Reconsidering "the love of art" : evaluating the potential of art museum outreach

Art museums have long been identified as bastions of social and cultural exclusion. This conclusion was best evidenced by the large-scale 1967 French study by Bourdieu and Darbel demonstrating the exclusionary nature of “The Love of Art.” However, in recent years there have been increasing efforts to reach out to a broader range of visitors beyond conventional audiences. The present study investigates the impacts of an outreach program at a UK art museum, which sought to engage socially excluded young mothers. This study employs ethnographic research methods on a longitudinal basis to develop qualitative insights about the program seeking to mitigate cultural exclusion. While the study’s findings uphold many longstanding critiques of art museums’ conventional approaches, the study also indicates that carefully designed outreach activities can overcome such limitations and enhance cultural engagement. Thus, art museums’ limited appeal is tied to problematic public engagement practices that can be changed

Study of the one-dimensional off-lattice hot-monomer reaction model

Hot monomers are particles having a transient mobility (a ballistic flight) prior to being definitely absorbed on a surface. After arriving at a surface, the excess energy coming from the kinetic energy in the gas phase is dissipated through degrees of freedom parallel to the surface plane. In this paper we study the hot monomer-monomer adsorption-reaction process on a continuum (off-lattice) one-dimensional space by means of Monte Carlo simulations. The system exhibits second-order irreversible phase transition between a reactive and saturated (absorbing) phases which belong to the directed percolation (DP) universality class. This result is interpreted by means of a coarse-grained Langevin description which allows as to extend the DP conjecture to transitions occurring in continuous media.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, final version to appear in J. Phys.

Nonuniversal Critical Spreading in Two Dimensions

Continuous phase transitions are studied in a two dimensional nonequilibrium model with an infinite number of absorbing configurations. Spreading from a localized source is characterized by nonuniversal critical exponents, which vary continuously with the density phi in the surrounding region. The exponent delta changes by more than an order of magnitude, and eta changes sign. The location of the critical point also depends on phi, which has important implications for scaling. As expected on the basis of universality, the static critical behavior belongs to the directed percolation class.Comment: 21 pages, REVTeX, figures available upon reques

Layer Features of the Lattice Gas Model for Self-Organized Criticality

A layer-by-layer description of the asymmetric lattice gas model for 1/f-noise suggested by Jensen [Phys. Rev. Lett. 64, 3103 (1990)] is presented. The power spectra of the lattice layers in the direction perpendicular to the particle flux is studied in order to understand how the white noise at the input boundary evolves, on the average, into 1/f-noise for the system. The effects of high boundary drive and uniform driving force on the power spectrum of the total number of diffusing particles are considered. In the case of nearest-neighbor particle interactions, high statistics simulation results show that the power spectra of single lattice layers are characterized by different $\beta_x$ exponents such that $\beta_x \to 1.9$ as one approaches the outer boundary.Comment: LaTeX, figures upon reques

Carbon incorporation in ZnSe grown by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition

Carbon incorporation in ZnSe films grown by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition is reported. Secondary‐ion mass spectrometry measurements in ZnSe films grown from methylallylselenide and dimethylzinc show an enhanced carbon accumulation at the interface between ZnSe and GaAs. The carbon incorporation in the bulk ZnSe increases with the VI/II ratio and for a value of VI/II=3–4, the amount of incorporated carbon abruptly jumps to concentrations of 10^(21) cm^(−3), whereupon the films become polycrystalline. A new shallow peak I^C at 2.7920 eV dominates the near‐band‐edge low‐temperature photoluminescence spectra of all carbon‐contaminated ZnSe films. The intensity and linewidth of I^C increase with the VI/II ratio in a similar manner to the carbon concentration. This peak is proposed to be due to the radiative decay of excitons bound to a complex defect, which is associated with the presence of carbon in the films

Critical behavior of a one-dimensional monomer-dimer reaction model with lateral interactions

A monomer-dimer reaction lattice model with lateral repulsion among the same species is studied using a mean-field analysis and Monte Carlo simulations. For weak repulsions, the model exhibits a first-order irreversible phase transition between two absorbing states saturated by each different species. Increasing the repulsion, a reactive stationary state appears in addition to the saturated states. The irreversible phase transitions from the reactive phase to any of the saturated states are continuous and belong to the directed percolation universality class. However, a different critical behavior is found at the point where the directed percolation phase boundaries meet. The values of the critical exponents calculated at the bicritical point are in good agreement with the exponents corresponding to the parity-conserving universality class. Since the adsorption-reaction processes does not lead to a non-trivial local parity-conserving dynamics, this result confirms that the twofold symmetry between absorbing states plays a relevant role in determining the universality class. The value of the exponent $\delta_2$, which characterizes the fluctuations of an interface at the bicritical point, supports the Bassler-Brown's conjecture which states that this is a new exponent in the parity-conserving universality class.Comment: 19 pages, 22 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev

Orientational phase transitions in anisotropic rare-earth magnets at low temperatures

Orientational phase transitions are investigated within the Heisenberg model with single-site anisotropy. The temperature dependence of the cone angle is calculated within the spin-wave theory. The role of the quantum renormalizations of anisotropy constants is discussed. A comparison with the experimental data on the cone-plane orientational transition in holmium is performed.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX, 3 figure

Interplay between SDW and induced local moments in URu2Si2

Theoretical model for magnetic ordering in the heavy-fermion metal URu2Si2 is suggested. The 17.5K transition in this material is ascribed to formation of a spin-density wave, which develops due to a partial nesting between electron and hole parts of the Fermi surface and has a negligibly small form-factor. Staggered field in the SDW state induces tiny antiferromagnetic order in the subsystem of localized singlet-singlet levels. Unlike the other models our scenario is based on coexistence of two orderings with the same antiferromagnetic dipole symmetry.The topology of the pressure phase diagram for such a two order parameter model is studied in the framework of the Landau theory. The field dependences of the staggered magnetization and the magnon gap are derived from the microscopic theory and found to be in good quantitative agreement with experiment.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

Investigation of resonant and transient phenomena in Josephson junction flux qubits

We present an analytical and computational study of resonances and transient responses in a classical Josephson junction system. A theoretical basis for resonances in a superconducting loop with three junctions is presented, outlining both the direct relationship between the dynamics of single- and multi-junction systems, and the direct relationships between observations of the classical counterparts to Rabi oscillations, Ramsey fringes, and spin echo oscillations in this class of systems. We show simulations data along with analytical analyses of the classical model, and the results are related to previously reported experiments conducted on three junction loops. We further investigate the effect of off-resonant microwave perturbations to, e.g., the Rabi-type response of the Josephson system, and we relate this response back to the nonlinear and multi-valued resonance behavior previously reported for a single Josephson junction. The close relationships between single and multi-junction behavior demonstrates the underlying dynamical mechanism for a whole class of classical counterparts to expected quantum mechanical observations in a variety of systems; namely the resonant and transient behavior of a particle in an anharmonic potential well with subsequent escape.Comment: 11 pages, seven figure