1,922 research outputs found
Arms Control and Disarmament: Legitimacy, War, and Peace
The 2013 Noble Peace Prize was awarded to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the same year that events in the Syrian Civil War made clear the difficulties of implementing global disarmament and the imperative for doing so. In relation to this situation, my thesis asks if arms control and disarmament reduce conflict and tensions between states. Attempts at chemical weapons disarmament have been relatively successful but global disarmament faces major obstacles that will be difficult to overcome. To be sure, arms control and disarmament can be beneficial to peace: they are not a cause of war, can lessen the devastation of war, and even the potential for war to occur. If certain weapons are removed from the world, or even tightly controlled, then lives will be saved. But the benefits are limited, and even successful arms control is only minimally effective on its own. Removing chemical weapons eliminates one potential point of contention. However, nuclear arms control coupled with deterrence seems to be partially successful in preventing conflict. This combination minimizes warfare between nuclear powers, decreases tensions, and lessens lower-level conflict. In the end, arms control can only prevent war in conjunction alongside political and other military factors and, still, is far from a guarantor of peace
The need for a second black hole at the Galactic center
Deep infra-red observations and long-term monitoring programs have provided
dynamical evidence for a supermassive black hole of mass 3.e6 solar masses
associated with the radio source Sagitarrius A* at the center of our Galaxy.
The brightest stars orbiting within 0.1 parsecs of the black hole appear to be
young, massive main sequence stars, n spite of an environment near the black
hole that is hostile to star formation. We discuss mechanisms by which stars
born outside the central parsec can sink towards the black hole and conclude
that the drag coming from plausible stellar populations does not operate on the
short timescales required by the stellar ages. We propose that these stars were
dragged in by a second black hole of mass of 1.e3-1.e4 solar masses, which
would be classified as an intermediate-mass black hole. We discuss the
implications for the stellar populations and the kinematics in the Galactic
center. Finally we note that continued astrometric monitoring of the central
radio source offers the prospect for a direct detection of such objects.Comment: 5 pages, 2 postscript figures, submitted to ApJ letters The
introduction section has been updated since submission to Ap
Synchronization of dynamical hypernetworks: dimensionality reduction through simultaneous block-diagonalization of matrices
We present a general framework to study stability of the synchronous solution
for a hypernetwork of coupled dynamical systems. We are able to reduce the
dimensionality of the problem by using simultaneous block-diagonalization of
matrices. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for stability of the
synchronous solution in terms of a set of lower-dimensional problems and test
the predictions of our low-dimensional analysis through numerical simulations.
Under certain conditions, this technique may yield a substantial reduction of
the dimensionality of the problem. For example, for a class of dynamical
hypernetworks analyzed in the paper, we discover that arbitrarily large
networks can be reduced to a collection of subsystems of dimensionality no more
than 2. We apply our reduction techique to a number of different examples,
including a class of undirected unweighted hypermotifs of three nodes.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
Patterns of Interactions in Complex Social Networks Based on Coloured Motifs Analysis
Coloured network motifs are small subgraphs that enable to discover and interpret the patterns of interaction within the complex networks. The analysis of three-nodes motifs where the colour of the node reflects its high – white node or low – black node centrality in the social network is presented in the paper. The importance of the vertices is assessed by utilizing two measures: degree prestige and degree centrality. The distribution of motifs in these two cases is compared to mine the interconnection patterns between nodes. The analysis is performed on the social network derived from email communication
High-order Discretization of a Gyrokinetic Vlasov Model in Edge Plasma Geometry
We present a high-order spatial discretization of a continuum gyrokinetic
Vlasov model in axisymmetric tokamak edge plasma geometries. Such models
describe the phase space advection of plasma species distribution functions in
the absence of collisions. The gyrokinetic model is posed in a four-dimensional
phase space, upon which a grid is imposed when discretized. To mitigate the
computational cost associated with high-dimensional grids, we employ a
high-order discretization to reduce the grid size needed to achieve a given
level of accuracy relative to lower-order methods. Strong anisotropy induced by
the magnetic field motivates the use of mapped coordinate grids aligned with
magnetic flux surfaces. The natural partitioning of the edge geometry by the
separatrix between the closed and open field line regions leads to the
consideration of multiple mapped blocks, in what is known as a mapped
multiblock (MMB) approach. We describe the specialization of a more general
formalism that we have developed for the construction of high-order,
finite-volume discretizations on MMB grids, yielding the accurate evaluation of
the gyrokinetic Vlasov operator, the metric factors resulting from the MMB
coordinate mappings, and the interaction of blocks at adjacent boundaries. Our
conservative formulation of the gyrokinetic Vlasov model incorporates the fact
that the phase space velocity has zero divergence, which must be preserved
discretely to avoid truncation error accumulation. We describe an approach for
the discrete evaluation of the gyrokinetic phase space velocity that preserves
the divergence-free property to machine precision
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