Inter- and Intra-Chain Attractions in Solutions of Flexible Polyelectrolytes at Nonzero Concentration

Constant temperature molecular dynamics simulations were used to study solutions of flexible polyelectrolyte chains at nonzero concentrations with explicit counterions and unscreened coulombic interactions. Counterion condensation, measured via the self-diffusion coefficient of the counterions, is found to increase with polymer concentration, but contrary to the prediction of Manning theory, the renormalized charge fraction on the chains decreases with increasing Bjerrum length without showing any saturation. Scaling analysis of the radius of gyration shows that the chains are extended at low polymer concentrations and small Bjerrum lengths, while at sufficiently large Bjerrum lengths, the chains shrink to produce compact structures with exponents smaller than a gaussian chain, suggesting the presence of attractive intrachain interactions. A careful study of the radial distribution function of the center-of-mass of the polyelectrolyte chains shows clear evidence that effective interchain attractive interactions also exist in solutions of flexible polyelectrolytes, similar to what has been found for rodlike polyelectrolytes. Our results suggest that the broad maximum observed in scattering experiments is due to clustering of chains.Comment: 12 pages, REVTeX, 15 eps figure

BMN operators with vector impurities, Z_2 symmetry and pp-waves

We calculate the coefficients of three-point functions of BMN operators with two vector impurities. We find that these coefficients can be obtained from those of the three-point functions of scalar BMN operators by interchanging the coefficient for the symmetric-traceless representation with the coefficient for the singlet. We conclude that the Z_2 symmetry of the pp-wave string theory is not manifest at the level of field theory three-point correlators.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figures. v1: A reference and a footnote added; v2: New contributions found, Z_2 symmetry lost in 3-point function

A Calculation of the plane wave string Hamiltonian from N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory

Berenstein, Maldacena, and Nastase have proposed, as a limit of the strong form of the AdS/CFT correspondence, that string theory in a particular plane wave background is dual to a certain subset of operators in the N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory. Even though this is a priori a strong/weak coupling duality, the matrix elements of the string theory Hamiltonian, when expressed in gauge theory variables, are analytic in the 't Hooft coupling constant. This allows one to conjecture that, like the masses of excited string states, these can be recovered using perturbation theory in Yang-Mills theory. In this paper we identify the difference between the generator of scale transformations and a particular U(1) R-symmetry generator as the operator dual to the string theory Hamiltonian for nonvanishing string coupling. We compute its matrix elements and find that they agree with the string theory prediction provided that the state-operator map is modified for nonvanishing string coupling. We construct this map explicitly and calculate the anomalous dimensions of the new operators. We identify the component arising from the modification of the state-operator map with the contribution of the string theory contact terms to the masses of string states.Comment: 38 pages, Latex; v2: Comparison with string theory changed in light of corrections to string theory results in hep-th/0206073 v3; state-operator map modified; Physical interpretation and conclusions unchange

Finite element computer program to analyze cracked orthotropic sheets

A two dimensional orthotropic sheet with through-the-thickness cracks and temperature gradient was analyzed. The program includes special crack tip elements that account for singular stress fields associated with crack opening and crack sliding displacements at the crack tip. The program also includes a linear spring element and a constant strain, triangular element. A number of problems for which closed form solutions exist were analyzed to demonstrate the capabilities of the program

Local Commutativity and Causality in Interacting PP-wave String Field Theory

In this paper, we extend our previous study of causality and local commutativity of string fields in the pp-wave lightcone string field theory to include interaction. Contrary to the flat space case result of Lowe, Polchinski, Susskind, Thorlacius and Uglum, we found that the pp-wave interaction does not affect the local commutativity condition. Our results show that the pp-wave lightcone string field theory is not continuously connected with the flat space one. We also discuss the relation between the condition of local commutativity and causality. While the two notions are closely related in a point particle theory, their relation is less clear in string theory. We suggest that string local commutativity may be relevant for an operational defintion of causality using strings as probes.Comment: Latex, JHEP3.cls, 18 pages, no figures. v2: add comments about the UV-IR mixing effect displayed in our result. version to appear in JHE

Chiral primary cubic interactions from pp-wave supergravity

We explicitly construct cubic interaction light-cone Hamiltonian for the chiral primary system involving the metric fields and the self-dual four-form fields in the IIB pp-wave supergravity. The background fields representing pp-waves exhibit SO(4)*SO(4)*Z_2 invariance. It turns out that the interaction Hamiltonian is precisely the same as that for the dilaton-axion system, except for the fact that the chiral primary system fields have the opposite parity to that of the dilaton-axion fields under the Z_2 transformation that exchanges two SO(4)'s.Comment: 14 pages, A few comments are adde

The first operation and results of the Chung-Li VHF radar

The Chung-Li Very High Frequency (VHF) radar is used in the dual-mode operations, applying Doppler beam-swinging as well as the spaced-antenna-drift method. The design of the VHF radar is examined. Results of performance tests are discussed

Conformal Dimensions of Two-Derivative BMN Operators

We compute the anomalous dimensions of BMN operators with two covariant derivative impurities at the planar level up to first order in the effective coupling lambda'. The result equals those for two scalar impurities as well as for mixed scalar and vector impurities given in the literature. Though the results are the same, the computation is very different from the scalar case. This is basically due to the existence of a non-vanishing overlap between the derivative impurity and the ``background'' field Z. We present details of these differences and their consequences.Comment: 27 pages, v2: references added, minor change