Parable

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. \u27Excuse me, sir. Would you mind telling me the time?\u27 The bartender looked at the pretty young woman in front of him. \u27It\u27s half past eleven;\u27 he said, glancing stonily at a clock on the wall

Genesis 2:26

On the eighth day, God sighed. The noise rumbled through heaven and earth. The cherubim were silenced; the seraphim held their breath. Even the archangels ceased their endless activity to crane their necks and look about. The earth trembled. Volcanos erupted, the great continental plates divided. The pools of celestial ooze stopped bubbling and crackling. All angels, all creatures, all rocks and trees - even the land itself waited in breathless, awful anticipation. Nothing happened. A rock relaxed, falling off a mountain. The volcanos grew dormant. The cherubim laughed, softly, nervously, then began to sing again, a lullaby. The seraphim continued praising the name of Jehovah. Everything went back to the way it was. Only two were different. Umbriel, the archangel, had heard God’s sigh. It caused a strange sensation to ripple through him, though what it was he could not say. Michael, the archangel, had felt God’s sigh. Knowing what must be done, he went to the Tree of Life and cut a limb off of its highest branch. He began to carve the branch into something less intricate, something more designed, something never seen by angel before. Umbriel went to Michael. “What is that?

The Poisson Bracket for Poisson Forms in Multisymplectic Field Theory

We present a general definition of the Poisson bracket between differential forms on the extended multiphase space appearing in the geometric formulation of first order classical field theories and, more generally, on exact multisymplectic manifolds. It is well defined for a certain class of differential forms that we propose to call Poisson forms and turns the space of Poisson forms into a Lie superalgebra.Comment: 40 pages LaTe

Dirac-screening stabilized surface-state transport in a topological insulator

We report magnetotransport studies on a gated strained HgTe device. This material is a threedimensional topological insulator and exclusively shows surface state transport. Remarkably, the Landau level dispersion and the accuracy of the Hall quantization remain unchanged over a wide density range ($3 \times 10^{11} cm^{-2} < n < 1 \times 10^{12} cm^{-2}$). This implies that even at large carrier densities the transport is surface state dominated, where bulk transport would have been expected to coexist already. Moreover, the density dependence of the Dirac-type quantum Hall effect allows to identify the contributions from the individual surfaces. A $k \cdot p$ model can describe the experiments, but only when assuming a steep band bending across the regions where the topological surface states are contained. This steep potential originates from the specific screening properties of Dirac systems and causes the gate voltage to influence the position of the Dirac points rather than that of the Fermi level.Comment: 12 pages 4 figure

Controlled fabrication of single-walled carbon nanotube electrodes by electron-beam-induced oxidation

The fabrication of metallic single-walled carbon nanotube electrodes separated by gaps of typically 20nm width by electron-beam-induced oxidation is studied within an active device configuration. The tube conductance is measured continuously during the process. The experiment provides a statistical evaluation of gap sizes as well as the electron dose needed for gap formation. Also, the ability to precisely cut many carbon nanotubes in parallel is demonstrated.Comment: The following article has been submitted to Applied Physics Letters. After it is published, it will be found at http://apl.aip.or