Holographic Van der Waals phase transition for a hairy black hole

The Van der Waals(VdW) phase transition in a hairy black hole is investigated by analogizing its charge, temperature, and entropy as the temperature, pressure, and volume in the fluid respectively. The two point correlation function(TCF), which is dual to the geodesic length, is employed to probe this phase transition. We find the phase structure in the temperature$-$geodesic length plane resembles as that in the temperature$-$thermal entropy plane besides the scale of the horizontal coordinate. In addition, we find the equal area law(EAL) for the first order phase transition and critical exponent of the heat capacity for the second order phase transition in the temperature$-$geodesic length plane are consistent with that in temperature$-$thermal entropy plane, which implies that the TCF is a good probe to probe the phase structure of the back hole.Comment: Accepted by Advances in High Energy Physics(The special issue: Applications of the Holographic Duality to Strongly Coupled Quantum Systems

The Advantage of Playing Home in NBA: Microscopic, Team-Specific and Evolving Features

The idea that the success rate of a team increases when playing home is broadly accepted and documented for a wide variety of sports. Investigations on the so-called home advantage phenomenon date back to the 70's and every since has attracted the attention of scholars and sport enthusiasts. These studies have been mainly focused on identifying the phenomenon and trying to correlate it with external factors such as crowd noise and referee bias. Much less is known about the effects of home advantage in the microscopic dynamics of the game (within the game) or possible team-specific and evolving features of this phenomenon. Here we present a detailed study of these previous features in the National Basketball Association (NBA). By analyzing play-by-play events of more than sixteen thousand games that span thirteen NBA seasons, we have found that home advantage affects the microscopic dynamics of the game by increasing the scoring rates and decreasing the time intervals between scores of teams playing home. We verified that these two features are different among the NBA teams, for instance, the scoring rate of the Cleveland Cavaliers team is increased 0.16 points per minute (on average the seasons 2004-05 to 2013-14) when playing home, whereas for the New Jersey Nets (now the Brooklyn Nets) this rate increases in only 0.04 points per minute. We further observed that these microscopic features have evolved over time in a non-trivial manner when analyzing the results team-by-team. However, after averaging over all teams some regularities emerge; in particular, we noticed that the average differences in the scoring rates and in the characteristic times (related to the time intervals between scores) have slightly decreased over time, suggesting a weakening of the phenomenon.Comment: Accepted for publication in PLoS ON

The Distribution of the Asymptotic Number of Citations to Sets of Publications by a Researcher or From an Academic Department Are Consistent With a Discrete Lognormal Model

How to quantify the impact of a researcher's or an institution's body of work is a matter of increasing importance to scientists, funding agencies, and hiring committees. The use of bibliometric indicators, such as the h-index or the Journal Impact Factor, have become widespread despite their known limitations. We argue that most existing bibliometric indicators are inconsistent, biased, and, worst of all, susceptible to manipulation. Here, we pursue a principled approach to the development of an indicator to quantify the scientific impact of both individual researchers and research institutions grounded on the functional form of the distribution of the asymptotic number of citations. We validate our approach using the publication records of 1,283 researchers from seven scientific and engineering disciplines and the chemistry departments at the 106 U.S. research institutions classified as "very high research activity". Our approach has three distinct advantages. First, it accurately captures the overall scientific impact of researchers at all career stages, as measured by asymptotic citation counts. Second, unlike other measures, our indicator is resistant to manipulation and rewards publication quality over quantity. Third, our approach captures the time-evolution of the scientific impact of research institutions.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, 3 table

Wannier-Stark localization in one-dimensional amplitude-chirped lattices

We study the Wannier-Stark (WS) localization in one-dimensional amplitude-chirped lattices with the $j$th onsite potential modulated by a function $Fj\cos(2\pi \alpha j)$, where $F$ is the external field with a period determined by $\alpha=p/q$ ($p$ and $q$ are co-prime integers). In the Hermitian (or non-Hermitian) systems with real (or imaginary) fields, we can obtain real (or imaginary) WS ladders in the eigenenergy spectrum. In most cases with $q \geq 2$, there are multiple WS ladders with all the eigenstates localized in the strong field limit. However, in the lattices with $q=4$, the energy-dependent localization phenomenon emerges due to the competition between spatially periodic and linearly increasing behaviors in the onsite potential. About half the number of eigenstates are gathered at the band center and can extend over a wide region or even the full range of the lattice, even when the field becomes very strong. Moreover, in the non-Hermitian lattices with odd $q$, some of the WS ladders become doubly degenerate, where the eigenstates are evenly distributed at two neighboring sites in a wide regime of field strength. Our work opens an avenue for exploring WS localization in both Hermitian and non-Hermitian amplitude-chirped lattices.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Thermodynamics and weak cosmic censorship conjecture of the torus-like black hole

After studying the energy-momentum relation of charged particles' Hamilton-Jacobi equations, we discuss the laws of thermodynamics and the weak cosmic censorship conjecture in torus-like black holes. We find that both the first law of thermodynamic as well as the weak cosmic censorship conjecture are valid in both the normal phase space and extended phase space. However, the second law of thermodynamics is only valid in the normal phase space. Our results show that the first law and weak cosmic censorship conjecture do not depend on the phase spaces while the second law depends. What's more, we find that the shift of the metric function that determines the event horizon take the same form in different phase spaces, indicating that the weak cosmic censorship conjecture is independent of the phase space.Comment: 15 page