FDA Regulation and Patient Assisted Suicides

There are an increasing number of Americans who believe that the marginal benefit of surviving a few extra months is not worth the cost of suffering the pain, physical and/or mental deterioration, or increased dependency they would experience during that period due to a terminal illness or a debilitating condition. For these people, the right to opt to die painlessly, simply, and with dignity at the time and place of their choosing is paramount, and in recent years they have taken steps to secure that right. Their convictions have given rise to the Hemlock Society, the passage of an Oregon referendum authorizing physician-assisted suicide, and the work of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who has personally assisted in the suicide of 20 people as of December 1993 using two patient-activated devices he created himself. Society has rarely strongly opposed the exercise of this "right;" indeed, while 28 states currently have laws declaring assistance in suicide a crime, no physician has been convicted for aiding in a suicide, and conviction of other types of suicide assistants has been sporadic at best. On the other hand, Michigan did ultimately prohibit physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in order to legally stop Dr. Kevorkian, and an injunction has prohibited enforcement of Oregon's referendum pending the resolution of constitutional challenges

3D Projection Sideband Cooling

We demonstrate 3D microwave projection sideband cooling of trapped, neutral atoms. The technique employs state-dependent potentials that enable microwave photons to drive vibration-number reducing transitions. The particular cooling sequence we employ uses minimal spontaneous emission, and works even for relatively weakly bound atoms. We cool 76% of atoms to their 3D vibrational ground states in a site-resolvable 3D optical lattice.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, Supplemental Material included. To appear in Physical Review Letter

Producing Bose condensates using optical lattices

We relate the entropies of ensembles of atoms in optical lattices to atoms in simple traps. We then determine which ensembles of lattice-bound atoms will adiabatically transform into a Bose condensate. This shows a feasible approach to Bose condensation without evaporative cooling.Comment: RevTeX, 5 pages, 5 eps-figure

Multi-Instantons and Multi-Cuts

We discuss various aspects of multi-instanton configurations in generic multi-cut matrix models. Explicit formulae are presented in the two-cut case and, in particular, we obtain general formulae for multi-instanton amplitudes in the one-cut matrix model case as a degeneration of the two-cut case. These formulae show that the instanton gas is ultra-dilute, due to the repulsion among the matrix model eigenvalues. We exemplify and test our general results in the cubic matrix model, where multi-instanton amplitudes can be also computed with orthogonal polynomials. As an application, we derive general expressions for multi-instanton contributions in two-dimensional quantum gravity, verifying them by computing the instanton corrections to the string equation. The resulting amplitudes can be interpreted as regularized partition functions for multiple ZZ-branes, which take into full account their back-reaction on the target geometry. Finally, we also derive structural properties of the trans-series solution to the Painleve I equation.Comment: 34 pages, 3 figures, JHEP3.cls; v2: added references, minor changes; v3: added 1 reference, more minor changes, final version for JMP; v4: more typos correcte