Motivic Brown-Peterson invariants of the rationals

Fix the base field Q of rational numbers and let BP denote the family of motivic truncated Brown-Peterson spectra over Q. We employ a "local-to-global" philosophy in order to compute the motivic Adams spectral sequence converging to the bi-graded homotopy groups of BP. Along the way, we provide a new computation of the homotopy groups of BP over the 2-adic rationals, prove a motivic Hasse principle for the spectra BP, and deduce several classical and recent theorems about the K-theory of particular fields.Comment: 32 pages, 6 figures; Introduction and exposition improved, typos corrected, now published in Geometry & Topolog

Calculations of K+, K- and phi Production in Near-Threshold Proton-Nucleus Collisions

K+, K- and \phi meson production in proton-nucleus (pA) collisions has been calculated within a BUU transport model. It is shown that the nucleon-hyperon strangeness transfer channel is essential. The role of three-body reactions has been investigated within the medium. The targetmass dependence of $\phi$ production is predicted to give important information on the in-medium properties of all three mesons.Comment: Talk presented by H.W.B. at the Budapest 2004 workshop on 'Hot and Dense Matter in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions', March 24-27, 2004, Budapest, Hungar

Simultaneous Kummer congruences and E∞\mathbb{E}_\infty-orientations of KO and tmf

Building on results of M. Ando, M.J. Hopkins and C. Rezk, we show the existence of uncountably many $\mathbb{E}_\infty$-String orientations of real K-theory KO and of topological modular forms tmf, generalizing the $\hat{A}$- (resp. the Witten) genus. Furthermore, the obstruction to lifting an $\mathbb{E}_\infty$-String orientations from KO to tmf is identified with a classical Iwasawa-theoretic condition. The common key to all these results is a precise understanding of the classical Kummer congruences, imposed for all primes simultaneously. This result is of independent arithmetic interest.Comment: final versio

On the search for the chiral anomaly in Weyl semimetals: The negative longitudinal magnetoresistance

Recently, the existence of massless chiral (Weyl) fermions has been postulated in a class of semi-metals with a non-trivial energy dispersion.These materials are now commonly dubbed Weyl semi-metals (WSM).One predicted property of Weyl fermions is the chiral or Adler-Bell-Jackiw anomaly, a chirality imbalance in the presence of parallel magnetic and electric fields. In WSM, it is expected to induce a negative longitudinal magnetoresistance (NMR), the chiral magnetic effect.Here, we present experimental evidence that the observation of the chiral magnetic effect can be hindered by an effect called "current jetting". This effect also leads to a strong apparent NMR, but it is characterized by a highly non-uniform current distribution inside the sample. It appears in materials possessing a large field-induced anisotropy of the resistivity tensor, such as almost compensated high-mobility semimetals due to the orbital effect.In case of a non-homogeneous current injection, the potential distribution is strongly distorted in the sample.As a consequence, an experimentally measured potential difference is not proportional to the intrinsic resistance.Our results on the MR of the WSM candidate materials NbP, NbAs, TaAs, TaP exhibit distinct signatures of an inhomogeneous current distribution, such as a field-induced "zero resistance' and a strong dependence of the `measured resistance" on the position, shape, and type of the voltage and current contacts on the sample. A misalignment between the current and the magnetic-field directions can even induce a "negative resistance". Finite-element simulations of the potential distribution inside the sample, using typical resistance anisotropies, are in good agreement with the experimental findings. Our study demonstrates that great care must be taken before interpreting measurements of a NMR as evidence for the chiral anomaly in putative Weyl semimetals.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Simulation of the Long Term Behavior of Polymers on the Basis of Short Term Data

The mechanical long term behavior of polymers is usually determined by long term creep experiments up to 10.000 h which are very time and cost consuming. Therefore these data are often not available for the engineer. But even if long term data is available FEA-tools used in industrial practice usually can not sufficiently represent the nonlinear time, temperature and load-dependency of the mechanical long term behaviour. Hence the dimensioning of polymer parts is still a rather difficult engineering task. As a consequence of this, additional time consuming and expensive component tests in combination with several iterations are often necessary to design a polymer part for long term behaviour. This paper develops a method for the modeling of the load and temperature-dependent mechanical behaviour of polymers over a wide time, load and temperature range by means of finite element analysis. The method includes a material model as well as the determination of material parameters to calibrate the model. As a special feature of this method the model is calibrated by using creep data generated from short term experiments. The procedure improves the simulation of the long term behaviour of plastic-components and reduces the experimental effort significantly. The simulation results are finally validated by creep experiments performed on an example part