Southward expansion: The myth of the West in the promotion of Florida, 1876–1900

This article examines the ways in which promoters and developers of Florida, in the decades after Reconstruction, engaged with a popular myth of the West as a means of recasting and selling their state to prospective settlers in the North and Midwest. The myth envisaged a cherished region to the west where worthy Americans could migrate and achieve social and economic independence away from the crowded confines of the East, or Europe. According to state immigration agents, land-promoters and other booster writers, Florida, although a Southern ex-Confederate state, offered precisely these 'western' opportunities for those hard-working Northerners seeking land and an opening for agrarian prosperity. However, the myth, which posited that, in the west, an individual's labour and thrift were rewarded with social and economic improvement, meshed awkwardly with the contemporary emergence of Florida as a popular winter destination for wealthy tourists and invalids seeking leisure and healthfulness away from the North. Yet it also reflected and reinforced promotional notions of racial improvement which would occur with an influx of enterprising Anglo-Americans, who would effectively displace the state's large African American population. In Florida, the myth of the West supported the linked post-Reconstruction processes of state development and racial subjugation

Cosmology, Particle Physics and Superfluid 3He

Many direct parallels connect superfluid 3He with the field theories describing the physical vacuum, gauge fields and elementary fermions. Superfluid $^3$He exhibits a variety of topological defects which can be detected with single-defect sensitivity. Modern scenarios of defect-mediated baryogenesis can be simulated by the interaction of the 3He vortices and domain walls with fermionic quasiparticles. Formation of defects in a symmetry-breaking phase transition in the early Universe, which could be responsible for large-scale structure formation and for microwave-background anisotropy, also may be modelled in the laboratory. This is supported by the recent observation of vortex formation in neutron-irradiated 3He-B where the "primordial fireball" is formed in an exothermic nuclear reaction.Comment: Invited talk at LT-21 Conference, 20 pages, 3 figures available at request, compressed ps file of the camera-ready format with 3 figures is at ftp://boojum.hut.fi/pub/publications/lowtemp/LTL-96006.ps.g

Vortex Rings in two Component Bose-Einstein Condensates

We study the structure of the vortex core in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates. We demonstrate that the order parameter may not vanish and the symmetry may not be restored in the core of the vortex. In this case such vortices can form vortex rings known as vortons in particle physics literature. In contrast with well-studied superfluid $^4He$, where similar vortex rings can be stable due to Magnus force only if they move, the vortex rings in two-component BECs can be stable even if they are at rest. This beautiful effect was first discussed by Witten in the cosmic string context, where it was shown that the stabilization occurs due to condensation of the second component of the field in the vortex core. This second condensate trapped in the core may carry a current along the vortex ring counteracting the effect of string tension that causes the loop to shrink. We speculate that such vortons may have been already observed in the laboratory. We also speculate that the experimental study of topological structures in BECs can provide a unique opportunity to study cosmology and astrophysics by doing laboratory experiments.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figure

Drum vortons in high density QCD

Recently it was shown that high density QCD supports of number of topological defects. In particular, there are U(1)_Y strings that arise due to K^0 condensation that occurs when the strange quark mass is relatively large. The unique feature of these strings is that they possess a nonzero K^+ condensate that is trapped on the core. In the following we will show that these strings (with nontrivial core structure) can form closed loops with conserved charge and currents trapped on the string worldsheet. The presence of conserved charges allows these topological defects, called vortons, to carry angular momentum, which makes them classically stable objects. We also give arguments demonstrating that vortons carry angular momentum very efficiently (in terms of energy per unit angular momentum) such that they might be the important degrees of freedom in the cores of neutron stars.Comment: 11 pages, accepted for publication in Physical Review

Community Engagement in US Biobanking: Multiplicity of Meaning and Method

Efforts to improve individual and population health increasingly rely on large scale collections of human biological specimens and associated data. Such collections or “biobanks” are hailed as valuable resources for facilitating translational biomedical research. However, biobanks also raise important ethical considerations, such as whether, how and why biobanks might engage with those who contributed specimens. This paper examines perceptions and practices of community engagement (CE) among individuals who operate six diverse biobanks in the U.S

Natural Orbitals and BEC in traps, a diffusion Monte Carlo analysis

We investigate the properties of hard core Bosons in harmonic traps over a wide range of densities. Bose-Einstein condensation is formulated using the one-body Density Matrix (OBDM) which is equally valid at low and high densities. The OBDM is calculated using diffusion Monte Carlo methods and it is diagonalized to obtain the "natural" single particle orbitals and their occupation, including the condensate fraction. At low Boson density, $na^3 < 10^{-5}$, where $n = N/V$ and $a$ is the hard core diameter, the condensate is localized at the center of the trap. As $na^3$ increases, the condensate moves to the edges of the trap. At high density it is localized at the edges of the trap. At $na^3 \leq 10^{-4}$ the Gross-Pitaevskii theory of the condensate describes the whole system within 1%. At $na^3 \approx 10^{-3}$ corrections are 3% to the GP energy but 30% to the Bogoliubov prediction of the condensate depletion. At $na^3 \gtrsim 10^{-2}$, mean field theory fails. At $na^3 \gtrsim 0.1$, the Bosons behave more like a liquid $^4$He droplet than a trapped Boson gas.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figures, submitted Phys. Rev.

The Shapes of Dirichlet Defects

If the vacuum manifold of a field theory has the appropriate topological structure, the theory admits topological structures analogous to the D-branes of string theory, in which defects of one dimension terminate on other defects of higher dimension. The shapes of such defects are analyzed numerically, with special attention paid to the intersection regions. Walls (co-dimension 1 branes) terminating on other walls, global strings (co-dimension 2 branes) and local strings (including gauge fields) terminating on walls are all considered. Connections to supersymmetric field theories, string theory and condensed matter systems are pointed out.Comment: 24 pages, RevTeX, 21 eps figure

Coherent matter wave inertial sensors for precision measurements in space

We analyze the advantages of using ultra-cold coherent sources of atoms for matter-wave interferometry in space. We present a proof-of-principle experiment that is based on an analysis of the results previously published in [Richard et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 91, 010405 (2003)] from which we extract the ratio h/m for 87Rb. This measurement shows that a limitation in accuracy arises due to atomic interactions within the Bose-Einstein condensate

Accuracy and Stability of Computing High-Order Derivatives of Analytic Functions by Cauchy Integrals

High-order derivatives of analytic functions are expressible as Cauchy integrals over circular contours, which can very effectively be approximated, e.g., by trapezoidal sums. Whereas analytically each radius r up to the radius of convergence is equal, numerical stability strongly depends on r. We give a comprehensive study of this effect; in particular we show that there is a unique radius that minimizes the loss of accuracy caused by round-off errors. For large classes of functions, though not for all, this radius actually gives about full accuracy; a remarkable fact that we explain by the theory of Hardy spaces, by the Wiman-Valiron and Levin-Pfluger theory of entire functions, and by the saddle-point method of asymptotic analysis. Many examples and non-trivial applications are discussed in detail.Comment: Version 4 has some references and a discussion of other quadrature rules added; 57 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables; to appear in Found. Comput. Mat