Extension of the Thomas-Fermi approximation for trapped Bose-Einstein condensates with an arbitrary number of atoms

By incorporating the zero-point energy contribution we derive simple and accurate extensions of the usual Thomas-Fermi (TF) expressions for the ground-state properties of trapped Bose-Einstein condensates that remain valid for an arbitrary number of atoms in the mean-field regime. Specifically, we obtain approximate analytical expressions for the ground-state properties of spherical, cigar-shaped, and disk-shaped condensates that reduce to the correct analytical formulas in both the TF and the perturbative regimes, and remain valid and accurate in between these two limiting cases. Mean-field quasi-1D and -2D condensates appear as simple particular cases of our formulation. The validity of our results is corroborated by an independent numerical computation based on the 3D Gross-Pitaevskii equation.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Final version published in Phys. Rev.

USHER: an algorithm for particle insertion in dense fluids

The insertion of solvent particles in molecular dynamics simulations of complex fluids is required in many situations involving open systems, but this challenging task has been scarcely explored in the literature. We propose a simple and fast algorithm (USHER) that inserts the new solvent particles at locations where the potential energy has the desired prespecified value. For instance, this value may be set equal to the system's excess energy per particle, in such way that the inserted particles are energetically indistinguishable from the other particles present. During the search for the insertion site, the USHER algorithm uses a steepest descent iterator with a displacement whose magnitude is adapted to the local features of the energy landscape. The only adjustable parameter in the algorithm is the maximum displacement and we show that its optimal value can be extracted from an analysis of the structure of the potential energy landscape. We present insertion tests in periodic and non-periodic systems filled with a Lennard-Jones fluid whose density ranges from moderate values to high values.Comment: 10 pages (Latex), 8 figures (postscript); J. Chem. Phys. (in press) 200

Exploring singlet deflection of gauge mediation

We embed the Next-to Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model into gauge mediation of supersymmetry breaking and study the phenomenology of scenarios where the gauge-mediation contributions to soft parameters are deflected by superpotential interactions of the gauge singlet with the messenger fields and the Higgs doublets. This kind of models provide a satisfactory solution to the mu-b_mu problem of gauge mediation, compatible with the adequate pattern of electroweak symmetry breaking and a realistic spectrum with supersymmetric partners at the TeV scale without requiring a significant fine tuning.Comment: Latex 18 pages, 4 eps figures. Minor corrections, version published in Phys. Rev.