3,117 research outputs found
From old wars to new wars and global terrorism
Even before 9/11 there were claims that the nature of war had changed
fundamentally. The 9/11 attacks created an urgent need to understand
contemporary wars and their relationship to older conventional and terrorist
wars, both of which exhibit remarkable regularities. The frequency-intensity
distribution of fatalities in "old wars", 1816-1980, is a power-law with
exponent 1.80. Global terrorist attacks, 1968-present, also follow a power-law
with exponent 1.71 for G7 countries and 2.5 for non-G7 countries. Here we
analyze two ongoing, high-profile wars on opposite sides of the globe -
Colombia and Iraq. Our analysis uses our own unique dataset for killings and
injuries in Colombia, plus publicly available data for civilians killed in
Iraq. We show strong evidence for power-law behavior within each war. Despite
substantial differences in contexts and data coverage, the power-law
coefficients for both wars are tending toward 2.5, which is a value
characteristic of non-G7 terrorism as opposed to old wars. We propose a
plausible yet analytically-solvable model of modern insurgent warfare, which
can explain these observations.Comment: For more information, please contact [email protected] or
[email protected]
Bound-state dark matter with Majorana neutrinos
We propose a simple scenario in which dark matter (DM) emerges as a stable
neutral hadronic thermal relics, its stability following from an exact
symmetry. Neutrinos pick up radiatively induced
Majorana masses from the exchange of colored DM constituents. There is a common
origin for both dark matter and neutrino mass, with a lower bound for
neutrinoless double beta decay. Direct DM searches at nuclear recoil
experiments will test the proposal, which may also lead to other
phenomenological signals at future hadron collider and lepton flavour violation
experiments.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1803.0852
The Spin-Orbit Evolution of GJ 667C System: The Effect of Composition and Other Planet's Perturbations
Potentially habitable planets within the habitable zone of M-dwarfs are
affected by tidal interaction. We studied the tidal evolution in GJ 667C using
a numerical code we call TIDEV. We reviewed the problem of the dynamical
evolution focusing on the effects that a rheological treatment, different
compositions and the inclusion of orbital perturbations, have on the spin-down
time and the probability to be trapped in a low spin-orbit resonance.
Composition have a strong effect on the spin-down time, changing, in some
cases, by almost a factor of 2 with respect to the value estimated for a
reference Earth-like model. We calculated the time to reach a low resonance
value (3:2) for the configuration of 6 planets. Capture probabilities are
affected when assuming different compositions and eccentricities variations. We
chose planets b and c to evaluate the probabilities of capture in resonances
below 5:2 for two compositions: Earth-like and Waterworld planets. We found
that perturbations, although having a secular effect on eccentricities, have a
low impact on capture probabilities and noth- ing on spin-down times. The
implications of the eccentricity variations and actual habitability of the GJ
667C system are discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS - V
Negative-Energy Perturbations in Circularly Cylindrical Equilibria within the Framework of Maxwell-Drift Kinetic Theory
The conditions for the existence of negative-energy perturbations (which
could be nonlinearly unstable and cause anomalous transport) are investigated
in the framework of linearized collisionless Maxwell-drift kinetic theory for
the case of equilibria of magnetically confined, circularly cylindrical plasmas
and vanishing initial field perturbations. For wave vectors with a
non-vanishing component parallel to the magnetic field, the plane equilibrium
conditions (derived by Throumoulopoulos and Pfirsch [Phys Rev. E {\bf 49}, 3290
(1994)]) are shown to remain valid, while the condition for perpendicular
perturbations (which are found to be the most important modes) is modified.
