Theories, models and structures: thirty years on

Thirty years after the conference that gave rise to The Structure of Scientific Theories, there is renewed interest in the nature of theories and models. However, certain crucial issues from thirty years ago are reprised in current discussions; specifically: whether the diversity of models in the science can be captured by some unitary account; and whether the temporal dimension of scientific practice can be represented by such an account. After reviewing recent developments we suggest that these issues can be accommodated within the partial structures formulation of the semantic or model-theoretic approach

Electronic oscillations in paired polyacetylene chains

An interacting pair of polyacetylene chains are initially modeled as a couple of undimerized polymers described by a Hamiltonian based on the tight-binding model representing the electronic behavior along the linear chain, plus a Dirac's potential double well representing the interaction between the chains. A theoretical field formalism is employed, and we find that the system exhibits a gap in its energy band due to the presence of a mass-matrix term in the Dirac's Lagrangian that describes the system. The Peierls instability is introduced in the chains by coupling a scalar field to the fermions of the theory via spontaneous symmetry breaking, to obtain a kink-like soliton, which separates two vacuum regions, i.e., two spacial configurations (enantiomers) of the each molecule. Since that mass-matrix and the pseudo-spin operator do not commute in the same quantum representation, we demonstrate that there is a particle oscillation phenomenon with a periodicity equivalent to the Bloch oscillations.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure.to appear in Solid State Communication