4,361 research outputs found
Socio-Legal Studies in Germany and the UK: Theory and Methods
This Special Issue considers the situated and contextualized development of socio legal, or law and society, scholarship within two materially different legal and academic cultures, namely Germany and the United Kingdom, with a view to achieving a better understanding of why and how such differences in understanding and practice have arisen. The contributions are grouped into three themes. The first reflects upon the influence of institutional contexts and scholarly traditions in terms of the development of those approaches that come under the banner of socio legal studies. The second features contributions that adopt a comparative perspective in terms of selected areas of law, pointing to notably different approaches taken in Germany and the UK, and considering the development of these respective situations. The third looks at the key contemporary trends, theoretical applications, and methodological approaches taken within both countries’ socio legal academic contexts
Dynamics of defect formation
A dynamic symmetry-breaking transition with noise and inertia is analyzed.
Exact solution of the linearized equation that describes the critical region
allows precise calculation (exponent and prefactor) of the number of defects
produced as a function of the rate of increase of the critical parameter. The
procedure is valid in both the overdamped and underdamped limits. In one space
dimension, we perform quantitative comparison with numerical simulations of the
nonlinear nonautonomous stochastic partial differential equation and report on
signatures of underdamped dynamics.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX, 4 figures. Submitted to Physical Revie
Microwave response of hole and patch arrays
Copyright © 2010 American Physical SocietyThe electromagnetic response of two-dimensional square arrays of perfectly conducting square patches, and their complementary structures, is modeled utilizing a modal matching technique and employing Babinet’s principle. This method allows for the introduction of progressively higher diffracted orders and waveguide modes to be included in the calculation, hence aiding understanding of the underlying causal mechanism for the observed response. At frequencies close to, but below, the onset of diffraction, a near-complete reflection condition is predicted, even for low filling fractions: conversely, for high filling fractions a near-complete transmission condition results. These resonance phenomena are associated with evanescent diffraction, which is sufficiently strong to reverse the step change in transmission upon establishment of electrical continuity; i.e., the connected structure demonstrates increased transmission with increasing filling fraction.BAE Systems Ltd.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC
Avoiding selection bias in gravitational wave astronomy
When searching for gravitational waves in the data from ground-based
gravitational wave detectors it is common to use a detection threshold to
reduce the number of background events which are unlikely to be the signals of
interest. However, imposing such a threshold will also discard some real
signals with low amplitude, which can potentially bias any inferences drawn
from the population of detected signals. We show how this selection bias is
naturally avoided by using the full information from the search, considering
both the selected data and our ignorance of the data that are thrown away, and
considering all relevant signal and noise models. This approach produces
unbiased estimates of parameters even in the presence of false alarms and
incomplete data. This can be seen as an extension of previous methods into the
high false rate regime where we are able to show that the quality of parameter
inference can be optimised by lowering thresholds and increasing the false
alarm rate.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure
Winding up by a quench: vortices in the wake of rapid Bose-Einstein condensation
A second order phase transition induced by a rapid quench can lock out
topological defects with densities far exceeding their equilibrium expectation
values. We use quantum kinetic theory to show that this mechanism, originally
postulated in the cosmological context, and analysed so far only on the mean
field classical level, should allow spontaneous generation of vortex lines in
trapped Bose-Einstein condensates of simple topology, or of winding number in
toroidal condensates.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures; misprint correcte
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