Sacrilege, Tractarian Fiction and the Very Long Reformation

The Tractarian movement in the nineteenth-century Church of England brought new life to Reformation-era issues. One such was the notion of sacrilege, especially associated with Catholics and high-churchmen. Responding to reformist destruction of religious houses and the lay impropriation of monastic lands and revenues, believers in sacrilege asserted that those who damaged sacred objects or stole from the church risked divine displeasure. The seventeenth-century commentator Henry Spelman’s writings on sacrilege were reprinted in the nineteenth century, and his warning that the descendants of impropriators would suffer for the sins of their ancestors was widely embraced. This essay examines how two Tractarian writers, John Mason Neale (1816–66) and Charlotte M. Yonge (1823–1901), engaged with ideas of sacrilege in their fiction

An improved Monte Carlo method for direct calculation of the density of states

We present an efficient Monte Carlo algorithm for determining the density of states which is based on the statistics of transition probabilities between states. By measuring the infinite temperature transition probabilities--that is, the probabilities associated with move proposal only--we are able to extract excellent estimates of the density of states. When this estimator is used in conjunction with a Wang-Landau sampling scheme [F. Wang and D. P. Landau, Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 2050 (2001)], we quickly achieve uniform sampling of macrostates (e.g., energies) and systematically refine the calculated density of states. This approach requires only potential energy evaluations, continues to improve the statistical quality of its results as the simulation time is extended, and is applicable to both lattice and continuum systems. We test the algorithm on the Lennard-Jones liquid and demonstrate good statistical convergence properties.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. to appear in Journal of Chemical Physic

Optical Parametric Oscillation in Orientation-Patterned Gallium Arsenide

Tunable laser sources in the mid-infrared (MIR) spectral range are required for several Air Force applications. Existing lasers with output in the near-infrared can be converted to more desirable MIR by using nonlinear effects. Orientation patterned gallium arsenide (OPGaAs) is a promising nonlinear conversion material because it has broad transparency and can be engineered for specific pump laser and output wavelengths using quasi-phase matching techniques. This research examines optical parametric oscillation (OPO) of several OPGaAs samples using a 2.052 micrometers wavelength Tm, Ho:YLF pump laser. Of the seven samples available the five that were capable of getting OPO output with this pump were tested and OPO was successfully demonstrated on 4 of the 5. The highest slope efficiency of 10% was seen in sample 5. The highest pump power of incident 190 mW without causing damage to the AR coatings was applied to sample 4. Finally spectroscopic data of input and output was obtained and compared to calculated values