From old wars to new wars and global terrorism

Even before 9/11 there were claims that the nature of war had changed fundamentally. The 9/11 attacks created an urgent need to understand contemporary wars and their relationship to older conventional and terrorist wars, both of which exhibit remarkable regularities. The frequency-intensity distribution of fatalities in "old wars", 1816-1980, is a power-law with exponent 1.80. Global terrorist attacks, 1968-present, also follow a power-law with exponent 1.71 for G7 countries and 2.5 for non-G7 countries. Here we analyze two ongoing, high-profile wars on opposite sides of the globe - Colombia and Iraq. Our analysis uses our own unique dataset for killings and injuries in Colombia, plus publicly available data for civilians killed in Iraq. We show strong evidence for power-law behavior within each war. Despite substantial differences in contexts and data coverage, the power-law coefficients for both wars are tending toward 2.5, which is a value characteristic of non-G7 terrorism as opposed to old wars. We propose a plausible yet analytically-solvable model of modern insurgent warfare, which can explain these observations.Comment: For more information, please contact [email protected] or [email protected]

Inception report on the Technical Assistance study (T.A. No. 1481-PAK): Crop based irrigation operations in the NWFP

Irrigation systems / Irrigation practices / Cropping systems / Water requirements / Pakistan

Ray and Wave Aberrations Revisited: A Huygens-Like Construction yields Exact Relations

The optical aberrations of a system can be described in terms of the wave aberrations, defined as the departure from the ideal spherical wavefront; or the ray aberrations, which are in turn the deviations from the paraxial ray intersection measured in the image plane. The classical connection between the two descriptions is an approximation, the error of which has, so far, not been quantified analytically. We derive exact analytical equations for computing the wavefront surface, the aberrated ray directions, and the transverse ray aberrations in terms of the wave aberrations (OPD) and the reference sphere. We introduce precise conditions for a function to be an OPD function, show that every such function has an associated wavefront, and study the error arising from the classical approximation. We establish strict conditions for the error to be small. We illustrate our results with numerical simulations. Our results show that large numerical apertures and high-frequency OPD functions yield larger approximation errors.Comment: 12 pages, 10 Figures, JOSA A, vol. 33, no.

Negative-energy perturbations in cylindrical equilibria with a radial electric field

The impact of an equilibrium radial electric field $E$ on negative-energy perturbations (NEPs) (which are potentially dangerous because they can lead to either linear or nonlinear explosive instabilities) in cylindrical equilibria of magnetically confined plasmas is investigated within the framework of Maxwell-drift kinetic theory. It turns out that for wave vectors with a non-vanishing component parallel to the magnetic field the conditions for the existence of NEPs in equilibria with E=0 [G. N. Throumoulopoulos and D. Pfirsch, Phys. Rev. E 53, 2767 (1996)] remain valid, while the condition for the existence of perpendicular NEPs, which are found to be the most important perturbations, is modified. For $|e_i\phi|\approx T_i$ ($\phi$ is the electrostatic potential) and $T_i/T_e > \beta_c\approx P/(B^2/8\pi)$ ($P$ is the total plasma pressure), a case which is of operational interest in magnetic confinement systems, the existence of perpendicular NEPs depends on $e_\nu E$, where $e_\nu$ is the charge of the particle species $\nu$. In this case the electric field can reduce the NEPs activity in the edge region of tokamaklike and stellaratorlike equilibria with identical parabolic pressure profiles, the reduction of electron NEPs being more pronounced than that of ion NEPs.Comment: 30 pages, late

Neutralino Phenomenology at LEP2 in Supersymmetry with Bilinear Breaking of R-parity

We discuss the phenomenology of the lightest neutralino in models where an effective bilinear term in the superpotential parametrizes the explicit breaking of R-parity. We consider supergravity scenarios where the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) is the lightest neutralino and which can be explored at LEP2. We present a detailed study of the LSP decay properties and general features of the corresponding signals expected at LEP2. We also contrast our model with gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking.Comment: 21 pages, Latex, uses axodraw.sty (included), 13 figures included as ps- and eps-files, figures slightly changed after bug-fixing, comparison with GMSB and a few references added, version to appear in NP

