Freya Stark

Freya Madeline Stark lived for a century, and into that one hundred years she packed a life of extraordinary daring and ingenuity. Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself, she wrote in Baghdad Sketches ( enlarged edition, 193 7); I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates. Such a motto defines not only her approach to the world but also the character of the woman herself. She had no duplicate. The writings that resulted from her constant travels began as wonder-filled accounts of ancient storybook kingdoms of the Middle East and moved impressively toward a reflective consideration of the differences between a nomadic way of life and the stable urbanity that might have been her lot if she had decided to fit the mold of those around her. In these accounts of her own transformation she brought a growing body of readers not only into exotic locales but also to the brink of metaphysical questions about the meaning of life

The Stark effect

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Anisotropic Stark Effect and Electric-Field Noise Suppression for Phosphorus Donor Qubits in Silicon

We report the use of novel, capacitively terminated coplanar waveguide (CPW) resonators to measure the quadratic Stark shift of phosphorus donor qubits in Si. We confirm that valley repopulation leads to an anisotropic spin-orbit Stark shift depending on electric and magnetic field orientations relative to the Si crystal. By measuring the linear Stark effect, we estimate the effective electric field due to strain in our samples. We show that in the presence of this strain, electric-field sources of decoherence can be non-negligible. Using our measured values for the Stark shift, we predict magnetic fields for which the spin-orbit Stark effect cancels the hyperfine Stark effect, suppressing decoherence from electric-field noise. We discuss the limitations of these noise-suppression points due to random distributions of strain and propose a method for overcoming them

Stark Broadening and White Dwarfs

White dwarf and pre-white dwarf atmospheres are one of the best examples for the application of Stark broadening research results in astrophysics, due to plasma conditions very favorable for this line broadening mechanism. For example in hot hydrogen-deficient (pre-) white dwarf stars Teff = 75 000 K - 180 000 K and log g = 5.5-8 [cgs]. Even for much cooler DA and DB white dwarfs with typical effective temperatures of 10 000 K - 20 000 K, Stark broadening is usually the dominant broadening mechanism. In this review, Stark broadening in white dwarf spectra is considered and the attention is drawn to the STARK-B database (http://stark-b.obspm.fr/), containing Stark broadening parameters needed for white dwarf spectra analysis and synthesis, as well as to the new search facilities which will provide the collective effort to develop Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Center (VAMDC - http://vamdc.org/)