Birth, survival and death of languages by Monte Carlo simulation

Simulations of physicists for the competition between adult languages since 2003 are reviewed. How many languages are spoken by how many people? How many languages are contained in various language families? How do language similarities decay with geographical distance, and what effects do natural boundaries have? New simulations of bilinguality are given in an appendix.Comment: 24 pages review, draft for Comm.Comput.Phys., plus appendix on bilingualit

Optomechanics with molecules in a strongly pumped ring cavity

Cavity cooling of an atom works best on a cyclic optical transition in the strong coupling regime near resonance, where small cavity photon numbers suffice for trapping and cooling. Due to the absence of closed transitions a straightforward application to molecules fails: optical pumping can lead the particle into uncoupled states. An alternative operation in the far off-resonant regime generates only very slow cooling due to the reduced field-molecule coupling. We predict to overcome this by using a strongly driven ring-cavity operated in the sideband cooling regime. As in the optomechanical setups one takes advantage of a collectively enhanced field-molecule coupling strength using a large photon number. A linearized analytical treatment confirmed by full numerical quantum simulations predicts fast cooling despite the off-resonant small single molecule - single photon coupling. Even ground state cooling can be obtained by tuning the cavity field close to the Anti-stokes sideband for sufficiently high trapping frequency. Numerical simulations show quantum jumps of the molecules between the lowest two trapping levels, which can be be directly and continuously monitored via scattered light intensity detection

Stability of hyperbolic space under Ricci flow

We study the Ricci flow of initial metrics which are C^0-perturbations of the hyperbolic metric on H^n. If the perturbation is bounded in the L^2-sense, and small enough in the C^0-sense, then we show the following: In dimensions four and higher, the scaled Ricci harmonic map heat flow of such a metric converges smoothly, uniformly and exponentially fast in all C^k-norms and in the L^2-norm to the hyperbolic metric as time approaches infinity. We also prove a related result for the Ricci flow and for the two-dimensional conformal Ricci flow.Comment: 18 page

Socioeconophysics: Opinion Dynamics for number of transactions and price, a trader based model

Involving effects of media, opinion leader and other agents on the opinion of individuals of market society, a trader based model is developed and utilized to simulate price via supply and demand. Pronounced effects are considered with several weights and some personal differences between traders are taken into account. Resulting time series and probabilty distribution function involving a power law for price come out similar to the real ones.Comment: will be published in IJMPC 17 (2006

The next new thing: curiosity and the motivation to purchase novel products

Consumers motivated by curiosity may enter a ‘hot' state when confronted with a desirable novel product and be unable to judge their future actions in a ‘cold'' state. To test this, a multiple week auction experiment was conducted using an opportunity to rent an MP3 player. Subjects initially recorded non-binding bids to rent the player for both the first and second weeks. The only significant differences between these and actual bids were with week one renters bidding lower in week two. Results showed that people have difficulty forecasting their future value of a product, especially when it is one about which they are curious or eager to try. Even consumers with a higher opinion of the product after use had a lower valuation of it after they gained experience with it.