Consequently, besides the tokamak equilibrium regime in which the existence of
negative-energy perturbations is related to the threshold value of 2/3 of the
quantity , a new
regime appears, not present in plane equilibria, in which negative-energy
perturbations exist for {\em any} value of . For various analytic
cold-ion tokamak equilibria a substantial fraction of thermal electrons are
associated with negative-energy perturbations (active particles). In
particular, for linearly stable equilibria of a paramagnetic plasma with flat
electron temperature profile (), the entire velocity space is
occupied by active electrons. The part of the velocity space occupied by active
particles increases from the center to the plasma edge and is larger in a
paramagnetic plasma than in a diamagnetic plasma with the same pressure
profile. It is also shown that, unlike in plane equilibria, negative-energy
perturbations exist in force-free reversed-field pinch equilibria with a
substantial fraction of active particles.Comment: 31 pages, late
Displacement Data Assimilation
We show that modifying a Bayesian data assimilation scheme by incorporating
kinematically-consistent displacement corrections produces a scheme that is
demonstrably better at estimating partially observed state vectors in a setting
where feature information important. While the displacement transformation is
not tied to any particular assimilation scheme, here we implement it within an
ensemble Kalman Filter and demonstrate its effectiveness in tracking
stochastically perturbed vortices.Comment: 26 Pages, 9 figures, 5 table
The Dynamics of the Colombian Civil Conflict: A New Data Set
We present a detailed, high-frequency data set on the civil conflict in Colombia during the period 1988-2002. We briefly introduce the Colombian case and the methodological issues that hinder data collection in civil wars, before presenting the pattern over time of conflict actions and intensity for all sides involved in the confrontation. We also describe the pattern of victimisation by group and the victimisation of civilians out of clashes
Negative-energy perturbations in cylindrical equilibria with a radial electric field
The impact of an equilibrium radial electric field on negative-energy
perturbations (NEPs) (which are potentially dangerous because they can lead to
either linear or nonlinear explosive instabilities) in cylindrical equilibria
of magnetically confined plasmas is investigated within the framework of
Maxwell-drift kinetic theory. It turns out that for wave vectors with a
non-vanishing component parallel to the magnetic field the conditions for the
existence of NEPs in equilibria with E=0 [G. N. Throumoulopoulos and D.
Pfirsch, Phys. Rev. E 53, 2767 (1996)] remain valid, while the condition for
the existence of perpendicular NEPs, which are found to be the most important
perturbations, is modified. For ( is the
electrostatic potential) and ( is
the total plasma pressure), a case which is of operational interest in magnetic
confinement systems, the existence of perpendicular NEPs depends on ,
where is the charge of the particle species . In this case the
electric field can reduce the NEPs activity in the edge region of tokamaklike
and stellaratorlike equilibria with identical parabolic pressure profiles, the
reduction of electron NEPs being more pronounced than that of ion NEPs.Comment: 30 pages, late
Stochastic Stokes' drift of a flexible dumbbell
We consider the stochastic Stokes drift of a flexible dumbbell. The dumbbell
consists of two isotropic Brownian particles connected by a linear spring with
zero natural length, and is advected by a sinusoidal wave. We find an
asymptotic approximation for the Stokes drift in the limit of a weak wave, and
find good agreement with the results of a Monte Carlo simulation. We show that
it is possible to use this effect to sort particles by their flexibility even
when all the particles have the same diffusivity.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur
Finding the Higgs Boson through Supersymmetry
The study of displaced vertices containing two b--jets may provide a double
discovery at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): we show how it may not only
reveal evidence for supersymmetry, but also provide a way to uncover the Higgs
boson necessary in the formulation of the electroweak theory in a large region
of the parameter space. We quantify this explicitly using the simplest minimal
supergravity model with bilinear breaking of R-parity, which accounts for the
observed pattern of neutrino masses and mixings seen in neutrino oscillation
experiments.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures. Final version to appear at PRD. Discussion and
results were enlarge
Probing Neutrino Oscillations in Supersymmetric Models at the Large Hadron Collider
The lightest supersymmetric particle may decay with branching ratios that
correlate with neutrino oscillation parameters. In this case the CERN Large
Hadron Collider (LHC) has the potential to probe the atmospheric neutrino
mixing angle with sensitivity competitive to its low-energy determination by
underground experiments. Under realistic detection assumptions, we identify the
necessary conditions for the experiments at CERN's LHC to probe the simplest
scenario for neutrino masses induced by minimal supergravity with bilinear R
parity violation.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. To appear in Physical Review
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