The number of negative modes of the oscillating bounces

The spectrum of small perturbations about oscillating bounce solutions recently discussed in the literature is investigated. Our study supports quite intuitive and expected result: the bounce with N nodes has exactly N homogeneous negative modes. Existence of more than one negative modes makes obscure the relation of these oscillating bounce solutions to the false vacuum decay processes.Comment: LaTex, 6 pages, including 3 figure

A Complex Chemical Potential: Signature of Decay in a Bose-Einstein Condensate

We explore the zero-temperature statics of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate in which a Feshbach resonance creates a coupling to a second condensate component of quasi-bound molecules. Using a variational procedure to find the equation of state, the appearance of this binding is manifest in a collapsing ground state, where only the molecular condensate is present up to some critical density. Further, an excited state is seen to reproduce the usual low-density atomic condensate behavior in this system, but the molecular component is found to produce an underlying decay, quantified by the imaginary part of the chemical potential. Most importantly, the unique decay rate dependencies on density ($\sim \rho ^{3/2}$) and on scattering length ($\sim a^{5/2}$) can be measured in experimental tests of this theory.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Thermodynamic curvature measures interactions

Thermodynamic fluctuation theory originated with Einstein who inverted the relation $S=k_B\ln\Omega$ to express the number of states in terms of entropy: $\Omega= \exp(S/k_B)$. The theory's Gaussian approximation is discussed in most statistical mechanics texts. I review work showing how to go beyond the Gaussian approximation by adding covariance, conservation, and consistency. This generalization leads to a fundamentally new object: the thermodynamic Riemannian curvature scalar $R$, a thermodynamic invariant. I argue that $|R|$ is related to the correlation length and suggest that the sign of $R$ corresponds to whether the interparticle interactions are effectively attractive or repulsive.Comment: 29 pages, 7 figures (added reference 27

Influence of detector motion in entanglement measurements with photons

We investigate how the polarization correlations of entangled photons described by wave packets are modified when measured by moving detectors. For this purpose, we analyze the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt Bell inequality as a function of the apparatus velocity. Our analysis is motivated by future experiments with entangled photons designed to use satellites. This is a first step towards the implementation of quantum information protocols in a global scale

Measurement of interfacial tension of immiscible liquid pairs in microgravity

A discussion is given of a containerless microgravity experiment aimed at measuring the interfacial tension of immiscible liquid pairs using a compound drop rotation method. The reasons for the failure to execute such experiments in microgravity are described. Also, the results of post-flight analyses used to confirm our arguments are presented

Influence of detector motion in Bell inequalities with entangled fermions

We investigate how relativity influences the spin correlation of entangled fermions measured by moving detectors. In particular, we show that the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt Bell inequality is not violated by quantum mechanics when the left and right spin detectors move fast enough.Comment: 4 pages and 5 figure

Nonlinear Quantum Mechanics at the Planck Scale

I argue that the linearity of quantum mechanics is an emergent feature at the Planck scale, along with the manifold structure of space-time. In this regime the usual causality violation objections to nonlinearity do not apply, and nonlinear effects can be of comparable magnitude to the linear ones and still be highly suppressed at low energies. This can offer alternative approaches to quantum gravity and to the evolution of the early universe.Comment: Talk given at the International Quantum Structures 2004 meeting, 16 pages LaTe

The alpha-particle based on modern nuclear forces

The Faddeev-Yakubovsky equations for the alpha-particle are solved. Accurate results are obtained for several modern NN interaction models, which include charge-symmetry breaking effects in the NN force, nucleon mass dependences as well as the Coulomb interaction. These models are augmented by three-nucleon forces of different types and adjusted to the 3N binding energy. Our results are close to the experimental binding energy with a slight overbinding. Thus there is only little room left for the contribution of possible 4N interactions to the alpha-particle binding energy. We also discuss model dependences of the binding energies and the wave functions.Comment: 22 pages REVTeX 4, 12 figures, table with TM parameters added, typos corrected, version as published in PR

Nonperturbative gravito-magnetic fields

In a cold matter universe, the linearized gravito-magnetic tensor field satisfies a transverse condition (vanishing divergence) when it is purely radiative. We show that in the nonlinear theory, it is no longer possible to maintain the transverse condition, since it leads to a non-terminating chain of integrability conditions. These conditions are highly restrictive, and are likely to hold only in models with special symmetries, such as the known Bianchi and $G_2$ examples. In models with realistic inhomogeneity, the gravito-magnetic field is necessarily non-transverse at second and higher order.Comment: Minor changes to match published version; to appear in Phys. Rev.

Time-like flows of energy-momentum and particle trajectories for the Klein-Gordon equation

The Klein-Gordon equation is interpreted in the de Broglie-Bohm manner as a single-particle relativistic quantum mechanical equation that defines unique time-like particle trajectories. The particle trajectories are determined by the conserved flow of the intrinsic energy density which can be derived from the specification of the Klein-Gordon energy-momentum tensor in an Einstein-Riemann space. The approach is illustrated by application to the simple single-particle phenomena associated with square potentials.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure