Dignity in America: The Role of an Idea During the American Enlightenment

Dignity ideas are experiencing a renaissance in modern American politics. Political leaders on the left and the right have invoked “human dignity” in efforts to justify their candidacies, their policies, and the political, economic, and sociocultural stories they wish to tell about the United States. There is, however, a lack of treatment of these profoundly influential dignity ideas in political science literature. This thesis aims to correct this by demonstrating the centrality of dignity during the American Founding era and the “American Enlightenment” period more broadly. Along with liberalism and civic republicanism, this thesis documents the rise of “dignitarianism” as a new, distinct American political tradition. The interplay of dignitarian thinking with the liberal and republican traditions, along with strong influences from Enlightenment rationalism and Judeo-Christian theologies, yielded correlated strands of dignity thought: namely, “individual dignity” and “national dignity.” Using rich qualitative analysis of primary documents, supplemented by secondary literature, this thesis will argue that these conceptions of dignity played a powerful role in influencing Founding Americans’ views on equality and individual rights – specifically, freedom of conscience, free speech, privacy values, and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment – and the relationship of the citizenry to the nation. National dignity in particular played the strongest role in this latter development, informing American federalism, foreign policy, expansionism, and the treatment of citizens and non-citizens at home. At its best, national dignity advanced individual dignity claims in shows of solidarity, and served as a constructive tool for the building of a new nation. All too often, however, national dignitarianism succumbed to the allures of imperialism and rankism, dehumanizing citizens and non-citizens alike in the name of “national dignity.” The lessons of dignitarianism in the Founding era offers insights into contemporary dignity demands fueled by raging income inequalities, senses of political helplessness, and toxic, narrow nationalisms

Unusual localisation effects in quantum percolation

We present a detailed study of the quantum site percolation problem on simple cubic lattices, thereby focussing on the statistics of the local density of states and the spatial structure of the single particle wavefunctions. Using the Kernel Polynomial Method we refine previous studies of the metal-insulator transition and demonstrate the non-monotonic energy dependence of the quantum percolation threshold. Remarkably, the data indicates a ``fragmentation'' of the spectrum into extended and localised states. In addition, the observation of a chequerboard-like structure of the wavefunctions at the band centre can be interpreted as anomalous localisation.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figure

The electronic structure of amorphous silica: A numerical study

We present a computational study of the electronic properties of amorphous SiO2. The ionic configurations used are the ones generated by an earlier molecular dynamics simulations in which the system was cooled with different cooling rates from the liquid state to a glass, thus giving access to glass-like configurations with different degrees of disorder [Phys. Rev. B 54, 15808 (1996)]. The electronic structure is described by a tight-binding Hamiltonian. We study the influence of the degree of disorder on the density of states, the localization properties, the optical absorption, the nature of defects within the mobility gap, and on the fluctuations of the Madelung potential, where the disorder manifests itself most prominently. The experimentally observed mismatch between a photoconductivity threshold of 9 eV and the onset of the optical absorption around 7 eV is interpreted by the picture of eigenstates localized by potential energy fluctuations in a mobility gap of approximately 9 eV and a density of states that exhibits valence and conduction band tails which are, even in the absence of defects, deeply located within the former band gap.Comment: 21 pages of Latex, 5 eps figure

Functional Renormalization of Noncommutative Scalar Field Theory

In this paper we apply the Functional Renormalization Group Equation (FRGE) to the non-commutative scalar field theory proposed by Grosse and Wulkenhaar. We derive the flow equation in the matrix representation and discuss the theory space for the self-dual model. The features introduced by the external dimensionful scale provided by the non-commutativity parameter, originally pointed out in \cite{Gurau:2009ni}, are discussed in the FRGE context. Using a technical assumption, but without resorting to any truncation, it is then shown that the theory is asymptotically safe for suitably small values of the $\phi^4$ coupling, recovering the result of \cite{disertori:2007}. Finally, we show how the FRGE can be easily used to compute the one loop beta-functions of the duality covariant model.Comment: 38 pages, no figures, LaTe

Phase field modeling of crack propagation in double cantilever beam under Mode I

A smeared crack approach using a phase-field approach to fracture with unilateral contact condition was used to study the stress distribution and crack propagation in a double cantilever beam (DCB) specimen. The parameters in the numerical model were informed from atomistic simulations and validated with experimental data for poly(methyl methacrylate) that included data for damage initiation under different levels of volumetric and deviatoric stress components and fracture toughness measurements obtained under Mode I conditions. The phase field model includes two quantities, a length scale that controls the width of the crack and the critical fracture energy density. The study considered a sensitivity analysis of the influence of these two parameters to obtain optimal values. Experiments and simulations of DCB are shown to study the toughness of polymer and polymer composite specimens that include residual stresses developed in the specimen during cure

Preferred foliation effects in Quantum General Relativity

We investigate the infrared (IR) effects of Lorentz violating terms in the gravitational sector using functional renormalization group methods similar to Reuter and collaborators. The model we consider consists of pure quantum gravity coupled to a preferred foliation, described effectively via a scalar field with non-standard dynamics. We find that vanishing Lorentz violation is a UV attractive fixed-point of this model in the local potential approximation. Since larger truncations may lead to differing results, we study as a first example effects of additional matter fields on the RG running of the Lorentz violating term and provide a general argument why they are small.Comment: 12 pages, no figures, compatible with published versio

Electron Impact Ionization Close to the Threshold: Classical Calculations

In this paper we present Classical Trajectory Monte Carlo (CTMC) calculations for single and multiple electron ionization of Argon atoms and ions in the threshold region. We are able to recover the Wannier exponents a for the power-law behavior of the cross section s versus excess energy: the exact value of the exponent as well as the existence of its saturation for multiple ionization appear to be related to how the total binding energy is shared between target electrons.Comment: 9 pages. To be published in Journal of Physics

Spectra of magnetic perturbations triggered by pellets in JET plasmas

Aiming at investigating edge localised mode (ELM) pacing for future application on ITER, experiments have been conducted on JET injecting pellets in different plasma configurations, including high confinement regimes with type-I and type-III ELMs, low confinement regimes and Ohmically heated plasmas. The magnetic perturbations spectra and the toroidal mode number, n, of triggered events are compared with those of spontaneous ELMs using a wavelet analysis to provide good time resolution of short-lived coherent modes. It is found that—in all these configurations—triggered events have a coherent mode structure, indicating that pellets can trigger an MHD event basically in every background plasma. Two components have been found in the magnetic perturbations induced by pellets, with distinct frequencies and toroidal mode numbers. In high confinement regimes triggered events have similarities with spontaneous ELMs: both are seen to start from low toroidal mode numbers, then the maximum measured n increases up to about 10 within 0.3 ms before the ELM burst

Finite size effects and localization properties of disordered quantum wires with chiral symmetry

Finite size effects in the localization properties of disordered quantum wires are analyzed through conductance calculations. Disorder is induced by introducing vacancies at random positions in the wire and thus preserving the chiral symmetry. For quasi one-dimensional geometries and low concentration of vacancies, an exponential decay of the mean conductance with the wire length is obtained even at the center of the energy band. For wide wires, finite size effects cause the conductance to decay following a non-pure exponential law. We propose an analytical formula for the mean conductance that reproduces accurately the numerical data for both geometries. However, when the concentration of vacancies increases above a critical value, a transition towards the suppression of the conductance occurs. This is a signature of the presence of ultra-localized states trapped in finite regions of the sample.Comment: 5 figures, revtex