Ab-Initio Calculation of the Metal-Insulator Transition in Lithium rings

We study how the Mott metal-insulator transition (MIT) is affected when we have to deal with electrons with different angular momentum quantum numbers. For that purpose we apply ab-initio quantum-chemical methods to lithium rings in order to investigate the analogue of a MIT. By changing the interatomic distance we analyse the character of the many-body wavefunction and discuss the importance of the $s-p$ orbital quasi-degeneracy within the metallic regime. The charge gap (ionization potential minus electron affinity) shows a minimum and the static electric dipole polarizability has a pronounced maximum at a lattice constant where the character of the wavefunction changes from significant $p$ to essentially $s$-type. In addition, we examine rings with bond alternation in order to answer the question under which conditions a Peierls distortion occurs.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figure

Rave journeys: Intimacy, liminality, and the changing notion of home.

Popular Music and Automobiles aims to unpack that relationship in more detail. It explores the ways in which cars and car journeys have shaped society, as well as how we have shaped them

Die politische Rationalität des Finanzausgleichs: Die Sicht des Landes Berlin

Dem politischen Streit um den Finanzausgleich liegen unterschiedliche Vorstellungen über die Funktion des Föderalismus im Bundesstaat zugrunde. Die finanzstarken Länder haben sich in ihren Überlegungen stets mehr vom kompetitiven Föderalismus und damit der Eigenständigkeit der Länder leiten lassen, die finanzschwachen Länder neigen eher zum kooperativen Föderalismus und damit zur Solidarität unter den Ländern. Besteht zwischen beiden Ansätzen zwangsläufig ein Widerspruch? --

Addressing the Long-Term Management of High-level and Long-lived Nuclear Wastes as a Socio-Technical Problem:Insights from InSOTEC

This report summarises the lessons to be drawn from the three-year collaborative social sciences research project ‘International Socio-Technical Challenges for implementing geological disposal’ (InSOTEC). Adopting an approach that is relatively novel in this context, the project focused its investigations on the complex interplay between what are typically seen as distinct technical and social dimensions of radioactive waste management (RWM), in particular in the context of the design and implementation of geological disposal. The aim of the InSOTEC project was not to arrive at a prescription for facilitating the implementation of geological disposal, but to foster and deepen the growing awareness of the interaction between social and technical aspects of RWM that has been evident within the technical expert community by providing stakeholders and experts of all kinds with a better understanding of the processes that shape the challenges which confront them. The report brings together insights for RWM that have been generated within the different research strands of the project and offers observations on their implications for practice, addressing in particular the processes of research and development, public and stakeholder involvement in RWM, and long-term governance of geological disposal of higher activity radioactive wastes

Re-thinking official educational organization towards friction-zones between divergent knowledges

In this article, I re-think official educational organization toward friction-zones. Thinking with a swimming event in physical education, and Deleuze’s notion of pure difference and its accompanying characteristics, non-linearity, decentralization, pluralistic knowledge, virtual and actual multiplicities, nomadic waiting, and open ends, I outline conditions for official educational organization in the encounter between divergent knowledges. The aim is to bring teachers and students closer to each other and paradoxically let up-coming concepts, meanings, and ideas act instead of silence everything that is not in line with predefined educational goals. It is to create common histories of learning and knowledge productions, and hence to produce common grounds in/by motion. Ultimately, it is about inclusive processes in/by motion. And, it is also a call for us all to pay attention and resist unintentional productions of exclusion, and thus all colonizing processes that includes superior knowledge.publishedVersio