Anomalies of weakened decoherence criteria for quantum histories

The theory of decoherent histories is checked for the requirement of statistical independence of subsystems. Strikingly, this is satisfied only when the decoherence functional is diagonal in both its real a n d imaginary parts. In particular, the condition of consistency (or weak decoherence) required for the assignment of probabilities appears to be ruled out. The same conclusion is obtained independently, by claiming a plausible dynamical robustness of decoherent histories.Comment: 3pp, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Preparation of high purity copper fluoride by fluorinating copper hydroxyfluoride

Copper fluoride containing no more than 50 ppm of any contaminating element was prepared by the fluorination of copper hydroxyfluoride. The impurity content was obtained by spark source mass spectrometry. High purity copper fluoride is needed as a cathode material for high energy density batteries

Monte Carlo Simulation of Smectic Liquid Crystals and the Electroclinic Effect: the Role of the Molecular Shape

Using Monte Carlo simulation methods, we explore the role of molecular shape in the phase behavior of liquid crystals and the electroclinic effect. We study a "bent-rod" mesogen shaped like the letter Z, composed of seven soft spheres bonded rigidly together with no intra-molecular degrees of freedom. For strongly angled molecules, we find that steric repulsion alone provides the driving force for a smectic-C phase, even without intermolecular dipole-dipole interactions. For weakly angled (nearly rod-like) molecules, we find a stable smectic-A (SmA) phase and a strong electroclinic effect with a saturation tilt angle of about 19 degrees. In the SmA phase we find evidence of vortex-like point defects. We also observe a field-induced nematic-smectic phase transition.Comment: 10 pages, including 10 postscript figures, uses REVTeX 3.0 and epsf.st

3-Body Dynamics in a (1+1) Dimensional Relativistic Self-Gravitating System

The results of our study of the motion of a three particle, self-gravitating system in general relativistic lineal gravity is presented for an arbitrary ratio of the particle masses. We derive a canonical expression for the Hamiltonian of the system and discuss the numerical solution of the resulting equations of motion. This solution is compared to the corresponding non-relativistic and post-Newtonian approximation solutions so that the dynamics of the fully relativistic system can be interpretted as a correction to the one-dimensional Newtonian self-gravitating system. We find that the structure of the phase space of each of these systems yields a large variety of interesting dynamics that can be divided into three distinct regions: annulus, pretzel, and chaotic; the first two being regions of quasi-periodicity while the latter is a region of chaos. By changing the relative masses of the three particles we find that the relative sizes of these three phase space regions changes and that this deformation can be interpreted physically in terms of the gravitational interactions of the particles. Furthermore, we find that many of the interesting characteristics found in the case where all of the particles share the same mass also appears in our more general study. We find that there are additional regions of chaos in the unequal mass system which are not present in the equal mass case. We compare these results to those found in similar systems.Comment: latex, 26 pages, 17 figures, high quality figures available upon request; typos and grammar correcte

Theoretical Determination of the Boundary of the Geomagnetic Field in a Steady Solar Wind

Theoretical determination of the boundary of the geomagnetic field in a steady solar win

Disordered asymmetric simple exclusion process: mean-field treatment

We provide two complementary approaches to the treatment of disorder in a fundamental nonequilibrium model, the asymmetric simple exclusion process. Firstly, a mean-field steady state mapping is generalized to the disordered case, where it provides a mapping of probability distributions and demonstrates how disorder results in a new flat regime in the steady state current--density plot for periodic boundary conditions. This effect was earlier observed by Tripathy and Barma but we provide treatment for more general distributions of disorder, including both numerical results and analytic expressions for the width $2\Delta_C$ of the flat section. We then apply an argument based on moving shock fronts to show how this leads to an increase in the high current region of the phase diagram for open boundary conditions. Secondly, we show how equivalent results can be obtained easily by taking the continuum limit of the problem and then using a disordered version of the well-known Cole--Hopf mapping to linearize the equation. Within this approach we show that adding disorder induces a localization transformation (verified by numerical scaling), and $\Delta_C$ maps to an inverse localization length, helping to give a new physical interpretation to the problem.Comment: 13 pages, 16 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Dynamical N-body Equlibrium in Circular Dilaton Gravity

We obtain a new exact equilibrium solution to the N-body problem in a one-dimensional relativistic self-gravitating system. It corresponds to an expanding/contracting spacetime of a circle with N bodies at equal proper separations from one another around the circle. Our methods are straightforwardly generalizable to other dilatonic theories of gravity, and provide a new class of solutions to further the study of (relativistic) one-dimensional self-gravitating systems.Comment: 4 pages, latex, reference added, minor changes in wordin

On the rotation of ONC stars in the Tsallis formalism context

The theoretical distribution function of the projected rotational velocity is derived in the context of the Tsallis formalism. The distribution is used to estimate the average for a stellar sample from the Orion Nebula Cloud (ONC), producing an excellent result when compared with observational data. In addition, the value of the parameter q obtained from the distribution of observed rotations reinforces the idea that there is a relation between this parameter and the age of the cluster.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure