[Review of] Sidner J. Larson. Catch Colt. American Indian Lives

Catch Colt describes Gros Ventre writer Sidner J. Larson\u27s experience as a mixed-blood Native American looking for his heritage, identity, and personal direction. Although minority fiction writers (such as Rudolfo A. Anaya and Leslie Marmon Silko) have addressed this theme, non-fiction discussions of mixed-blood Native American lives are lacking. Larson\u27s autobiography, however, is only moderately successful because he fails to make readers identify with his struggle as a member of “two different worlds at the same time...with a degree of non-acceptance by both

Parametric Instabilities in Resonantly-Driven Bose-Einstein Condensates

Shaking optical lattices in a resonant manner offers an efficient and versatile method to devise artificial gauge fields and topological band structures for ultracold atomic gases. This was recently demonstrated through the experimental realization of the Harper-Hofstadter model, which combined optical superlattices and resonant time-modulations. Adding inter-particle interactions to these engineered band systems is expected to lead to strongly-correlated states with topological features, such as fractional Chern insulators. However, the interplay between interactions and external time-periodic drives typically triggers violent instabilities and uncontrollable heating, hence potentially ruling out the possibility of accessing such intriguing states of matter in experiments. In this work, we study the early-stage parametric instabilities that occur in systems of resonantly-driven Bose-Einstein condensates in optical lattices. We apply and extend an approach based on Bogoliubov theory [PRX 7, 021015 (2017)] to a variety of resonantly-driven band models, from a simple shaken Wannier-Stark ladder to the more intriguing driven-induced Harper-Hofstadter model. In particular, we provide ab initio numerical and analytical predictions for the stability properties of these topical models. This work sheds light on general features that could guide current experiments to stable regimes of operation.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, one appendi

The planetary nebula IC 5148 and its ionized halo

Many round or nearly roundish Planetary Nebulae (PNe) show multiple shells and halo structures during their evolutionary stage near the maximum temperature of their central star. Controversial debate is currently ongoing if these structures are recombination halos, as suggested by hydrodynamic modelling efforts, or ionized material. Recently we discovered a halo with even somewhat unusual structures around the sparsely studied PN IC~5148 and present for the first time spectroscopy going out to the halo of such a PN.} resolution spectroscopy is used to derive dust chemistry and mineralogy. We investigate the spatial distribution of material and its ionization state from the center of the nebula up to the very outskirts of the halo. We obtained long-slit low resolution spectroscopy (FORS2@VLT) of the nebula in two position angles, which we used to investigate the nebular structure and its halo in the optical range from 450 to 880\,nm. In addition we used medium resolution spectra taken with X-SHOOTER@VLT ranging from 320 nm to 2.4 mu to derive atmospheric parameters for the central star. We obtained the distance and position in the Galaxy from various methods combined with GAIA DR2 data. We also applied Cloudy models to the nebula in order to derive physical parameters of the various regions. We obtained spatially resolved structures and detailed descriptions of the outrunning shock front and a set of unusual halo structures denoted to further shock. The halo structures appears clearly as hot ionized material. Furthermore we derived a reliable photometric value for the central star at a GAIA distance of D=1.3kpc. Considering the large distance $z=1.0$\,kpc from the galactic plane together to its non-circular motion in the galaxy and, a metallicity only slightly below that of typical disk PNe, most likely IC 5148 originates from a thick disk population star.Comment: 12 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

QED Penguin Contributions To Isospin Splittings of Heavy-Light Quark Systems

Recent experiments show that the isospin-violating mass splitting of the B mesons is very small, but the best fits with a QCD sum rule analysis give a splitting of at least 1.0 MeV. The isospin-violating mass splittings of the charmed mesons, on the other hand, are in agreement with experiment. In this letter we show that the inclusion of 2$^{nd}$ kind QED penguin diagrams can account for this discrepancy within the errors in the QCD sum rule method.Comment: 9 pages, latex, 2 figure

SN1987A - a Testing Ground for the KARMEN Anomaly

We show, that SN1987A can serve as an astrophysical laboratory for testing the viability of the assertion that a new massive neutral fermion is implied by the KARMEN data. We show that a wide range of the parameters characterizing the proposed particle is ruled out by the above constraints making this interpretation very unlikely.Comment: 12 pages, 1 eps figure embedded, to appear in Phys. Lett.