The Chagos Islands cases: the empire strikes back

Good governance requires the accommodation of multiple interests in the cause of decision making. However, undue regard for particular sectional interests can take their toll upon public faith in government administration. Historically, broad conceptions of the good of the commonwealth were employed to outweigh the interests of groups that resisted colonisation. In the decision making of the British Empire, the standard approach for justifying the marginalisation of the interests of colonised groups was that they were uncivilised and that particular hardships were the price to be paid for bringing to them the imperial dividend of industrial society. It is widely assumed that with the dismantling of the British Empire, such impulses and their accompanying jurisprudence became a thing of the past. Even as decolonisation proceeded apace after the Second World War, however, the United Kingdom maintained control of strategically important islands with a view towards sustaining its global role. In an infamous example from this twilight period of empire, in the 1960s imperial interests were used to justify the expulsion of the Chagos islanders from the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Into the twenty-first century, this forced elision of the UK’s interests with the imperial “common good” continues to take centre stage in courtroom battles over the islanders’ rights, being cited before domestic and international tribunals in order to maintain the Chagossians’ exclusion from their homeland. This article considers the new jurisprudence of imperialism which has emerged in a string of decisions which have continued to marginalise the Chagossians’ interests

Position-dependent mass models and their nonlinear characterization

We consider the specific models of Zhu-Kroemer and BenDaniel-Duke in a sech$^{2}$-mass background and point out interesting correspondences with the stationary 1-soliton and 2-soliton solutions of the KdV equation in a supersymmetric framework.Comment: 8 Pages, Latex version, Two new references are added, To appear in J.Phys.A (Fast Track Communication

Transients in sheared granular matter

As dense granular materials are sheared, a shear band and an anisotropic force network form. The approach to steady state behavior depends on the history of the packing and the existing force and contact network. We present experiments on shearing of dense granular matter in a 2D Couette geometry in which we probe the history and evolution of shear bands by measuring particle trajectories and stresses during transients. We find that when shearing is stopped and restarted in the same direction, steady state behavior is immediately reached, in agreement with the typical assumption that the system is quasistatic. Although some relaxation of the force network is observed when shearing is stopped, quasistatic behavior is maintained because the contact network remains essentially unchanged. When the direction of shear is reversed, a transient occurs in which stresses initially decrease, changes in the force network reach further into the bulk, and particles far from the wheel become more mobile. This occurs because the force network is fragile to changes transverse to the force network established under previous shear; particles must rearrange before becoming jammed again, thereby providing resistance to shear in the reversed direction. The strong force network is reestablished after displacing the shearing surface $\approx 3d$, where $d$ is the mean grain diameter. Steady state velocity profiles are reached after a shear of $\leq 30d$. Particles immediately outside of the shear band move on average less than 1 diameter before becoming jammed again. We also examine particle rotation during this transient and find that mean particle spin decreases during the transient, which is related to the fact that grains are not interlocked as strongly.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figures, accepted to Eur. Phys. J. E, revised version based on referee suggestion

S-particles at their naturalness limits

We draw attention on a particular configuration of supersymmetric particle masses, motivated by naturalness and flavour considerations. All its relevant phenomenological properties for the LHC are described in terms of a few physical parameters, irrespective of the underlying theoretical model. This allows a simple characterization of its main features, useful to define a strategy for its discovery.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, added reference

Tests of Basic Quantum Mechanics in Oscillation Experiments

According to standard quantum theory, the time evolution operator of a quantum system is independent of the state of the system. One can, however, consider systems in which this is not the case: the evolution operator may depend on the density operator itself. The presence of such modifications of quantum theory can be tested in long baseline oscillation experiments.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX; no macros neede

Meanfield treatment of Bragg scattering from a Bose-Einstein condensate

A unified semiclassical treatment of Bragg scattering from Bose-Einstein condensates is presented. The formalism is based on the Gross-Pitaevskii equation driven by classical light fields far detuned from atomic resonance. An approximate analytic solution is obtained and provides quantitative understanding of the atomic momentum state oscillations, as well as a simple expression for the momentum linewidth of the scattering process. The validity regime of the analytic solution is derived, and tested by three dimensional cylindrically symmetric numerical simulations.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures. Minor changes made to documen

Spacetime Defects: von K\'arm\'an vortex street like configurations

A special arrangement of spinning strings with dislocations similar to a von K\'arm\'an vortex street is studied. We numerically solve the geodesic equations for the special case of a test particle moving along twoinfinite rows of pure dislocations and also discuss the case of pure spinning defects.Comment: 9 pages, 2figures, CQG in pres

Noether symmetries for two-dimensional charged particle motion

We find the Noether point symmetries for non-relativistic two-dimensional charged particle motion. These symmetries are composed of a quasi-invariance transformation, a time-dependent rotation and a time-dependent spatial translation. The associated electromagnetic field satisfy a system of first-order linear partial differential equations. This system is solved exactly, yielding three classes of electromagnetic fields compatible with Noether point symmetries. The corresponding Noether invariants are derived and interpreted

Numerical study of a non-equilibrium interface model

We have carried out extensive computer simulations of one-dimensional models related to the low noise (solid-on-solid) non-equilibrium interface of a two dimensional anchored Toom model with unbiased and biased noise. For the unbiased case the computed fluctuations of the interface in this limit provide new numerical evidence for the logarithmic correction to the subnormal L^(1/2) variance which was predicted by the dynamic renormalization group calculations on the modified Edwards-Wilkinson equation. In the biased case the simulations are in close quantitative agreement with the predictions of the Collective Variable Approximation (CVA), which gives the same L^(2/3) behavior of the variance as the KPZ equation.Comment: 15 pages revtex, 4 Postscript Figure

One-Loop Maximal Helicity Violating Amplitudes in N=4 Super Yang-Mills Theories

One-loop maximal helicity violating (MHV) amplitudes in N=4 super Yang-Mills (SYM) theories are analyzed, using the prescription of Cachazo, Svrcek, and Witten (CSW). The relations between leading N_c amplitudes A_{n;1} and sub-leading amplitudes A_{n;c} obtained by the CSW prescription are found to be identical to those obtained from conventional field theory calculations. Combining with existing results, this establishes the validity of the CSW prescription to one-loop in the calculation of MHV amplitudes in N=4 SYM theories of finite N_c.Comment: Minor changes and typos fixed. Published version in JHE