Minimal perturbations approaching the edge of chaos in a Couette flow

This paper provides an investigation of the structure of the stable manifold of the lower branch steady state for the plane Couette flow. Minimal energy perturbations to the laminar state are computed, which approach within a prescribed tolerance the lower branch steady state in a finite time. For small times, such minimal-energy perturbations maintain at least one of the symmetries characterizing the lower branch state. For a sufficiently large time horizon, such symmetries are broken and the minimal-energy perturbations on the stable manifold are formed by localized asymmetrical vortical structures. These minimal-energy perturbations could be employed to develop a control procedure aiming at stabilizing the low-dissipation lower branch state

Inertial effects of an accelerating black hole

We consider the static vacuum C metric that represents the gravitational field of a black hole of mass $m$ undergoing uniform translational acceleration $A$ such that $mA<1/(3\sqrt{3})$. The influence of the inertial acceleration on the exterior perturbations of this background are investigated. In particular, we find no evidence for a direct spin-acceleration coupling.Comment: Proceedings of the XVI Conference of the Italian Society for General Relativity and Gravitation (SIGRAV), Vietri (SA), September 13-16, 2004. Prepared using revtex4 macro

Vacuum C-metric and the Gravitational Stark Effect

We study the vacuum C-metric and its physical interpretation in terms of the exterior spacetime of a uniformly accelerating spherically - symmetric gravitational source. Wave phenomena on the linearized C-metric background are investigated. It is shown that the scalar perturbations of the linearized C-metric correspond to the gravitational Stark effect. This effect is studied in connection with the Pioneer anomaly.Comment: New version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Amalgams of inverse semigroups and reversible two-counter machines

We show that the word problem for an amalgam $[S_1,S_2;U,\omega_1,\omega_2]$ of inverse semigroups may be undecidable even if we assume $S_1$ and $S_2$ (and therefore $U$) to have finite $\mathcal{R}$-classes and $\omega_1,\omega_2$ to be computable functions, interrupting a series of positive decidability results on the subject. This is achieved by encoding into an appropriate amalgam of inverse semigroups 2-counter machines with sufficient universality, and relating the nature of certain \sch graphs to sequences of computations in the machine