911 research outputs found
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 UKâs interests with the imperial âcommon goodâ continues to take centre stage in courtroom battles over the islandersâ rights, being cited before domestic and international tribunals in order to maintain the Chagossiansâ 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 Chagossiansâ interests
Translocation Dynamics with Attractive Nanopore-Polymer Interactions
Using Langevin dynamics simulations, we investigate the influence of
polymer-pore interactions on the dynamics of biopolymer translocation through
nanopores. We find that an attractive interaction can significantly change the
translocation dynamics. This can be understood by examining the three
components of the total translocation time
corresponding to the initial filling of the pore, transfer of polymer from the
\textit{cis} side to the \textit{trans} side, and emptying of the pore,
respectively. We find that the dynamics for the last process of emptying of the
pore changes from non-activated to activated in nature as the strength of the
attractive interaction increases, and becomes the dominant
contribution to the total translocation time for strong attraction. This leads
to a new dependence of as a function of driving force and chain length.
Our results are in good agreement with recent experimental findings, and
provide a possible explanation for the different scaling behavior observed in
solid state nanopores {\it vs.} that for the natural -hemolysin
channel.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figure
Dynamics and delocalisation transition for an interface driven by a uniform shear flow
We study the effect of a uniform shear flow on an interface separating the
two broken-symmetry ordered phases of a two-dimensional system with
nonconserved scalar order parameter. The interface, initially flat and
perpendicular to the flow, is distorted by the shear flow. We show that there
is a critical shear rate, \gamma_c, proportional to 1/L^2, (where L is the
system width perpendicular to the flow) below which the interface can sustain
the shear. In this regime the countermotion of the interface under its
curvature balances the shear flow, and the stretched interface stabilizes into
a time-independent shape whose form we determine analytically. For \gamma >
\gamma_c, the interface acquires a non-zero velocity, whose profile is shown to
reach a time-independent limit which we determine exactly. The analytical
results are checked by numerical integration of the equations of motion.Comment: 5 page
Influence of polymer-pore interactions on translocation
We investigate the influence of polymer-pore interactions on the
translocation dynamics using Langevin dynamics simulations. An attractive
interaction can greatly improve translocation probability. At the same time, it
also increases translocation time slowly for weak attraction while exponential
dependence is observed for strong attraction. For fixed driving force and chain
length the histogram of translocation time has a transition from Gaussian
distribution to long-tailed distribution with increasing attraction. Under a
weak driving force and a strong attractive force, both the translocation time
and the residence time in the pore show a non-monotonic behavior as a function
of the chain length. Our simulations results are in good agreement with recent
experimental data.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, Submitted to Phys. Rev. Let
Polymer translocation out of confined environments
We consider the dynamics of polymer translocation out of confined
environments. Analytic scaling arguments lead to the prediction that the
translocation time scales like for translocation out of a planar
confinement between two walls with separation into a 3D environment, and
for translocation out of two strips with separation
into a 2D environment. Here, is the chain length, and
are the Flory exponents in 3D and 2D, and is the scaling exponent of
translocation velocity with , whose value for the present choice of
parameters is based on Langevin dynamics simulations. These
scaling exponents improve on earlier predictions.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. To appear in Phys. Rev.
Modular Groups, Visibility Diagram and Quantum Hall Effect
We consider the action of the modular group on the set of
positive rational fractions. From this, we derive a model for a classification
of fractional (as well as integer) Hall states which can be visualized on two
``visibility" diagrams, the first one being associated with even denominator
fractions whereas the second one is linked to odd denominator fractions. We use
this model to predict, among some interesting physical quantities, the relative
ratios of the width of the different transversal resistivity plateaus. A
numerical simulation of the tranversal resistivity plot based on this last
prediction fits well with the present experimental data.Comment: 17 pages, plain TeX, 4 eps figures included (macro epsf.tex), 1
figure available from reques
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