Crop-based irrigation operations in the NWFP: Progress report no.2, Kharif 92 on the Technical Assistance Study, T.A. No.1481-PAK

Irrigation operation / Cropping systems / Irrigation canals / Water users' associations / Institutions / Pakistan

Bound-state dark matter with Majorana neutrinos

We propose a simple scenario in which dark matter (DM) emerges as a stable neutral hadronic thermal relics, its stability following from an exact $\operatorname{U}(1)_D$ symmetry. Neutrinos pick up radiatively induced Majorana masses from the exchange of colored DM constituents. There is a common origin for both dark matter and neutrino mass, with a lower bound for neutrinoless double beta decay. Direct DM searches at nuclear recoil experiments will test the proposal, which may also lead to other phenomenological signals at future hadron collider and lepton flavour violation experiments.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1803.0852

Critical behavior of ferromagnetic pure and random diluted nanoparticles with competing interactions: variational and Monte Carlo approaches

The magnetic properties and critical behavior of both ferromagnetic pure and metallic nanoparticles having concurrently atomic disorder, dilution and competing interactions, are studied in the framework of an Ising model. We have used both the free energy variational principle based on the Bogoliubov inequality and Monte Carlo simulation. As a case of study for random diluted nanoparticles we have considered the Fe$_{0.5}$Mn$_{0.1}$Al$_{0.4}$ alloy characterized for exhibiting, under bulk conditions, low temperature reentrant spin glass (RSG) behavior and for which experimental and simulation results are available. Our results allow concluding that the variational model is successful in reproducing features of the particle size dependence of the Curie temperature for both pure and random diluted particles. In this last case, low temperature magnetization reduction was consistent with the same type of RSG behavior observed in bulk in accordance with the Almeida-Thouless line at low fields and a linear dependence of the freezing temperature with the reciprocal of the particle diameter was also obtained. Computation of the correlation length critical exponent yielded the values $\nu=0.926\pm 0.004$ via Bogoliubov and$\nu =0.71\pm 0.04$ via Monte Carlo. This fact indicates that even though thermodynamical models can be indeed used in the study of nanostructures and they can reproduce experimental features, special attention must be paid regarding critical behavior. From both approaches, differences in the $\nu$ exponent with respect to the pure Ising model agree with Harris and Fisher arguments.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Negative-Energy Perturbations in Circularly Cylindrical Equilibria within the Framework of Maxwell-Drift Kinetic Theory

The conditions for the existence of negative-energy perturbations (which could be nonlinearly unstable and cause anomalous transport) are investigated in the framework of linearized collisionless Maxwell-drift kinetic theory for the case of equilibria of magnetically confined, circularly cylindrical plasmas and vanishing initial field perturbations. For wave vectors with a non-vanishing component parallel to the magnetic field, the plane equilibrium conditions (derived by Throumoulopoulos and Pfirsch [Phys Rev. E {\bf 49}, 3290 (1994)]) are shown to remain valid, while the condition for perpendicular perturbations (which are found to be the most important modes) is modified. Consequently, besides the tokamak equilibrium regime in which the existence of negative-energy perturbations is related to the threshold value of 2/3 of the quantity $\eta_\nu = \frac {\partial \ln T_\nu} {\partial \ln N_\nu}$, a new regime appears, not present in plane equilibria, in which negative-energy perturbations exist for {\em any} value of $\eta_\nu$. For various analytic cold-ion tokamak equilibria a substantial fraction of thermal electrons are associated with negative-energy perturbations (active particles). In particular, for linearly stable equilibria of a paramagnetic plasma with flat electron temperature profile ($\eta_e=0$), the entire velocity space is occupied by active electrons. The part of the velocity space occupied by active particles increases from the center to the plasma edge and is larger in a paramagnetic plasma than in a diamagnetic plasma with the same pressure profile. It is also shown that, unlike in plane equilibria, negative-energy perturbations exist in force-free reversed-field pinch equilibria with a substantial fraction of active particles.Comment: 31 pages, late