Truncated unity functional renormalization group for multiband systems with spin-orbit coupling

Although the functional renormalization group (fRG) is by now a well-established method for investigating correlated electron systems, it is still undergoing significant technical and conceptual improvements. In particular, the motivation to optimally exploit the parallelism of modern computing platforms has recently led to the development of the "truncated-unity" functional renormalization group (TU-fRG). Here, we review this fRG variant, and we provide its extension to multiband systems with spin-orbit coupling. Furthermore, we discuss some aspects of the implementation and outline opportunities and challenges ahead for predicting the ground-state ordering and emergent energy scales for a wide class of quantum materials.Comment: consistent with published version in Frontiers in Physics (2018

Swimming Against the Current: \u3cem\u3eMayall v. USA Water Polo\u3c/em\u3e and Its Potential Impact on Overseeing Athletic Organizations

The concussion epidemic has been a major source of discussion among commentators in a variety of different subject areas, as many attempt to determine how to solve this crisis and curb the threat it poses to sport participation. While much of the discussion is centered around professional and intercollegiate sports, amateur youth sports have been affected as well. According to medical researchers, around 600,000 sport- and recreation-related concussions by youth sport participants are treated each year; between 22.5 percent and 52.7 percent of high school students’ concussions are not reported to medical providers for treatment. It may be impossible to entirely remove concussions from sport. Even still, significant efforts have been made by State legislatures and overseeing athletic organizations, including promulgation of effective concussion management policies, education of coaches about the threat of concussions and other head injuries, facilitation of better recognition of concussion symptoms, and encouragement of appropriate action to prevent or minimize secondary injuries

Remembering the Lessons of the Baseball Exemption in \u3ci\u3eNCAA v. Alston\u3c/i\u3e

It is somewhat ironic that the recently-granted Supreme Court appeal in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) v. Alston falls so near the 100-year anniversary of Federal Baseball v. National League, a well-debated opinion by the Supreme Court that gave a particular sports league—and, for decades only that sports league—broad immunity from the antitrust laws. In doing so, the Court set up the field of sports antitrust law in a way that would position professional baseball apart from the other leagues to a degree that the Court would later remark is “unrealistic, inconsistent, or illogical.” Indeed, even a sitting member of the Court has remarked on the baseball exemption’s controversial nature, noting that Federal Baseball has been “pilloried pretty consistently in the legal literature since at least the 1940s.

Stillness in Motion: The Sleeping Man of Oguri Kohei

Stillness in Motion: The Sleeping Man of Oguri Kohei investigates the Buddhistic elements of this award-winning Japanese film. The sense of tragedy in the film is seen, not in the scenes of the young protagonist locked in a coma, but rather in the plight of the Sough East Asian women who work in the mountainous region of Gumma prefecture where the story takes place. The symbolism of the noh play MATSUKAZE (performed near the end of the film) is tied into the paradoxes of the main characters. The cyclical, and elliptical, nature of this narrative makes this film a unique viewing experience for students of religion and film studies alike

Longitudinal variations, the opposition effect and monochromatic albedos for Mars

Magnitude at zero phase, phase coefficient, and monochromatic albedo computed for Mars as function of wavelengt

The Inherent Bad Faith of the NCAA\u27s Use of Title IX to Shield Its Illegal Business Practices

This Essay examines the moral and policy implications of the NCAA’s use of Title IX to argue for legislative immunity from antitrust and employment law. Regardless of if there is merit to the NCAA’s in-court assertions that Title IX prevents employment status, revenue sharing, and other reforms, the NCAA’s requests to Congress for legislative protection and immunity requires a monumental degree of faith that an all-powerful NCAA would sincerely carry out its supposed commitment to gender equity. Yet this Essay finds that the NCAA has hardly earned the level of trust necessary to grant it that power. To the contrary, the NCAA has shown repeatedly that they cannot be trusted to follow through on this implicit promise in light of the NCAA and its’ member schools’ historical battles against Title IX and incessant use of loopholes, each of which highlight their bad faith in these discussions. While the NCAA’s arguments regarding Title IX are compelling to many, history simply does not support trusting an above-the-law NCAA to actually work to ensure gender equality in college sports. As such, this Essay argues that it is at the utmost levels of bad faith for the NCAA to attempt to use Title IX as a shield when the NCAA and its stakeholders have been fighting Title IX’s on-paper and in-spirit application to college sports at every turn

Using molecular mechanics to predict bulk material properties of fibronectin fibers

The structural proteins of the extracellular matrix (ECM) form fibers with finely tuned mechanical properties matched to the time scales of cell traction forces. Several proteins such as fibronectin (Fn) and fibrin undergo molecular conformational changes that extend the proteins and are believed to be a major contributor to the extensibility of bulk fibers. The dynamics of these conformational changes have been thoroughly explored since the advent of single molecule force spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulations but remarkably, these data have not been rigorously applied to the understanding of the time dependent mechanics of bulk ECM fibers. Using measurements of protein density within fibers, we have examined the influence of dynamic molecular conformational changes and the intermolecular arrangement of Fn within fibers on the bulk mechanical properties of Fn fibers. Fibers were simulated as molecular strands with architectures that promote either equal or disparate molecular loading under conditions of constant extension rate. Measurements of protein concentration within micron scale fibers using deep ultraviolet transmission microscopy allowed the simulations to be scaled appropriately for comparison to in vitro measurements of fiber mechanics as well as providing estimates of fiber porosity and water content, suggesting Fn fibers are approximately 75% solute. Comparing the properties predicted by single molecule measurements to in vitro measurements of Fn fibers showed that domain unfolding is sufficient to predict the high extensibility and nonlinear stiffness of Fn fibers with surprising accuracy, with disparately loaded fibers providing the best fit to experiment. This work shows the promise of this microstructural modeling approach for understanding Fn fiber properties, which is generally applicable to other ECM fibers, and could be further expanded to tissue scale by incorporating these simulated fibers into three dimensional network models