Breathing SPACE – a practical approach to the breathless patient.

Breathlessness is a common symptom which may have multiple causes in any one individual and causes which may change over time. Breathlessness campaigns encourage people to see their GP if they are unduly breathless. Members of the London Respiratory Network collaborated to develop a tool which would encourage a holistic approach to breathlessness, which was applicable both at the time of diagnosis and during ongoing management. This has led to the development of the aide memoire “Breathing SPACE” which encompasses 5 key themes – Smoking, Pulmonary disease, Anxiety/psychosocial factors, Cardiac disease and Exercise/fitness. A particular concern was to ensure that high value interventions (smoking cessation and exercise interventions) are prioritised across the life-course and throughout the course of disease management. The approach is relevant both to well people and in those with an underling diagnosis or diagnoses. The inclusion of anxiety draws attention to the importance of mental health issues. Parity of esteem requires the physical health problems of people with mental illness to be addressed. The SPACE mnemonic also addresses the problem of underdiagnosis of heart disease in people with lung disease and vice versa, as well as the systematic undertreatment of these conditions where they do co-occur

The challenge of the chiral Potts model

The chiral Potts model continues to pose particular challenges in statistical mechanics: it is ``exactly solvable'' in the sense that it satisfies the Yang-Baxter relation, but actually obtaining the solution is not easy. Its free energy was calculated in 1988 and the order parameter was conjectured in full generality a year later. However, a derivation of that conjecture had to wait until 2005. Here we discuss that derivation.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, 29 reference

The order parameter of the chiral Potts model

An outstanding problem in statistical mechanics is the order parameter of the chiral Potts model. An elegant conjecture for this was made in 1983. It has since been successfully tested against series expansions, but as far as the author is aware there is as yet no proof of the conjecture. Here we show that if one makes a certain analyticity assumption similar to that used to derive the free energy, then one can indeed verify the conjecture. The method is based on the ``broken rapidity line'' approach pioneered by Jimbo, Miwa and Nakayashiki.Comment: 29 pages, 7 figures. Citations made more explicit and some typos correcte

Exact results for the one-dimensional many-body problem with contact interaction: Including a tunable impurity

The one-dimensional problem of $N$ particles with contact interaction in the presence of a tunable transmitting and reflecting impurity is investigated along the lines of the coordinate Bethe ansatz. As a result, the system is shown to be exactly solvable by determining the eigenfunctions and the energy spectrum. The latter is given by the solutions of the Bethe ansatz equations which we establish for different boundary conditions in the presence of the impurity. These impurity Bethe equations contain as special cases well-known Bethe equations for systems on the half-line. We briefly study them on their own through the toy-examples of one and two particles. It turns out that the impurity can be tuned to lift degeneracies in the energies and can create bound states when it is sufficiently attractive. The example of an impurity sitting at the center of a box and breaking parity invariance shows that such an impurity can be used to confine asymmetrically a stationary state. This could have interesting applications in condensed matter physics.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, version accepted for publication: some typos corrected, references and comments adde

Spontaneous magnetization of the XXZ Heisenberg spin-1/2 chain

Determinant representations of form factors are used to represent the spontaneous magnetization of the Heisenberg XXZ chain (Delta >1) on the finite lattice as the ratio of two determinants. In the thermodynamic limit (the lattice of infinite length), the Baxter formula is reproduced in the framework of Algebraic Bethe Ansatz. It is shown that the finite size corrections to the Baxter formula are exponentially small.Comment: 18 pages, Latex2

Some comments on developments in exact solutions in statistical mechanics since 1944

Lars Onsager and Bruria Kaufman calculated the partition function of the Ising model exactly in 1944 and 1949. Since then there have been many developments in the exact solution of similar, but usually more complicated, models. Here I shall mention a few, and show how some of the latest work seems to be returning once again to the properties observed by Onsager and Kaufman.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures, section on six-vertex model revise

Eigenvectors of Baxter-Bazhanov-Stroganov \tau^{(2)}(t_q) model with fixed-spin boundary conditions

The aim of this contribution is to give the explicit formulas for the eigenvectors of the transfer-matrix of Baxter-Bazhanov-Stroganov (BBS) model (N-state spin model) with fixed-spin boundary conditions. These formulas are obtained by a limiting procedure from the formulas for the eigenvectors of periodic BBS model. The latter formulas were derived in the framework of the Sklyanin's method of separation of variables. In the case of fixed-spin boundaries the corresponding T-Q Baxter equations for the functions of separated variables are solved explicitly. As a particular case we obtain the eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian of Ising-like Z_N quantum chain model.Comment: 14 pages, paper submitted to Proceedings of the International Workshop "Classical and Quantum Integrable Systems" (Dubna, January, 2007

Ex-nihilo: Obstacles Surrounding Teaching the Standard Model

The model of the Big Bang is an integral part of the national curriculum for England. Previous work (e.g. Baxter 1989) has shown that pupils often come into education with many and varied prior misconceptions emanating from both internal and external sources. Whilst virtually all of these misconceptions can be remedied, there will remain (by its very nature) the obstacle of ex-nihilo, as characterised by the question `how do you get something from nothing?' There are two origins of this obstacle: conceptual (i.e. knowledge-based) and cultural (e.g. deeply held religious viewpoints). The article shows how the citizenship section of the national curriculum, coming `online' in England from September 2002, presents a new opportunity for exploiting these.Comment: 6 pages. Accepted for publication in Physics E

Tetromino tilings and the Tutte polynomial

We consider tiling rectangles of size 4m x 4n by T-shaped tetrominoes. Each tile is assigned a weight that depends on its orientation and position on the lattice. For a particular choice of the weights, the generating function of tilings is shown to be the evaluation of the multivariate Tutte polynomial Z\_G(Q,v) (known also to physicists as the partition function of the Q-state Potts model) on an (m-1) x (n-1) rectangle G, where the parameter Q and the edge weights v can take arbitrary values depending on the tile weights.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure