Living in the Milky Way

It’s finally here. Today, June 20 at 6:34 p.m., is the the summer solstice, also known as the first day of summer and, confusingly enough, midsummer’s eve. From a scientific perspective, it marks the moment the sun reaches its northernmost point in our sky. As a result of that position, it’s the shortest night and longest day if you live north of the equator. [excerpt

Very Large Spectroscopic Surveys with the VLT

Recently, it has been recognised that very large spectroscopic surveys (several million spectra) are required to advance our understanding of Dark Energy (via baryonic wiggles) and the detailed history of our Local Group of galaxies (via Galactic Archeology or near-field cosmology). In this paper I make a preliminary exploration of how this might be done by putting a wide field, optical, prime-focus fibre-fed spectroscopic facility on one of the VLT's UTs.Comment: 6 pages. To be published in the proceedings "Science with the VLT in the ELT era

Quantum Popov robust stability analysis of an optical cavity containing a saturated Kerr medium

This paper applies results on the robust stability of nonlinear quantum systems to a system consisting an optical cavity containing a saturated Kerr medium. The system is characterized by a Hamiltonian operator which contains a non-quadratic term involving a quartic function of the annihilation and creation operators. A saturated version of the Kerr nonlinearity leads to a sector bounded nonlinearity which enables a quantum small gain theorem to be applied to this system in order to analyze its stability. Also, a non-quadratic version of a quantum Popov stability criterion is presented and applied to analyze the stability of this system.Comment: A shortened version will appear in the Proceedings of the 2013 European Control Conferenc

Quantum Robust Stability of a Small Josephson Junction in a Resonant Cavity

This paper applies recent results on the robust stability of nonlinear quantum systems to the case of a Josephson junction in a resonant cavity. The Josephson junction is characterized by a Hamiltonian operator which contains a non-quadratic term involving a cosine function. This leads to a sector bounded nonlinearity which enables the previously developed theory to be applied to this system in order to analyze its stability.Comment: A version of this paper appeared in the proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Multi-conference on Systems and Contro

Education in Nazi Germany

This essay investigates the sweeping educational reforms that the Nazi government implemented to use elementary education to further its political goals. Along with the major laws concerned, it concentrates on several personal accounts of families and students during this era to better understand how these educational reforms affected Germans. Additionally, it analyzes the Hitler Youth and other such recreational organizations that the Nazis created to continue to mold students’ ideologies. It examines the stories of several people who were children in these organizations and what their impressions were of the groups. Finally, it places these Nazi reforms in the context of the post-1945 period of denazification and reconstruction

Input Design for System Identification via Convex Relaxation

This paper proposes a new framework for the optimization of excitation inputs for system identification. The optimization problem considered is to maximize a reduced Fisher information matrix in any of the classical D-, E-, or A-optimal senses. In contrast to the majority of published work on this topic, we consider the problem in the time domain and subject to constraints on the amplitude of the input signal. This optimization problem is nonconvex. The main result of the paper is a convex relaxation that gives an upper bound accurate to within $2/\pi$ of the true maximum. A randomized algorithm is presented for finding a feasible solution which, in a certain sense is expected to be at least $2/\pi$ as informative as the globally optimal input signal. In the case of a single constraint on input power, the proposed approach recovers the true global optimum exactly. Extensions to situations with both power and amplitude constraints on both inputs and outputs are given. A simple simulation example illustrates the technique.Comment: Preprint submitted for journal publication, extended version of a paper at 2010 IEEE Conference on Decision and Contro