Inelastic Hadron Diffraction in High Energy Elastic Scattering of Nuclei

The r\^{o}le of inelastic diffraction in elastic scattering of nuclei is studied in the formalism of \emph{diffractive limit}. The results obtained for scattering of the $\alpha$--particles on light nuclei show that the nucleonic diffraction is especially important at large momentum transfers where the Glauber model of geometric diffraction fails.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure (in eps) talk given at XXXI International Symposium on Multiparticle Dynamics, Sep. 1-7, 2001, Datong China URL http://ismd31.ccnu.edu.cn

Medea in the courtroom and on the stage in nineteenth-century London.

In 430 BC Greek playwright Euripides transformed the mythological figure of Medea into the proto-typical murdering mother when he put a dagger in her hand and had her slaughter her two young sons. Euripides, at the same time, created the only known ancient version of the classic legend to portray Medea sympathetically. It is this combination of sympathy power and repulsion that has seen Euripides’ Medea endure down through the ages. In nineteenth-century London adaptations of Euripides’ play struck a chord with audiences at a time when unprecedented numbers of English mothers were killing their babies. At a time when it was claimed that London harboured 16,000 women who had destroyed their children (Behlmer, Child Abuse 23) Medea was the most ubiquitous heroine of the London stage. While Medea on the London stage was the object of public gaze, so too were the real-life Medeas of London, who were charged with infanticide and stood in the dock of the Old Bailey, or in a room set aside for inquests at a public inn. This paper examines the intersections between the imagined Medea of the nineteenth-century London stage and real-life Medeas of the London streets by analysing editorial texts in London’s most influential nineteenth-century newspaper, the London Times. I will draw upon news reports of infanticide trials and inquests, editorials and letters to the editor, and on theatre reviews and news stories about theatre performances and performers, to map both the 19th century stage persona of Medea and the experience of young abandoned mothers driven to murder their children

A model of fracture nucleation, growth and arrest, and consequences for fracture density and scaling

International audienceIn order to improve discrete fracture network (DFN) models, which are increasingly required into groundwater and rock mechanics applications, we propose a new DFN modeling based on the evolution of fracture network formation--nucleation, growth, and arrest--with simplified mechanical rules. The central idea of the model relies on the mechanical role played by large fractures in stopping the growth of smaller ones. The modeling framework combines, in a time-wise approach, fracture nucleation, growth, and arrest. It yields two main regimes. Below a certain critical scale, the density distribution of fracture sizes is a power law with a scaling exponent directly derived from the growth law and nuclei properties; above the critical scale, a quasi-universal self-similar regime establishes with a self-similar scaling. The density term of the dense regime is related to the details of arrest rule and to the orientation distribution of the fractures. The DFN model, so defined, is fully consistent with field cases former studied. Unlike more usual stochastic DFN models, ours is based on a simplified description of fracture interactions, which eventually reproduces the multiscale self-similar fracture size distribution often observed and reported in the literature. The model is a potential significant step forward for further applications to groundwater flow and rock mechanical issues