Treaty Exit in the United States: Insights from the United Kingdom or South Africa?

This essay, a contribution to an AJIL Unbound symposium on “Treaty Exit at the Interface of Domestic and International Law,” compares treaty exit in the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. After examining the longstanding practice of unilateral presidential withdrawals from treaties in the United States and the refusal to date of U.S. courts to review the constitutionality of that practice, the essay summarizes recent judicial decisions in the United Kingdom and South Africa holding that parliamentary approval was required before these nations could withdraw from treaties committing them, respectively, to the European Union and the International Criminal Court. We conclude that these decisions—while important and interesting in their own right—offer limited insights for debates in the United States over whether the President has unilateral treaty withdrawal authority and how such withdrawals might affect statutes implementing international agreements

Moving Mirrors and Thermodynamic Paradoxes

Quantum fields responding to "moving mirrors" have been predicted to give rise to thermodynamic paradoxes. I show that the assumption in such work that the mirror can be treated as an external field is invalid: the exotic energy-transfer effects necessary to the paradoxes are well below the scales at which the model is credible. For a first-quantized point-particle mirror, it appears that exotic energy-transfers are lost in the quantum uncertainty in the mirror's state. An accurate accounting of these energies will require a model which recognizes the mirror's finite reflectivity, and almost certainly a model which allows for the excitation of internal mirror modes, that is, a second-quantized model.Comment: 7 pages, Revtex with Latex2

Gravitational Wave Emission from Collisions of Compact Scalar Solitons

We numerically investigate the gravitational waves generated by the head-on collision of equal-mass, self-gravitating, real scalar field solitons (oscillatons) as a function of their compactness $\mathcal{C}$. We show that there exist three different possible outcomes for such collisions: (1) an excited stable oscillaton for low $\mathcal{C}$, (2) a merger and formation of a black-hole for intermediate $\mathcal{C}$, and (3) a pre-merger collapse of both oscillatons into individual black-holes for large $\mathcal{C}$. For (1), the excited, aspherical oscillaton continues to emit gravitational waves. For (2), the total energy in gravitational waves emitted increases with compactness, and possesses a maximum which is greater than that from the merger of a pair of equivalent mass black-holes. The initial amplitudes of the quasi-normal modes in the post-merger ring-down in this case are larger than that of corresponding mass black-holes -- potentially a key observable to distinguish black-hole mergers with their scalar mimics. For (3), the gravitational wave output is indistinguishable from a similar mass, black-hole--black-hole merger.Comment: 8 Pages, 8 figures, movies : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSkfizpQDrcahgvc5TvBk5qtXAzkSyHP

Formation of Relativistic Axion Stars

Axions and axion-like particles are compelling candidates for the missing dark matter of the universe. As they undergo gravitational collapse, they can form compact objects such as axion stars or even black holes. In this paper, we study the formation and distribution of such objects. First, we simulate the formation of compact axion stars using numerical relativity with aspherical initial conditions that could represent the final stages of axion dark matter structure formation. We show that the final states of such collapse closely follow the known relationship of initial mass and axion decay constant $f_a$. Second, we demonstrate with a toy model how this information can be used to scan a model density field to predict the number densities and masses of such compact objects. In addition to being detectable by the LIGO/VIRGO gravitational wave interferometer network for axion mass of $10^{-9} < m_a < 10^{-11}$ eV, we show using peak statistics that for $f_a < 0.2M_{pl}$, there exists a "mass gap" between the masses of axion stars and black holes formed from collapse

The electromagnetic field near a dielectric half-space

We compute the expectations of the squares of the electric and magnetic fields in the vacuum region outside a half-space filled with a uniform non-dispersive dielectric. This gives predictions for the Casimir-Polder force on an atom in the `retarded' regime near a dielectric. We also find a positive energy density due to the electromagnetic field. This would lead, in the case of two parallel dielectric half-spaces, to a positive, separation-independent contribution to the energy density, besides the negative, separation-dependent Casimir energy. Rough estimates suggest that for a very wide range of cases, perhaps including all realizable ones, the total energy density between the half-spaces is positive.Comment: Latex2e, IOP macros, 15 pages, 2 eps figure

General Relativistic Polarized Proca Stars

Massive vector fields can form spatially localized, non-relativistic, stationary field configurations supported by gravitational interactions. The ground state configurations (p-solitons/vector solitons/dark photon stars/polarized Proca stars) have a time-dependent vector field pointing in the same spatial direction throughout the configuration at any instant of time, can carry macroscopic amounts of spin angular momentum, and are spherically symmetric and monotonic in the energy density. In this paper, we include general relativistic effects, and numerically investigate the stability of compact polarized Proca stars (linear and circularly polarized) and compare them to hedgehog-like field configurations (with radially pointing field directions). Starting with approximate field profiles of such stars, we evolve the system numerically using 3+1 dimensional numerical simulations in general relativity. We find that these initial conditions lead to stable configurations. However, at sufficiently large initial compactness, they can collapse to black holes. We find that the initial compactness that leads to black hole formation is higher for circularly polarized stars (which carry macroscopic spin angular momentum), compared to linearly polarized ones, which in turn is higher than that for hedgehog configurations.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

Non-Gaussian curvature distribution of actin-propelled biomimetric colloid trajectories

We analyze the motion of colloids propelled by a comet-like tail of polymerizing actin filaments. The curvature of the particle trajectories deviates strongly from a Gaussian distribution, implying that the underlying microscopic processes are fluctuating in a non-independent manner. Trajectories for beads of different size all showed the same non-Gaussian behavior, while the mean curvature decreased weakly with size. A stochastic simulation that includes nucleation, force-dependent dissociation, growth, and capping of filaments, shows that the non-Gaussian curvature distribution can be explained by a positive feedback mechanism in which attached chains under higher tension are more likely to sna