Avenues and incentives for commercial use of a low-gravity environment

The scientific and commercial utilization of the low-g environments for materials research and for process and product development is considered. Any products of commercial interest which necessitate processing in space will probably be low volume, high value items. To encourage the commercialization of materials processing in low-g, NASA, in parallel with establishing and demonstrating the scientific/technological precepts for analyzing and using a low-g environment, is establishing the legal and management mechanisms to share in the cost and risk of early commercial ventures, and is now working with commercial firms on a case-by basis to explore applications of this new technology to specific needs of the company

Absorption in Ultra-Peripheral Nucleus-Atom Collisions in Crystal

The Glauber theory description of particle- and nucleus-crystal Coulomb interactions at high-energy is developed. The allowance for the lattice thermal vibrations is shown to produce strong absorption effect which is of prime importance for quantitative understanding of the coherent Coulomb excitation of ultra-relativistic particles and nuclei passing through the crystal.Comment: 8 pages, LaTe

Majorana Quasi-Particles Protected by Z2\mathbb{Z}_2 Angular Momentum Conservation

We show how angular momentum conservation can stabilise a symmetry-protected quasi-topological phase of matter supporting Majorana quasi-particles as edge modes in one-dimensional cold atom gases. We investigate a number-conserving four-species Hubbard model in the presence of spin-orbit coupling. The latter reduces the global spin symmetry to an angular momentum parity symmetry, which provides an extremely robust protection mechanism that does not rely on any coupling to additional reservoirs. The emergence of Majorana edge modes is elucidated using field theory techniques, and corroborated by density-matrix-renormalization-group simulations. Our results pave the way toward the observation of Majorana edge modes with alkaline-earth-like fermions in optical lattices, where all basic ingredients for our recipe - spin-orbit coupling and strong inter-orbital interactions - have been experimentally realized over the last two years.Comment: 12 pages (6 + 6 supplementary material

Stochastic Gross-Pitaevsky Equation for BEC via Coarse-Grained Effective Action

We sketch the major steps in a functional integral derivation of a new set of Stochastic Gross-Pitaevsky equations (GPE) for a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) confined to a trap at zero temperature with the averaged effects of non-condensate modes incorporated as stochastic sources. The closed-time-path (CTP) coarse-grained effective action (CGEA) or the equivalent influence functional method is particularly suitable because it can account for the full back-reaction of the noncondensate modes on the condensate dynamics self-consistently. The Langevin equations derived here containing nonlocal dissipation together with colored and multiplicative noises are useful for a stochastic (as distinguished from say, a kinetic) description of the nonequilibrium dynamics of a BEC. This short paper contains original research results not yet published anywhere.Comment: 6 page

Sonic analog of gravitational black holes in Bose-Einstein condensates

It is shown that, in dilute-gas Bose-Einstein condensates, there exist both dynamically stable and unstable configurations which, in the hydrodynamic limit, exhibit a behavior resembling that of gravitational black holes. The dynamical instabilities involve creation of quasiparticle pairs in positive and negative energy states, as in the well-known suggested mechanism for black hole evaporation. We propose a scheme to generate a stable sonic black hole in a ring trap.Comment: RevTeX 3.1, 1 figure, 4 page

Optical pumping of quantum dot nuclear spins

An all-optical scheme to polarize nuclear spins in a single quantum dot is analyzed. The hyperfine interaction with randomly oriented nuclear spins presents a fundamental limit for electron spin coherence in a quantum dot; by cooling the nuclear spins, this decoherence mechanism could be suppressed. The proposed scheme is inspired by laser cooling methods of atomic physics and implements a "controlled Overhauser effect" in a zero-dimensional structure

Reconstructing the orbit type stratification of a torus action from its equivariant cohomology

We investigate what information on the orbit type stratification of a torus action on a compact space is contained in its rational equivariant cohomology algebra. Regarding the (labelled) poset structure of the stratification we show that equivariant cohomology encodes the subposet of ramified elements. For equivariantly formal actions, we also examine what cohomological information of the stratification is encoded. In the smooth setting we show that under certain conditions -- which in particular hold for a compact orientable manifold with discrete fixed point set -- the equivariant cohomologies of the strata are encoded in the equivariant cohomology of the manifold

Spatial and spectral shape of inhomogeneous non-equilibrium exciton-polariton condensates

We develop a mean-field theory of the spatial profile and the spectral properties of polariton condensates in nonresonantly pumped semiconductor microcavities in the strong coupling regime. Predictions are obtained for both the continuous-wave and the pulsed excitation regimes and the specific signatures of the non-equilibrium character of the condensation process are pointed out. A striking sensitivity of the condensate shape on the optical pump spot size is demonstrated by analytical and numerical calculations, in good quantitative agreement with recent experimental observations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure