Rethinking Presidential Eligibility

Many aspiring American Presidents have had their candidacies challenged for failing to meet the Constitution’s eligibility requirements. Although none of these challenges have ever been successful, they have sapped campaigns of valuable resources and posed a threat to several ambitious men. This Article examines several notable presidential eligibility challenges and explains why they have often been unsuccessful. The literature on presidential eligibility traditionally has focused on the Eligibility Clause, which enumerates the age, residency, and citizenship requirements that a President must satisfy before taking office. By contrast, very little of it examines how a challenge to one’s candidacy impacts a presidential campaign. This Article seeks to fill this gap. It also offers a modest proposal: Congress should pass legislation defining exactly who is eligible to be President and also implement procedural rules that would expedite presidential eligibility cases for review to the Supreme Court

Some properties of membranes in nematic solvents

The fluctuation spectrum of membranes in nematic solvents is altered by the boundary condition imposed on the bulk nematic director by the curved membrane. We discuss some properties of single and multi-membrane systems in nematic solvents, primarily based on the Berreman-de~Gennes model. We show that: membranes in nematic solvents are more rigid and less rough than in their isotropic counterparts; have a different Helfrich steric stabilization energy, proportional to $d^{-3}$, and hence a different compression modulus in the lamellar state; and can exhibit phase separation via unbinding during a quench into the nematic state. We also discuss the preparation and possible experimental effects of nematic-mediated surfactant membrane system

Shiba impurity bound states as a probe of topological superconductivity and Fermion parity changing quantum phase transitions

Spin-orbit coupled superconductors are potentially interesting candidates for realizing topological and potentially non-Abelian states with Majorana Fermions. We argue that time-reversal broken spin-orbit coupled superconductors generically can be characterized as having sub-gap states that are bound to localized non-magnetic impurities. Such bound states, which are referred to as Shiba states, can be detected as sharp resonances in the tunneling spectrum of the spin-orbit coupled superconductors. The Shiba state resonance can be tuned using a gate-voltage or a magnetic field from being at the edge of the gap at zero magnetic fields to crossing zero energy when the Zeeman splitting is tuned into the topological superconducting regime. The zero-crossing signifies a Fermion parity changing first order quantum phase transition, which is characterized by a Pfaffian topological invariant. These zero-crossings of the impurity level can be used to locally characterize the topological superconducting state from tunneling experiments.Comment: 5 pages; 3 figures: minor reference update

The parallel programming of landing position in saccadic eye movement sequences

Saccadic eye movements occur in sequences, gathering new information about the visual environment to support successful task completion. Here we examine the control of these saccadic sequences and specifically the extent to which the spatial aspects of the saccadic responses are programmed in parallel. We asked participants to saccade to a series of visual targets and, while they shifted their gaze around the display, we displaced select targets. We found that saccade landing position was deviated towards the previous location of the target suggesting that partial parallel programming of target location information was occurring. The saccade landing position was also affected by the new target location which demonstrates that the saccade landing position was also partially updated following the shift. This pattern was present even for targets that were the subject of the next fixation. Having a greater preview about the sequence path influenced saccade accuracy with saccades being less affected by relocations when there is less preview information. The results demonstrate that landing positions from a saccade sequence are programmed in parallel and combined with more immediate visual signals

Broken scale invariance, massless dilaton and confinement in QCD

Classical conformal invariance of QCD in the chiral limit is broken explicitly by scale anomaly. As a result, the lightest scalar particle (scalar glueball, or dilaton) in QCD is not light, and cannot be described as a Goldstone boson. Nevertheless basing on an effective low-energy theory of broken scale invariance we argue that inside the hadrons the non-perturbative interactions of gluon fields result in the emergence of a massless dilaton excitation (which we call the "scalaron"). We demonstrate that our effective theory of broken scale invariance leads to confinement. This theory allows a dual formulation as a classical Yang-Mills theory on a curved conformal space-time background. Possible applications are discussed, including the description of strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma and the spin structure of hadrons.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures; v2: fixed numerous typo

Fractional quantum Hall states of atoms in optical Lattices

We describe a method to create fractional quantum Hall states of atoms confined in optical lattices. We show that the dynamics of the atoms in the lattice is analogous to the motion of a charged particle in a magnetic field if an oscillating quadrupole potential is applied together with a periodic modulation of the tunneling between lattice sites. We demonstrate that in a suitable parameter regime the ground state in the lattice is of the fractional quantum Hall type and we show how these states can be reached by melting a Mott insulator state in a super lattice potential. Finally we discuss techniques to observe these strongly correlated states.Comment: 4+epsilon pages including 3 figures. V2: Changes in the presentatio