Negotiating cultural difference in everyday life : some insights for inclusionary local governance

With the waning of state-sponsored multiculturalism, local governments in Australia have assumed leadership and responsibility for establishing and maintaining collaborative relationships with stakeholders to promote diverse and inclusive cities. Engaging with residents often through consultation processes and interacting with key institutions, local governments aim to value local knowledge and mobilise citizen participation. This social interactive approach to building local knowledge in places officially and popularly identified as socially disadvantaged and culturally diverse, however, is fraught with interethnic tensions if cultural practices unintentionally privi&Igrave;ege whiteness. In this paper I argue that such tensions can also give rise to moments of affective ambivalence that ate productive if it leads to the acknowledgement and questioning of white privilege within the formal agencies of government. Such questioning provides the possibility to value the voices of local residents and engage in meaningful intercultural dialogue. This paper draws on indepth interviews with planners, elected local councillors and residents in the City of Greater Dandenong, Melbourne, to illustrate the potential that the affective dimension of living with cultural diversity has in building governance capacity and inclusive understandings of citizenship.<br /

Optical lattices with large scattering length: Using few-body physics to simulate an electron-phonon system

We propose to go beyond the usual Hubbard model description of atoms in optical lattices and show how few-body physics can be used to simulate many-body phenomena, e.g., an electron-phonon system. We take one atomic species to be trapped in a deep optical lattice at full filling and another to be untrapped spin-polarized fermions (which do not see the optical lattice) but has an s-wave contact interaction with the first species. For large positive scattering length on the order of lattice spacing, the usual two-body bound (dimer) states overlap forming giant orbitals extending over the entire lattice, which can be viewed as an "electronic" band for the untrapped species while the trapped atoms become the "ions" with their own on-site dynamics, thereby simulating an electron-phonon system with renormalization of the phonon frequencies and Peierls transitions. This setup requires large scattering lengths but minimises losses, does not need higher bands and adds new degrees of freedom which cannot easily be described in terms of lattice variables, thus opening up intriguing possibilities to explore interesting physics at the interface between few-body and many-body systems.Comment: published version; title change

A single impurity in an ideal atomic Fermi gas: current understanding and some open problems

We briefly review some current theoretical and experimental aspects of the problem of a single spinless impurity in a 3D polarised atomic Fermi gas at zero temperature where the interactions can be tuned using a wide Feshbach resonance. We show that various few-body states in vacuum composed of the impurity and background gas atoms (single impurity, dimer, trimer, tetramer) give rise to corresponding dressed states ({\em polaron}, {\em dimeron}, {\em trimeron}, {\em tetrameron}) in the gas and inherit many of their characteristics. We study the ground state focussing on the choice of wave function and its properties. We raise a few unsolved problems: whether the polaron and dimeron are really separate branches, what other few-body states might exist, the nature of the groundstate for large numbers of particle-hole pairs and why is the polaron ansatz so good. We then turn to the excited states, and to the calculation of the effective mass. We examine the bounds on the effective mass and raise a conjecture about that of composite quasiparticle states.Comment: Review asked by Journal of the Indian Institute of Science, to appear in Vol. 94 No. 2 (Apr. - Jun. 2014) Cold Atom Quantum Emulators: From Condensed Matter to Filed Theory to Optical Clock