Combating corruption through employment law and whistleblower protection.

This article examines the extent to which employment law has the potential to fight corruption by imposing rights and duties on employers and workers and analyses the extent to which the UN Convention on Corruption 2003 (UNCAC) protects those who speak out about malpractices within an organisation. Section 2 focuses on UNCAC while Section 3 focuses on the extent to which employment law imposes obligations on those within the workplace to report corrupt activities and the circumstances in which those who speak out about corruption are protected under UK employment law. It is argued that because of the inadequacies of the existing legislation and the threat posed by disclosures via the Internet, organisations have much to gain from devising effective policies on both internal and external reporting that do not inhibit the exposure of corruption or unnecessarily curtail freedom of speech. The authors conclude by welcoming the draft recommendations from the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly to draw up a set of guidelines for the protection of whistleblowers and consider drafting a framework convention

Growth of primordial black holes in a universe containing a massless scalar field

The evolution of primordial black holes in a flat Friedmann universe with a massless scalar field is investigated in fully general relativistic numerical relativity. A primordial black hole is expected to form with a scale comparable to the cosmological apparent horizon, in which case it may go through an initial phase with significant accretion. However, if it is very close to the cosmological apparent horizon size, the accretion is suppressed due to general relativistic effects. In any case, it soon gets smaller than the cosmological horizon and thereafter it can be approximated as an isolated vacuum solution with decaying mass accretion. In this situation the dynamical and inhomogeneous scalar field is typically equivalent to a perfect fluid with a stiff equation of state $p=\rho$. The black hole mass never increases by more than a factor of two, despite recent claims that primordial black holes might grow substantially through accreting quintessence. It is found that the gravitational memory scenario, proposed for primordial black holes in Brans-Dicke and scalar-tensor theories of gravity, is highly unphysical.Comment: 24 pages, accepted for publication in Physical Review

Accretion with back reaction

We calculate analytically a back reaction of the stationary spherical accretion flow near the event horizon and near the inner Cauchy horizon of the charged black hole. It is shown that corresponding back-reaction corrections to the black hole metric depend only on the fluid accretion rate and diverge in the case of an extremely charged black hole. In result, the test fluid approximation for stationary accretion is violated for extreme black holes. This behavior of the accreting black hole is in accordance with the third law of black hole thermodynamics, forbidding the practical attainability of the extreme state.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; new figure and references adde

Bose-Einstein condensates in standing waves: The cubic nonlinear Schroedinger equation with a periodic potential

We present a new family of stationary solutions to the cubic nonlinear Schroedinger equation with a Jacobian elliptic function potential. In the limit of a sinusoidal potential our solutions model a dilute gas Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a standing light wave. Provided the ratio of the height of the variations of the condensate to its DC offset is small enough, both trivial phase and nontrivial phase solutions are shown to be stable. Numerical simulations suggest such stationary states are experimentally observable.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Doppler cooling of gallium atoms: 2. Simulation in complex multilevel systems

This paper derives a general procedure for the numerical solution of the Lindblad equations that govern the coherences arising from multicoloured light interacting with a multilevel system. A systematic approach to finding the conservative and dissipative terms is derived and applied to the laser cooling of gallium. An improved numerical method is developed to solve the time-dependent master equation and results are presented for transient cooling processes. The method is significantly more robust, efficient and accurate than the standard method and can be applied to a broad range of atomic and molecular systems. Radiation pressure forces and the formation of dynamic dark-states are studied in the gallium isotope 66Ga.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

Spontaneous soliton formation and modulational instability in Bose-Einstein condensates

The dynamics of an elongated attractive Bose-Einstein condensate in an axisymmetric harmonic trap is studied. It is shown that density fringes caused by self-interference of the condensate order parameter seed modulational instability. The latter has novel features in contradistinction to the usual homogeneous case known from nonlinear fiber optics. Several open questions in the interpretation of the recent creation of the first matter-wave bright soliton train [Strecker {\it et al.} Nature {\bf 417} 150 (2002)] are addressed. It is shown that primary transverse collapse, followed by secondary collapse induced by soliton--soliton interactions, produce bursts of hot atoms at different time scales.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. Phys. Rev. Lett. in pres

Are black holes over-produced during preheating?

We provide a simple but robust argument that primordial black hole (PBH) production generically does {\em not} exceed astrophysical bounds during the resonant preheating phase after inflation. This conclusion is supported by fully nonlinear lattice simulations of various models in two and three dimensions which include rescattering but neglect metric perturbations. We examine the degree to which preheating amplifies density perturbations at the Hubble scale and show that at the end of the parametric resonance, power spectra are universal, with no memory of the power spectrum at the end of inflation. In addition we show how the probability distribution of density perturbations changes from exponential on very small scales to Gaussian when smoothed over the Hubble scale -- the crucial length for studies of primordial black hole formation -- hence justifying the standard assumption of Gaussianity.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, revtex, added references for section

The state space and physical interpretation of self-similar spherically symmetric perfect-fluid models

The purpose of this paper is to further investigate the solution space of self-similar spherically symmetric perfect-fluid models and gain deeper understanding of the physical aspects of these solutions. We achieve this by combining the state space description of the homothetic approach with the use of the physically interesting quantities arising in the comoving approach. We focus on three types of models. First, we consider models that are natural inhomogeneous generalizations of the Friedmann Universe; such models are asymptotically Friedmann in their past and evolve fluctuations in the energy density at later times. Second, we consider so-called quasi-static models. This class includes models that undergo self-similar gravitational collapse and is important for studying the formation of naked singularities. If naked singularities do form, they have profound implications for the predictability of general relativity as a theory. Third, we consider a new class of asymptotically Minkowski self-similar spacetimes, emphasizing that some of them are associated with the self-similar solutions associated with the critical behaviour observed in recent gravitational collapse calculations.Comment: 24 pages, 12 figure

Semi-Static Hedging Based on a Generalized Reflection Principle on a Multi Dimensional Brownian Motion

On a multi-assets Black-Scholes economy, we introduce a class of barrier options. In this model we apply a generalized reflection principle in a context of the finite reflection group acting on a Euclidean space to give a valuation formula and the semi-static hedge.Comment: Asia-Pacific Financial Markets, online firs