Some Comments on the Spin of the Chern - Simons Vortices

We compute the spin of both the topological and nontopological solitons of the Chern - Simons - Higgs model by using our approach based on constrained analysis. We also propose an extension of our method to the non - relativistic Chern - Simons models. The spin formula for both the relativistic and nonrelativistic theories turn out to be structurally identical. This form invariance manifests the topological origin of the Chern - Simons term responsible for inducing fractional spin. Also, some comparisons with the existing results are done.Comment: 12 pages, Late

Dynamics of ion cloud in a linear Paul trap

A linear ion trap setup has been developed for studying the dynamics of trapped ion cloud and thereby realizing possible systematics of a high precision measurement on a single ion within it. The dynamics of molecular nitrogen ion cloud has been investigated to extract the characteristics of the trap setup. The stability of trap operation has been studied with observation of narrow nonlinear resonances pointing out the region of instabilities within the broad stability region. The secular frequency has been measured and the motional spectra of trapped ion oscillation have been obtained by using electric dipole excitation. It is applied to study the space charge effect and the axial coupling in the radial plane.Comment: Colloquium paper, 9 pages, 6 figure

Spin of Chern-Simons vortices

We discuss a novel method of obtaining the fractional spin of abelian and nonabelian Chern-Simons vortices. This spin is interpreted as the difference between the angular momentum obtained by modifying Schwinger's energy momentum tensor by the Gauss constraint, and the canonical (Noether) angular momentum. It is found to be a boundary term depending only on the gauge field and, hence, is independent of the matter sector to which the Chern-Simons term couples. Addition of the Maxwell term does not alter the fractional spin.Comment: 11 pages, Latex file, no figure

Ultrapure glass optical waveguide development in microgravity by the sol-gel process

The alkali-borosilicate system was selected as the glass system for the preparation of ultrapure low loss glasses suitable for optical communication. The effect of different oxide contents on the absorption loss was critically reviewed. One composition was chosen to develop the gel preparation procedure in the alkali-borosilicate system. In addition, several procedures for the preparation of gels based on two different approaches were developed. The influence of different preparation parameters were investigated qualitatively. Several conclusions are drawn from the results

Do wavelets really detect non-Gaussianity in the 4-year COBE data?

We investigate the detection of non-Gaussianity in the 4-year COBE data reported by Pando, Valls-Gabaud & Fang (1998), using a technique based on the discrete wavelet transform. Their analysis was performed on the two DMR faces centred on the North and South Galactic poles respectively, using the Daubechies 4 wavelet basis. We show that these results depend critically on the orientation of the data, and so should be treated with caution. For two distinct orientations of the data, we calculate unbiased estimates of the skewness, kurtosis and scale-scale correlation of the corresponding wavelet coefficients in all of the available scale domains of the transform. We obtain several detections of non-Gaussianity in the DMR-DSMB map at greater than the 99 per cent confidence level, but most of these occur on pixel-pixel scales and are therefore not cosmological in origin. Indeed, after removing all multipoles beyond $\ell = 40$ from the COBE maps, only one robust detection remains. Moreover, using Monte-Carlo simulations, we find that the probability of obtaining such a detection by chance is 0.59. We repeat the analysis for the 53+90 GHz coadded COBE map. In this case, after removing $\ell > 40$ multipoles, two non-Gaussian detections at the 99 per cent level remain. Nevertheless, again using Monte-Carlo simulations, we find that the probability of obtaining two such detections by chance is 0.28. Thus, we conclude the wavelet technique does {\em not} yield strong evidence for non-Gaussianity of cosmological origin in the 4-year COBE data.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. Revised version including discussion of orientation sensitivity of the wavelet decomposition. MNRAS submitte