60,716 research outputs found
Seeking togetherness: moving toward a comparative evaluation framework in an interdisciplinary DIY networking project
There is renewed interest in community networks as a mechanism for local neighbourhoods to find their voice and maintain local ownership of knowledge. In a post-Snowden, big data, age of austerity there is both widespread questioning of what happens to public generated data shared over ‘free’ services such as Facebook, and also a renewed focus on self-provisioning where there are gaps in digital service provision. In this paper we introduce an EU funded collaborative project (‘MAZI’) that is exploring how Do-It-Yourself approaches to building community networks might foster social cohesion, knowledge sharing and sustainable living through four pilots across Europe. A key challenge is to develop a shared evaluation approach that will allow us to make sense of what we are learning across highly diverse local situations and disciplinary approaches. In this paper we describe our initial approaches and the challenges we face
Varieties of liberalism: Anglo-Saxon capitalism in crisis?
‘Global financial crisis’ is an inaccurate description of the current upheaval in the world’s financial markets. The initial banking crisis did not affect all countries to the same degree. Notably, while the US and UK banking systems
were badly hit, those of the other two major Anglo-Saxon economies, Canada and Australia, remain largely unscathed and have even gained in terms of global market share. The national business systems and comparative corporate governance literatures underscore the similarities among these four ‘liberal market economies’ (LMEs) and would predict similar trajectories. This paper investigates the reasons behind the differing performance of the Anglo-Saxon
banking systems, which defy a verdict of failure of the LME variety of capitalism as such
Consistent analysis of neutral- and charged-current neutrino scattering off carbon
Background: Good understanding of the cross sections for (anti)neutrino
scattering off nuclear targets in the few-GeV energy region is a prerequisite
for correct interpretation of results of ongoing and planned oscillation
experiments.
Purpose: Clarify possible source of disagreement between recent measurements
of the cross sections on carbon.
Method: Nuclear effects in (anti)neutrino scattering off carbon nucleus are
described using the spectral function approach. The effect of two- and
multi-nucleon final states is accounted for by applying an effective value of
the axial mass, fixed to 1.23 GeV. Neutral-current elastic (NCE) and
charged-current quasielastic (CCQE) processes are treated on equal footing.
Results: The differential and total cross sections for the energy ranging
from a few hundreds of MeV to 100 GeV are obtained and compared to the
available data from the BNL E734, MiniBooNE, and NOMAD experiments.
Conclusions: Nuclear effects in NCE and CCQE scattering seem to be very
similar. Within the spectral function approach, the axial mass from the shape
analysis of the MiniBooNE data is in good agreement with the results reported
by the BNL E734 and NOMAD Collaborations. However, the combined analysis of NCE
and CCQE data does not seem to support the contribution of multi-nucleon final
states being large enough to explain the normalization of the
MiniBooNE-reported cross sections.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, detailed discussion of the role of FSI is adde
Entanglement quantification by local unitaries
Invariance under local unitary operations is a fundamental property that must
be obeyed by every proper measure of quantum entanglement. However, this is not
the only aspect of entanglement theory where local unitaries play a relevant
role. In the present work we show that the application of suitable local
unitary operations defines a family of bipartite entanglement monotones,
collectively referred to as "mirror entanglement". They are constructed by
first considering the (squared) Hilbert-Schmidt distance of the state from the
set of states obtained by applying to it a given local unitary. To the action
of each different local unitary there corresponds a different distance. We then
minimize these distances over the sets of local unitaries with different
spectra, obtaining an entire family of different entanglement monotones. We
show that these mirror entanglement monotones are organized in a hierarchical
structure, and we establish the conditions that need to be imposed on the
spectrum of a local unitary for the associated mirror entanglement to be
faithful, i.e. to vanish on and only on separable pure states. We analyze in
detail the properties of one particularly relevant member of the family, the
"stellar mirror entanglement" associated to traceless local unitaries with
nondegenerate spectrum and equispaced eigenvalues in the complex plane. This
particular measure generalizes the original analysis of [Giampaolo and
Illuminati, Phys. Rev. A 76, 042301 (2007)], valid for qubits and qutrits. We
prove that the stellar entanglement is a faithful bipartite entanglement
monotone in any dimension, and that it is bounded from below by a function
proportional to the linear entropy and from above by the linear entropy itself,
coinciding with it in two- and three-dimensional spaces.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures. Improved and generalized proof of monotonicity
of the mirror and stellar entanglemen
The effect of stellar-mass black holes on the structural evolution of massive star clusters
We present the results of realistic N-body modelling of massive star clusters
in the Magellanic Clouds, aimed at investigating a dynamical origin for the
radius-age trend observed in these systems. We find that stellar-mass black
holes, formed in the supernova explosions of the most massive cluster stars,
can constitute a dynamically important population. If a significant number of
black holes are retained (here we assume complete retention), these objects
rapidly form a dense core where interactions are common, resulting in the
scattering of black holes into the cluster halo, and the ejection of black
holes from the cluster. These two processes heat the stellar component,
resulting in prolonged core expansion of a magnitude matching the observations.
