The body in the library: adventures in realism

This essay looks at two aspects of the virtual ‘material world’ of realist fiction: objects encountered by the protagonist and the latter’s body. Taking from Sartre two angles on the realist pact by which readers agree to lend their bodies, feelings, and experiences to the otherwise ‘languishing signs’ of the text, it goes on to examine two sets of first-person fictions published between 1902 and 1956 — first, four modernist texts in which banal objects defy and then gratify the protagonist, who ends up ready and almost able to write; and, second, three novels in which the body of the protagonist is indeterminate in its sex, gender, or sexuality. In each of these cases, how do we as readers make texts work for us as ‘an adventure of the body’

Assignments in the electronic spectrum of water

To explain the inelastic feature at 4.5 eV in the spectrum of water and to study its spectrum in some detail, we have carried out several calculations on the excited states of water using the equations‐of‐motion method. We conclude that the calculated vertical excitation energy of 6.9 eV for the ^3B_1 state corresponds to the strong feature at 7.2 eV observed in low‐energy electron scattering spectrum. The 4.5 eV inelastic process almost certainly does not correspond to a vertical excitation of water at the ground state geometry. The other excitation energies and oscillator strengths agree well with experiment

A spin-boson thermal rectifier

Rectification of heat transfer in nanodevices can be realized by combining the system inherent anharmonicity with structural asymmetry. we analyze this phenomenon within the simplest anharmonic system -a spin-boson nanojunction model. We consider two variants of the model that yield, for the first time, analytical solutions: a linear separable model in which the heat reservoirs contribute additively, and a non-separable model suitable for a stronger system-bath interaction. Both models show asymmetric (rectifying) heat conduction when the couplings to the heat reservoirs are different.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, RevTeX

Noncommutative differential calculus for Moyal subalgebras

We build a differential calculus for subalgebras of the Moyal algebra on R^4 starting from a redundant differential calculus on the Moyal algebra, which is suitable for reduction. In some cases we find a frame of 1-forms which allows to realize the complex of forms as a tensor product of the noncommutative subalgebras with the external algebra Lambda^*.Comment: 13 pages, no figures. One reference added, minor correction

Quantum heat transfer: A Born Oppenheimer method

We develop a Born-Oppenheimer type formalism for the description of quantum thermal transport along hybrid nanoscale objects. Our formalism is suitable for treating heat transfer in the off-resonant regime, where e.g., the relevant vibrational modes of the interlocated molecule are high relative to typical bath frequencies, and at low temperatures when tunneling effects dominate. A general expression for the thermal energy current is accomplished, in the form of a generalized Landauer formula. In the harmonic limit this expression reduces to the standard Landauer result for heat transfer, while in the presence of nonlinearities multiphonon tunneling effects are realized

On (k⊕l∣q)(k\oplus l |q)-dimensional supermanifolds

We define a $(k\oplus l|q)$-dimensional supermanifold as a manifold having q odd coordinates and k + l even coordinates with l of them taking only nilpotent values. We show that this notion can be used to formulate superconformal field theories with different number of supersymmetries in holomorphic and antiholomorphic sectors.Comment: 19 pages, Late

Geometric structures on loop and path spaces

Is is known that the loop space associated to a Riemannian manifold admits a quasi-symplectic structure. This article shows that this structure is not likely to recover the underlying Riemannian metric by proving a result that is a strong indication of the "almost" independence of the quasi-symplectic structure with respect to the metric. Finally conditions to have contact structures on these spaces are studied.Comment: Final version. To appear in Proceedings of Math. Sci. Indian Academy of Science

The Physics Inside Topological Quantum Field Theories

We show that the equations of motion defined over a specific field space are realizable as operator conditions in the physical sector of a generalized Floer theory defined over that field space. The ghosts associated with such a construction are found not to be dynamical. This construction is applied to gravity on a four dimensional manifold, $M$; whereupon, we obtain Einstein's equations via surgery, along $M$, in a five-dimensional topological quantum field theory.Comment: LaTeX, 7 page