Rudolf Serkin: A Life

Pianist Rudolf Serkin, a virtuosic solo performer and chamber musician, captivated music lovers the world over for much of the twentieth century. Although he acquired a large and devoted public following, Serkin preferred to keep out of the spotlight, instead directing attention toward the music he loved. Dedicated to disseminating European classical music in America, Serkin became a committed teacher and director of major musical institutions. Rudolf Serkin: A Life, the first biography of this influential figure, offers an insightful analysis of Serkin\u27s role in shaping American musical values and provides a rare glimpse into the life story of this intense performer and elusive man

What are the Confining Field Configurations of Strong-Coupling Lattice Gauge Theory?

Starting from the strong-coupling SU(2) Wilson action in D=3 dimensions, we derive an effective, semi-local action on a lattice of spacing L times the spacing of the original lattice. It is shown that beyond the adjoint color-screening distance, i.e. for $L \ge 5$, thin center vortices are stable saddlepoints of the corresponding effective action. Since the entropy of these stable objects exceeds their energy, center vortices percolate throughout the lattice, and confine color charge in half-integer representations of the SU(2) gauge group. This result contradicts the folklore that confinement in strong-coupling lattice gauge theory, for D>2 dimensions, is simply due to plaquette disorder, as is the case in D=2 dimensions. It also demonstrates explicitly how the emergence and stability of center vortices is related to the existence of color screening by gluon fields.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, latex2

Evidence for a Center Vortex Origin of the Adjoint String Tension

Wilson loops in the adjoint representation are evaluated on cooled lattices in SU(2) lattice gauge theory. It is found that the string tension of an adjoint Wilson loop vanishes, if the loop is evaluated in a sub-ensemble of configurations in which no center vortex links the loop. This result supports our recent proposal that the adjoint string tension, in the Casimir-scaling regime, can be attributed to a center vortex mechanism.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Latex2

Zero-gravity and reduced-gravity simulation on a magnetic-colloid pool-boiling system

Zero and reduced gravity simulation on magnetic colloid pool-boiling syste

Fresh look on triality

Investigating the $Z_3$ symmetry in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) we show that full QCD with a vacuum of vanishing baryonic number does not lead to metastable phases. Rather in QCD with dynamical fermions, the degeneracy of $Z_3$ phases manifests itself in observables without open triality.Comment: 9 pages, 0 figures, latex, IK-TUW-Preprint 930840