[Review of] Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley Fisher Fishkin. People of the Book: Holstein Thirty Scholars Reflect on their Jewish Identity

People of the Book is an important contribution to ethnic studies and identity politics. It is a dense and reflective collection of essays which defines Judaism in personal and scholarly contexts. As one of the contributors, Nancy Miller, says: It\u27s not easy to write about being Jewish (168). The editors divide the essays into four parts. After the introductory essay, Part 2, Transformations, examines how the authors\u27 activism grows out of their Jewish heritage. Negotiations, looks at Jewish definition in the context of other Jewish and non-Jewish communities, and Explorations, shows the relationship between being Jewish and pursuing a discipline. Meditations, is an application of previous themes to specific literary works. Certain concerns cross over all four sections to make the search for identity continuous and shared

[Review of] Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice

Uprooting Racism, by Paul Kivel, is a deceptively simple book which covers a lot of ground. Kivel defines racism, places it in context, specifies its effect on certain groups, and shows how to fight it. He begins with, This is a book about racism for white people and goes on to explain what it means to be white in a society which institutionalizes oppression and social injustice based on a definition of whiteness. Privilege, benefits, seeing whiteness as normative, and tactics which minimize, deny, or avoid responsibility for racism are all discussed succinctly and directly

A Brief Introduction to Chiral Perturbation Theory

A brief introduction to the subject of chiral perturbation theory ($\chi$pt) is presented, including a discussion of effective field theory and applications of $\chi$pt in the arena of purely mesonic interactions as well as in the $\pi N$ sector.Comment: 15 pages, talk given at TAPS detector workshop, Rez, Czech Republic, Sept. 1999, to be published in Czech. J. Phy

Chiral Symmetry and the Parity-Violating NNπNN\pi Yukawa Coupling

We construct the complete SU(2) parity-violating (PV) $\pi, N, \Delta$ interaction Lagrangian with one derivative, and calculate the chiral corrections to the PV Yukawa $NN\pi$ coupling constant $h_\pi$ through ${\cal O}(1/\Lambda_\chi^3)$ in the leading order of heavy baryon expansion. We discuss the relationship between the renormalized \hpi, the measured value of \hpi, and the corresponding quantity calculated microscopically from the Standard Model four-quark PV interaction.Comment: RevTex, 26 pages + 5 PS figure

Ground state overlap and quantum phase transitions

We present a characterization of quantum phase transitions in terms of the the overlap function between two ground states obtained for two different values of external parameters. On the examples of the Dicke and XY models, we show that the regions of criticality of a system are marked by the extremal points of the overlap and functions closely related to it. Further, we discuss the connections between this approach and the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe as well as with the dynamical study of the Loschmidt echo for critical systems.Comment: 5 pages. Version to be published, title change

On the parameterization dependence of the energy momentum tensor and the metric

We use results by Kirilin to show that in general relativity the nonleading terms in the energy-momentum tensor of a particle depends on the parameterization of the gravitational field. While the classical metric that is calculated from this source, used to define the leading long-distance corrections to the metric, also has a parameteriztion dependence, it can be removed by a coordinate change. Thus the classical observables are parameterization independent. The quantum effects that emerge within the same calculation of the metric also depend on the parameterization and a full quantum calculation requires the inclusion of further diagrams. However, within a given parameterization the quantum effects calculated by us in a previous paper are well defined. Flaws of Kirilin's proposed alternate metric definition are described and we explain why the diagrams that we calculated are the appropriate ones.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

Two-mode entanglement in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates

We study the generation of two-mode entanglement in a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a double-well potential. By applying the Holstein-Primakoff transformation, we show that the problem is exactly solvable as long as the number of excitations due to atom-atom interactions remains low. In particular, the condensate constitutes a symmetric Gaussian system, thereby enabling its entanglement of formation to be measured directly by the fluctuations in the quadratures of the two constituent components [Giedke {\it et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 91}, 107901 (2003)]. We discover that significant two-mode squeezing occurs in the condensate if the interspecies interaction is sufficiently strong, which leads to strong entanglement between the two components.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure

Model Calculation of Electron-Phonon Couplings in a Dimer with a Non-Degenerate Orbital

We evaluate all the electron-phonon couplings derived from the one-body electronic interactions, in both the adiabatic and extreme non-adiabatic limit, for a dimer with a non-degenerate orbital built from atomic wave functions of Gaussian shape. We find largely different values of the coupling parameters in the two cases, as well as different expressions of the corresponding terms in the Hamiltonian.Comment: 5 postscript figure

Subleading corrections to parity-violating pion photoproduction

We compute the photon asymmetry Bγ for near threshold parity-violating (PV) pion photoproduction through subleading order. We show that subleading contributions involve a new combination of PV couplings not included in previous analyses of hadronic PV. We argue that existing constraints on the leading order contribution to Bγ—obtained from the PV γ-decay of 18F—suggest that the impact of the subleading contributions may be more significant than expected from naturalness arguments