Significant core evolution is also observed in Magellanic Cloud clusters at
early times. We find that this does not result from the action of black holes,
but can be reproduced by the effects of mass-loss due to rapid stellar
evolution in a primordially mass segregated cluster.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters; 2 figures, 1 tabl
Handling uncertainties in background shapes: the discrete profiling method
A common problem in data analysis is that the functional form, as well as the
parameter values, of the underlying model which should describe a dataset is
not known a priori. In these cases some extra uncertainty must be assigned to
the extracted parameters of interest due to lack of exact knowledge of the
functional form of the model. A method for assigning an appropriate error is
presented. The method is based on considering the choice of functional form as
a discrete nuisance parameter which is profiled in an analogous way to
continuous nuisance parameters. The bias and coverage of this method are shown
to be good when applied to a realistic example.Comment: Accepted by J.Ins
Quarkonium spin structure in lattice NRQCD
Numerical simulations of the quarkonium spin splittings are done in the
framework of lattice nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics (NRQCD). At leading
order in the velocity expansion the spin splittings are of , where
is the renormalized quark mass and is the mean squared quark
velocity. A systematic analysis is done of all next-to-leading order
corrections. This includes the addition of relativistic
interactions, and the removal of discretization errors in the
leading-order interactions. Simulations are done for both S- and P-wave mesons,
with a variety of heavy quark actions and over a wide range of lattice
spacings. Two prescriptions for the tadpole improvement of the action are also
studied in detail: one using the measured value of the average plaquette, the
other using the mean link measured in Landau gauge. Next-to-leading order
interactions result in a very large reduction in the charmonium splittings,
down by about 60% from their values at leading order. There are further
indications that the velocity expansion may be poorly convergent for
charmonium. Prelimary results show a small correction to the hyperfine
splitting in the Upsilon system.Comment: 16 pages, REVTEX v3.1, 5 postscript figures include
Tadpole renormalization and relativistic corrections in lattice NRQCD
We make a comparison of two tadpole renormalization schemes in the context of
the quarkonium hyperfine splittings in lattice NRQCD. Improved gauge-field and
NRQCD actions are analyzed using the mean-link in Landau gauge, and
using the fourth root of the average plaquette . Simulations are done
for , , and systems. The hyperfine splittings are
computed both at leading and at next-to-leading order in the relativistic
expansion. Results are obtained at lattice spacings in the range of about
0.14~fm to 0.38~fm. A number of features emerge, all of which favor tadpole
renormalization using . This includes much better scaling behavior of
the hyperfine splittings in the three quarkonium systems when is
used. We also find that relativistic corrections to the spin splittings are
smaller when is used, particularly for the and
systems. We also see signs of a breakdown in the NRQCD expansion when the bare
quark mass falls below about one in lattice units. Simulations with
also appear to be better behaved in this context: the bare quark masses turn
out to be larger when is used, compared to when is used on
lattices with comparable spacings. These results also demonstrate the need to
go beyond tree-level tadpole improvement for precision simulations.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures (minor changes to some phraseology and
references
The Low Surface Brightness Extent of the Fornax Cluster
We have used a large format CCD camera to survey the nearby Fornax cluster
and its immediate environment for low luminosity low surface brightness
galaxies. Recent observations indicate that these are the most dark matter
dominated galaxies known and so they are likely to be a good tracer of the dark
matter in clusters. We have identified large numbers of these galaxies
consistent with a steep faint end slope of the luminosity function (alpha~ -2)
down to MB ~ -12. These galaxies contribute almost the same amount to the total
cluster light as the brighter galaxies and they have a spatial extent that is
some four times larger. They satisfy two of the important predictions of N-body
hierarchical simulations of structure formation using dark halos. The
luminosity (mass ?) function is steep and the mass distribution is more
extended than that defined by the brighter galaxies. We also find a large
concentration of low surface brightness galaxies around the nearby galaxy
NGC1291.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure
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