Preface "Nonlinear processes in oceanic and atmospheric flows"

Nonlinear phenomena are essential ingredients in many oceanic and atmospheric processes, and successful understanding of them benefits from multidisciplinary collaboration between oceanographers, meteorologists, physicists and mathematicians. The present Special Issue on ``Nonlinear Processes in Oceanic and Atmospheric Flows'' contains selected contributions from attendants to the workshop which, in the above spirit, was held in Castro Urdiales, Spain, in July 2008. Here we summarize the Special Issue contributions, which include papers on the characterization of ocean transport in the Lagrangian and in the Eulerian frameworks, generation and variability of jets and waves, interactions of fluid flow with plankton dynamics or heavy drops, scaling in meteorological fields, and statistical properties of El Ni\~no Southern Oscillation.Comment: This is the introductory article to a Special Issue on "Nonlinear Processes in Oceanic and Atmospheric Flows'', published in the journal Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics, where the different contributions are summarized. The Special Issue itself is freely available from http://www.nonlin-processes-geophys.net/special_issue103.htm

Non-localities and Fermi motion corrections in K−K^- atoms

We evaluate the p-wave $K^-N$ amplitudes from the chiral Lagrangians and from there construct the p-wave part of the $K^-$ nucleus optical potential plus a small s-wave part induced from the elementary p-wave amplitude and the nuclear Fermi motion. Simultaneously, the momentum and energy dependence of the s-wave optical potential, previously developed, are taken into account and shown to generate a small p-wave correction to the optical potential. All the corrections considered are small compared to the leading s-wave potential, and lead to changes in the shifts and widths which are smaller than the experimental errors. A thorough study of the threshold region and low densities is conducted, revealing mathematical problems for which a physical solution is given.Comment: revised version, 28 pages, Latex, 8 postscript figures. Submitted to Nucl. Phys.

Extraordinary transverse magneto-optical Kerr effect in a superlens

It has been shown that a slab of a negative index material can behave as a superlens enhancing the imaging resolution beyond the wavelength limit. We show here that if such a slab possesses in addition some magneto-optical activity, it could act as an ideal optical filter and exhibit an extraordinary transverse magneto-optical Kerr effect. Moreover, we show that losses, which spoil the imaging resolution of these lenses, are a necessary ingredient to observe this effect.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure

Intrinsic structure of two-phonon states in the interacting boson model

A general study of excitations up to two-phonon states is carried out using the intrinsic-state formalism of the Interacting Boson Model (IBM). Spectra and transitions for the different dynamical symmetries are analyzed and the correspondence with states in the laboratory frame is established. The influence of multi-phonon states is discussed. The approach is useful in problems where the complexity of the IBM spectrum renders the analysis in the laboratory frame difficult.Comment: 22 pages, TeX (ReVTeX). 7 eps figures. Submitted to Nucl. Phys.

Evolutionary and Ecological Trees and Networks

Evolutionary relationships between species are usually represented in phylogenies, i.e. evolutionary trees, which are a type of networks. The terminal nodes of these trees represent species, which are made of individuals and populations among which gene flow occurs. This flow can also be represented as a network. In this paper we briefly show some properties of these complex networks of evolutionary and ecological relationships. First, we characterize large scale evolutionary relationships in the Tree of Life by a degree distribution. Second, we represent genetic relationships between individuals of a Mediterranean marine plant, Posidonia oceanica, in terms of a Minimum Spanning Tree. Finally, relationships among plant shoots inside populations are represented as networks of genetic similarity.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures. To appear in Proceedings of the Medyfinol06 Conferenc

Probing long-range leptonic forces with solar and reactor neutrinos

In this work we study the phenomenological consequences of the existence of long-range forces coupled to lepton flavour numbers in solar neutrino oscillations. We study electronic forces mediated by scalar, vector or tensor neutral bosons and analyze their effect on the propagation of solar neutrinos as a function of the force strength and range. Under the assumption of one mass scale dominance, we perform a global analysis of solar and KamLAND neutrino data which depends on the two standard oscillation parameters, \Delta m^2_{21} and \tan^2\theta_{12}, the force coupling constant, its range and, for the case of scalar-mediated interactions, on the neutrino mass scale as well. We find that, generically, the inclusion of the new interaction does not lead to a very statistically significant improvement on the description of the data in the most favored MSW LMA (or LMA-I) region. It does, however, substantially improve the fit in the high-\Delta m^2 LMA (or LMA-II) region which can be allowed for vector and scalar lepto-forces (in this last case if neutrinos are very hierarchical) at 2.5\sigma. Conversely, the analysis allows us to place stringent constraints on the strength versus range of the leptonic interaction.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure