The Right Legislation for the Wrong Reasons

Senator Arlen Specter took a bold and long-overdue step on January 22, 2007, when he introduced legislation that would require the Supreme Court to allow television coverage of its proceedings. But instead of making his case with a straightforward appeal to the public’s right to know, Specter has introduced arguments in favor of his bill that seem destined to antagonize the Court, drive it into the shadows, or both. Chances of passage might improve if Specter adjusts his tactics

The Right Legislation for the Wrong Reasons

Senator Arlen Specter took a bold and long-overdue step on January 22, 2007, when he introduced legislation that would require the Supreme Court to allow television coverage of its proceedings. But instead of making his case with a straightforward appeal to the public’s right to know, Specter has introduced arguments in favor of his bill that seem destined to antagonize the Court, drive it into the shadows, or both. Chances of passage might improve if Specter adjusts his tactics

Work statistics, irreversible heat and correlations build-up in joining two spin chains

We investigate the influences of quantum many-body effects, such as criticality and the existence of factorisation fields, in the thermodynamic cost of establishing a bonding link between two independent quantum spin chains. We provide a physical interpretation of the behavior of irreversible work spent in such process by linking the phenomenology of such quantities to the properties of the spectrum of the systemComment: 9 pages, 8 figures. Contribution to the FQMT13 special volum

Non-archimedean quantum K-invariants

We construct quantum K-invariants in non-archimedean analytic geometry. Our approach differs from the classical one in algebraic geometry via perfect obstruction theory. Instead, we build on our previous works on the foundation of derived non-archimedean geometry and Gromov compactness. We obtain a list of natural geometric relations of the stacks of stable maps, directly at the derived level, with respect to elementary operations on graphs, namely, products, cutting edges, forgetting tails and contracting edges. They imply immediately the corresponding properties of K-theoretic invariants. The derived approach produces highly intuitive statements and functorial proofs, without the need to manipulate perfect obstruction theories. The flexibility of our derived approach to quantum K-invariants allows us to impose not only simple incidence conditions for marked points, but also incidence conditions with multiplicities, which we discuss in the final section of the paper. This leads to a new set of enumerative invariants, which is not yet considered in the literature, to the best of our knowledge. For the proofs, we had to further develop the foundations of derived non-archimedean geometry in this paper: we study derived lci morphisms, relative analytification, and deformation to the normal bundle. Our motivations come from non-archimedean enumerative geometry and mirror symmetry.Comment: 82 pages, minor revisio