a $q\bar q$ pair is constrained by dual Meissner effect into a dual Abrikosov flux tube and the static potential energy is proportional to the distance.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, plenary talk at "Quark Matter 99", Torino, Italy, May 10-15, 199

A disorder analysis of the Ising model

Lattice studies of monopole condensation in QCD are based on the construction of a disorder parameter, a creation operator of monopoles which is written in terms of the gauge fields. This procedure is expected to work for any system which presents duality. We check it on the Ising model in 2d, which is exactly solvable. The output is an amusing exercise in statistical mechanics.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

Topology in QCD with 4 flavours of dynamical fermions

We study the topological properties of full QCD with four flavours of dynamical staggered fermions. In particular the topological susceptibility is measured and the problem of the determination of its first derivative is discussed.Comment: LATTICE99(Topology and Confinement). 3 pages, contains espcrc2.sty fil

Topological susceptibility at zero and finite TT in SU(3) Yang-Mills theory

We determine the topological susceptibility $\chi$ at T=0 in pure SU(3) gauge theory and its behaviour at finite $T$ across the deconfining transition. We use an improved topological charge density operator. $\chi$ drops sharply by one order of magnitude at the deconfining temperature $T_c$.Comment: Recently appeared erratum added as an "Appendix" to the original pape

Propagation and stability of optical pulses in a diffractive dispersive non-linear medium

Propagation and stability of light pulses under the combined influence of the optical Kerr effect, dispersion and diffraction are investigated by adopting a variational procedure. In particular, it is found that 'light bullets', i.e. radially symmetric pulses propagating without distortion, are not necessarily unstable under perturbations which do not maintain radial symmetry

Rolewicz-type chaotic operators

In this article we introduce a new class of Rolewicz-type operators in l_p, $1 \le p < \infty$. We exhibit a collection F of cardinality continuum of operators of this type which are chaotic and remain so under almost all finite linear combinations, provided that the linear combination has sufficiently large norm. As a corollary to our main result we also obtain that there exists a countable collection of such operators whose all finite linear combinations are chaotic provided that they have sufficiently large norm.Comment: 15 page