Superfluid and Mott Insulating shells of bosons in harmonically confined optical lattices

Weakly interacting atomic or molecular bosons in quantum degenerate regime and trapped in harmonically confined optical lattices, exhibit a wedding cake structure consisting of insulating (Mott) shells. It is shown that superfluid regions emerge between Mott shells as a result of fluctuations due to finite hopping. It is found that the order parameter equation in the superfluid regions is not of the Gross-Pitaeviskii type except near the insulator to superfluid boundaries. The excitation spectra in the Mott and superfluid regions are obtained, and it is shown that the superfluid shells posses low energy sound modes with spatially dependent sound velocity described by a local index of refraction directly related to the local superfluid density. Lastly, the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition and vortex-antivortex pairs are discussed in thin (wide) superfluid shells (rings) limited by three (two) dimensional Mott regions.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures

Causal Structure and Birefringence in Nonlinear Electrodynamics

We investigate the causal structure of general nonlinear electrodynamics and determine which Lagrangians generate an effective metric conformal to Minkowski. We also proof that there is only one analytic nonlinear electrodynamics presenting no birefringence.Comment: 11 pages, no figure

Prediction of genetic potential of common bean segregant populations for slow seed-coat darkening.

The objective of this study was to predict the genetic potential of common bean segregant populations for slow seed-coat darkening

Electromagnetic structure and weak decay of pseudoscalar mesons in a light-front QCD-inspired model

We study the scaling of the $^3S_1-^1S_0$ meson mass splitting and the pseudoscalar weak decay constants with the mass of the meson, as seen in the available experimental data. We use an effective light-front QCD-inspired dynamical model regulated at short-distances to describe the valence component of the pseudoscalar mesons. The experimentally known values of the mass splittings, decay constants (from global lattice-QCD averages) and the pion charge form factor up to 4 [GeV/c]$^2$ are reasonably described by the modelComment: 27 Pages, 7 eps figures,use revtex