Buoyancy driven rotating boundary currents

The structure of boundary currents formed from intermediately dense water introduced into a rotating, stably stratified, two-layer environment is investigated in a series of laboratory experiments, performed for Froude numbers ranging from 0.01 to 1. The thickness and streamwise velocity profiles in quasi-steady currents are measured using a pH activated tracer (thymol blue) and found to compare favorably to simplified analytic solutions and numerical models. Currents flowing along sloping boundaries in a stratified background exhibit robust stability at all experimental Froude numbers. Such stability is in sharp contrast to the unequivocal instability of such currents flowing against vertical boundaries, or of currents flowing along slopes in a uniform background. The presence of a variety of wave mechanisms in the ambient medium might account for the slower and wider observed structures and the stability of the currents, by effecting the damping of disturbances through wave radiation.Comment: 9 pages with 2 figures to appear in Ann NYAS "Long range effects in physics and astrophysics

Lipkin translational-symmetry restoration in the mean-field and energy-density-functional methods

Based on the 1960 idea of Lipkin, the minimization of energy of a symmetry-restored mean-field state is equivalent to the minimization of a corrected energy of a symmetry-broken state with the Peierls-Yoccoz mass. It is interesting to note that the "unphysical" Peierls-Yoccoz mass, and not the true mass, appears in the Lipkin projected energy. The Peierls-Yoccoz mass can be easily calculated from the energy and overlap kernels, which allows for a systematic, albeit approximate, restoration of translational symmetry within the energy-density formalism. Analogous methods can also be implemented for all other broken symmetries.Comment: 15 LaTeX pages, 8 eps figures, submitted to Journal of Physics

Aquarium fishes and their collection in the Great Barrier Reef Region

The size and nature of the aquarium fish industry in the Great Barrier Reef Region makes it both economically .and ecologically important. The industry is expanding fast, yet little information is available

Where we are on θ13\theta_{13}: addendum to "Global neutrino data and recent reactor fluxes: status of three-flavour oscillation parameters"

In this addendum to arXiv:1103.0734 we consider the recent results from long-baseline $\nu_\mu\to\nu_e$ searches at the T2K and MINOS experiments and investigate their implications for the mixing angle $\theta_{13}$ and the leptonic Dirac CP phase $\delta$. By combining the $2.5\sigma$ indication for a non-zero value of $\theta_{13}$ coming from T2K data with global neutrino oscillation data we obtain a significance for $\theta_{13} > 0$ of about $3\sigma$ with best fit points $\sin^2\theta_{13} = 0.013(0.016)$ for normal (inverted) neutrino mass ordering. These results depend somewhat on assumptions concerning the analysis of reactor neutrino data.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures and 1 tabl

Gamow-Teller transitions and deformation in the proton-neutron random phase approximation

We investigate reliability of Gamow-Teller transition strengths computed in the proton-neutron random phase approximation, comparing with exact results from diagonalization in full $0\hbar\omega$ shell-model spaces. By allowing the Hartree-Fock state to be deformed, we obtain good results for a wide variety of nuclides, even though we do not project onto good angular momentum. We suggest that deformation is as important or more so than pairing for Gamow-Teller transitions.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures; added references, clarified discussion with regards to stabilit