Relativistic Landau Levels in the Rotating Cosmic String Spacetime

In the spacetime induced by a rotating cosmic string we compute the energy levels of a massive spinless particle coupled covariantly to a homogeneous magnetic field parallel to the string. Afterwards, we consider the addition of a scalar potential with a Coulomb-type and a linear confining term and completely solve the Klein-Gordon equations for each configuration. Finally, assuming rigid-wall boundary conditions, we find the Landau levels when the linear defect is itself magnetized. Remarkably, our analysis reveals that the Landau quantization occurs even in the absence of gauge fields provided the string is endowed with spin.Comment: Writing and grammar revised. References added. 14 pages, no figures. To appear in European Phys. J.

Fracture strength and Young's modulus of ZnO nanowires

The fracture strength of ZnO nanowires vertically grown on sapphire substrates was measured in tensile and bending experiments. Nanowires with diameters between 60 and 310 nm and a typical length of 2 um were manipulated with an atomic force microscopy tip mounted on a nanomanipulator inside a scanning electron microscope. The fracture strain of (7.7 +- 0.8)% measured in the bending test was found close to the theoretical limit of 10% and revealed a strength about twice as high as in the tensile test. From the tensile experiments the Young's modulus could be measured to be within 30% of that of bulk ZnO, contrary to the lower values found in literature.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Simplicial gauge theory on spacetime

We define a discrete gauge-invariant Yang-Mills-Higgs action on spacetime simplicial meshes. The formulation is a generalization of classical lattice gauge theory, and we prove consistency of the action in the sense of approximation theory. In addition, we perform numerical tests of convergence towards exact continuum results for several choices of gauge fields in pure gauge theory.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figure

The long road of statistical learning research: past, present and future

Published 21 November 2016 http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/1711/20160047http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/1711/20160047This paper was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 217/14 awarded to R.F.), by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (RO1 HD 067364 awarded to Ken Pugh and R.F., PO1-HD 01994 awarded to Haskins Laboratories) and by the European Research Council (project ERC-ADG- 692502 awarded to R.F.)

Complex Line Bundles over Simplicial Complexes and their Applications

Discrete vector bundles are important in Physics and recently found remarkable applications in Computer Graphics. This article approaches discrete bundles from the viewpoint of Discrete Differential Geometry, including a complete classification of discrete vector bundles over finite simplicial complexes. In particular, we obtain a discrete analogue of a theorem of Andr\'e Weil on the classification of hermitian line bundles. Moreover, we associate to each discrete hermitian line bundle with curvature a unique piecewise-smooth hermitian line bundle of piecewise constant curvature. This is then used to define a discrete Dirichlet energy which generalizes the well-known cotangent Laplace operator to discrete hermitian line bundles over Euclidean simplicial manifolds of arbitrary dimension

Gluon distributions in nucleons and pions at a low resolution scale

In this paper we study the gluon distribution functions in nucleons and pions at a low resolution $Q^2$ scale. This is an important issue since parton densities at low $Q^2$ have always been taken as an external input which is adjusted through DGLAP evolution to fit the experimental data at higher scales. Here, in the framework of a model recently developed, it is shown that the hypothetical cloud of {\it neutral} pions surrounding nucleons and pions appears to be responsible for the characteristic valence-like gluon distributions needed at the inital low scale. As an additional result, we get the remarkable prediction that neutral and charged pions have different intrinsic sea flavor contents.Comment: final version to appear in Phys. Rev. D. Discussion on several points enlarge

The UNSW Extrasolar Planet Search: Methods and First Results from a Field Centred on NGC 6633

We report on the current status of the University of New South Wales Extrasolar Planet Search project, giving details of the methods we use to obtain millimagnitude precision photometry using the 0.5m Automated Patrol Telescope. We use a novel observing technique to optimally broaden the PSF and thus largely eliminate photometric noise due to intra-pixel sensitivity variations on the CCD. We have observed 8 crowded Galactic fields using this technique during 2003 and 2004. Our analysis of the first of these fields (centred on the open cluster NGC 6633) has yielded 49 variable stars and 4 shallow transit candidates. Follow-up observations of these candidates have identified them as eclipsing binary systems. We use a detailed simulation of our observations to estimate our sensitivity to short-period planets, and to select a new observing strategy to maximise the number of planets detected.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, version published in MNRAS Updated figures, references, and additional discussion in section