Terrorizing Advocacy and the First Amendment: Free Expression and the Fallacy of Mutual Exclusivity

Traditional free speech doctrine is inadequate to account for modern terrorist speech. Unprotected threats and substantially protected lawful advocacy are not mutually exclusive. This Article proposes recognizing a new hybrid category of speech called “terrorizing advocacy.” This is a type of traditionally protected public advocacy of unlawful conduct that simultaneously exhibits the unprotected pathologies of a true threat. This Article explains why this new category confounds existing First Amendment doctrine and details a proposed model for how the doctrine should be reshaped

The Partially-Split Hall Bar: Tunneling in the Bosonic Integer Quantum Hall Effect

We study point-contact tunneling in the integer quantum Hall state of bosons. This symmetry-protected topological state has electrical Hall conductivity equal to $2 e^2/h$ and vanishing thermal Hall conductivity. In contrast to the integer quantum Hall state of fermions, a point contact can have a dramatic effect on the low energy physics. In the absence of disorder, a point contact generically leads to a partially-split Hall bar geometry. We describe the resulting intermediate fixed point via the two-terminal electrical (Hall) conductance of the edge modes. Disorder along the edge, however, both restores the universality of the two-terminal conductance and helps preserve the integrity of the Hall bar within the relevant parameter regime.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures; v.2: typos fixed and clarified some argument

Experiments with calibrated digital sideband separating downconversion

This article reports on the first step in a focused program to re-optimize radio astronomy receiver architecture to better take advantage of the latest advancements in commercial digital technology. Specifically, an L-Band sideband-separating downconverter has been built using a combination of careful (but ultimately very simple) analog design and digital signal processing to achieve wideband downconversion of an RFI-rich frequency spectrum to baseband in a single mixing step, with a fixed-frequency Local Oscillator and stable sideband isolation exceeding 50 dB over a 12 degree C temperature range.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, to be published in PAS

Quantum Indistinguishability in Chemical Reactions

Quantum indistinguishability plays a crucial role in many low-energy physical phenomena, from quantum fluids to molecular spectroscopy. It is, however, typically ignored in most high temperature processes, particularly for ionic coordinates, implicitly assumed to be distinguishable, incoherent and thus well-approximated classically. We explore chemical reactions involving small symmetric molecules, and argue that in many situations a full quantum treatment of collective nuclear degrees of freedom is essential. Supported by several physical arguments, we conjecture a "Quantum Dynamical Selection" (QDS) rule for small symmetric molecules that precludes chemical processes that involve direct transitions from orbitally non-symmetric molecular states. As we propose and discuss, the implications of the Quantum Dynamical Selection rule include: (i) a differential chemical reactivity of para- and ortho-hydrogen, (ii) a mechanism for inducing inter-molecular quantum entanglement of nuclear spins, (iii) a new isotope fractionation mechanism, (iv) a novel explanation of the enhanced chemical activity of "Reactive Oxygen Species", (v) illuminating the importance of ortho-water molecules in modulating the quantum dynamics of liquid water, (vi) providing the critical quantum-to-biochemical linkage in the nuclear spin model of the (putative) quantum brain, among others.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures. Clarified presentation and figure

Quantum Disentangled Liquids

We propose and explore a new finite temperature phase of translationally invariant multi-component liquids which we call a "Quantum Disentangled Liquid" (QDL) phase. We contemplate the possibility that in fluids consisting of two (or more) species of indistinguishable quantum particles with a large mass ratio, the light particles might "localize" on the heavy particles. We give a precise, formal definition of this Quantum Disentangled Liquid phase in terms of the finite energy density many-particle wavefunctions. While the heavy particles are fully thermalized, for a typical fixed configuration of the heavy particles, the entanglement entropy of the light particles satisfies an area law; this implies that the light particles have not thermalized. Thus, in a QDL phase, thermal equilibration is incomplete, and the canonical assumptions of statistical mechanics are not fully operative. We explore the possibility of QDL in water, with the light proton degrees of freedom becoming "localized" on the oxygen ions. We do not presently know whether a local, generic Hamiltonian can have eigenstates of the QDL form, and if it can not, then the non-thermal behavior discussed here will exist as an interesting crossover phenomena at time scales that diverge as the ratio of the mass of the heavy to the light species also diverges.Comment: 14 page

Correlation Effects in Carbon Nanotubes

We consider the effects of Coulomb interactions on single-wall carbon nanotubes using an on-site Hubbard interaction, u. For the (N,N) armchair tubes the low energy theory is shown to be identical to a 2-chain Hubbard model at half-filling, with an effective interaction u_N = u/N. Umklapp scattering leads to gaps in the spectrum of charge and spin excitations which are exponentially small for large N. Above the gaps the intrinsic nanotube resistivity due to these scattering processes is linear in temperature, as observed experimentally. The presence of "d-wave" superconductivity in the 2-chain Hubbard model away from half-filling suggests that doped armchair nanotubes might exhibit superconductity with a purely electronic mechanism.Comment: 4 pages (REVTeX), 5 postscript figures included automatically using epsf.sty. Complete postscript version also available at http://www.itp.ucsb.edu/~balents/papers.htm