Geodesics around line defects in elastic solids

Topological defects in solids, usually described by complicated boundary conditions in elastic theory, may be described more simply as sources of a gravity- like deformation field in the geometric approach of Katanaev and Volovich. This way, the deformation field is described by non-Euclidean metric that incorporates the boundary imposed by the defects. A possible way of gaining some insight into the motion of particles in a medium with topological defects (e.g., electrons in a dislocated metal) is to look at the geodesics of the medium around the defect. In this work, we find the exact solution for the geodesic equation for elastic medium with a generic line defect, the dispiration, that can either be a screw dislocation or a wedge disclination for particular choices of its parameters.Comment: 10 pages, Latex, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Lett.

Global Hypoellipticity for Strongly Invariant Operators

In this note, by analyzing the behavior at infinity of the matrix symbol of an invariant operator $P$ with respect to a fixed elliptic operator, we obtain a necessary and sufficient condition to guarantee that $P$ is globally hypoelliptic. We also investigate relations between the global hypoellipticity of $P$ and global subelliptic estimates.Comment: 20 page