9,249 research outputs found
No Escape
The initial idea for the film came from an inspiring performance of Chaplin's Easy Street (1917) accompanied by Donald MacKenzie, resident organist at the Odeon Leicester Square, which led me into researches of early cinema (c1895-1907), a period described by Tom Gunning as the ‘cinema of attractions’. James Lastra points out that during this time competition between cinemas was based on the success of various sound strategies all emphasising the ‘liveness’ of the film experience and films were made to motivate particular types of sound accompaniment.
Particularly intriguing was the use of live sound effects performed by a skilled troupe from behind the film screen to produce ‘realistic’ sound effects. This is translated in No Escape into the manipulation of on-screen diegetic sound, also inspired by Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète and his notions of the sound object and reduced listening. The interaction between the live piano and the onscreen sound is crucial to No Escape as is that of the piano and images, which exist alone together for long stretches.
The visual content and structure of the film draws on the city symphonies of Walter Ruttman and especially Dziga Vertov whose formal experimentation, startling juxtaposition of images and very rapid editing is important to No Escape’s non-narrative and at times complex montage of British rural and urban vistas. Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is by and partially about the man with the camera as is No Escape, the title of which refers to the idea that though we may travel to get away from something, there is no escape from the inner life. This is represented by the piano music, which varies but within fairly restricted limits. It does respond or drive image choice and editing but the overall sense should be that one cannot escape and these responses are temporary and fleeting
Extrapolating from Tom Gunning's cinema of attractions, James Beattie's concept of ‘documentary display’ - a poetic, sensual and subjective approach which encourages listening and looking rather than cognitive understanding - underpins the aesthetic of No Escape, as is a belief in the supremacy of sound and of film as a performative event
Weak disorder: anomalous transport and diffusion are normal yet again
Particles driven through a periodic potential by an external constant force
are known to exhibit a pronounced peak of the diffusion around a critical force
that defines the transition between locked and running states. It has recently
been shown both experimentally and numerically that this peak is greatly
enhanced if some amount of spatial disorder is superimposed on the periodic
potential. Here we show that beyond a simple enhancement lies a much more
interesting phenomenology. For some parameter regimes the system exhibits a
rich variety of behaviors from normal diffusion to superdiffusion, subdiffusion
and even subtransport.Comment: Substantial improvements in presentatio
Symmetron Fields: Screening Long-Range Forces Through Local Symmetry Restoration
We present a screening mechanism that allows a scalar field to mediate a long
range (~Mpc) force of gravitational strength in the cosmos while satisfying
local tests of gravity. The mechanism hinges on local symmetry restoration in
the presence of matter. In regions of sufficiently high matter density, the
field is drawn towards \phi = 0 where its coupling to matter vanishes and the
\phi-> -\phi symmetry is restored. In regions of low density, however, the
symmetry is spontaneously broken, and the field couples to matter with
gravitational strength. We predict deviations from general relativity in the
solar system that are within reach of next-generation experiments, as well as
astrophysically observable violations of the equivalence principle. The model
can be distinguished experimentally from Brans-Dicke gravity, chameleon
theories and brane-world modifications of gravity.Comment: 4 pages. v3: version appearing in PR
Fraser of cryptophthalmosis syndrome: A case report
Fraser or cryptophthalmos syndrome is a rare autosomal recessive disorder characterized by major features such as cryptophthalmos, syndactyly, and abnormal genitalia. Consanguinity is reported in 15-24.8% of the cases. The diagnosis of this syndrome can be made on clinical examination; therefore we present the clinical findings of a rare case of Fraser syndrome in a female infant
Unified Superfluid Dark Sector
We present a novel theory of a unified dark sector, where late-time cosmic
acceleration emerges from the dark matter superfluid framework. The system is
described by a superfluid mixture consisting of two distinguishable states with
a small energy gap, such as the ground state and an excited state of dark
matter. Given their contact in the superfluid, interaction between those states
can happen, converting one state into the other. This long range interaction
within the superfluid couples the two superfluid phonon species through a
cosine potential motivated by Josephson/Rabi interactions. As a consequence of
this potential, a new dynamics of late-time accelerated expansion emerges in
this system, without the need of dark energy, coming from a universe containing
only this two-state DM superfluid. Because the superfluid species are
non-relativistic, their sound speeds remain suitably small throughout the
evolution. We calculate the expansion history and growth of linear
perturbations, and compare the results to CDM cosmology. For the
fiducial parameters studied here, the predicted expansion and growth function
are close to those of CDM, but the difference in the predicted growth
rate is significant at late times. The present theory nicely complements the
recent proposal of dark matter superfluidity to explain the empirical success
of MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) on galactic scales, thus offering a
unified framework for dark matter, dark energy, and MOND phenomenology.Comment: 27 pages, 4 figures. v2: Version accepted in JCA
Quantum phase-space analysis of the pendular cavity
We perform a quantum mechanical analysis of the pendular cavity, using the
positive-P representation, showing that the quantum state of the moving mirror,
a macroscopic object, has noticeable effects on the dynamics. This system has
previously been proposed as a candidate for the quantum-limited measurement of
small displacements of the mirror due to radiation pressure, for the production
of states with entanglement between the mirror and the field, and even for
superposition states of the mirror. However, when we treat the oscillating
mirror quantum mechanically, we find that it always oscillates, has no
stationary steady-state, and exhibits uncertainties in position and momentum
which are typically larger than the mean values. This means that previous
linearised fluctuation analyses which have been used to predict these highly
quantum states are of limited use. We find that the achievable accuracy in
measurement is far worse than the standard quantum limit due to thermal noise,
which, for typical experimental parameters, is overwhelming even at 2 mK.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures To be published in Phys. Rev.
Fading Gravity and Self-Inflation
We study the cosmology of a toy modified theory of gravity in which gravity
shuts off at short distances, as in the fat graviton scenario of Sundrum. In
the weak-field limit, the theory is perturbatively local, ghost-free and
unitary, although likely suffers from non-perturbative instabilities. We derive
novel self-inflationary solutions from the vacuum equations of the theory,
without invoking scalar fields or other forms of stress energy. The modified
perturbation equation expressed in terms of the Newtonian potential closely
resembles its counterpart for inflaton fluctuations. The resulting scalar
spectrum is therefore slightly red, akin to the simplest scalar-driven
inflationary models. A key difference, however, is that the gravitational wave
spectrum is generically not scale invariant. In particular the tensor spectrum
can have a blue tilt, a distinguishing feature from standard inflation.Comment: 35 pages, 4 figures. v3: version to appear in Phys. Rev.
Symmetron Cosmology
The symmetron is a scalar field associated with the dark sector whose
coupling to matter depends on the ambient matter density. The symmetron is
decoupled and screened in regions of high density, thereby satisfying local
constraints from tests of gravity, but couples with gravitational strength in
regions of low density, such as the cosmos. In this paper we derive the
cosmological expansion history in the presence of a symmetron field, tracking
the evolution through the inflationary, radiation- and matter-dominated epochs,
using a combination of analytical approximations and numerical integration. For
a broad range of initial conditions at the onset of inflation, the scalar field
reaches its symmetry-breaking vacuum by the present epoch, as assumed in the
local analysis of spherically-symmetric solutions and tests of gravity. For the
simplest form of the potential, the energy scale is too small for the symmetron
to act as dark energy, hence we must add a cosmological constant to drive
late-time cosmic acceleration. We briefly discuss a class of generalized,
non-renormalizable potentials that can have a greater impact on the late-time
cosmology, though cosmic acceleration requires a delicate tuning of parameters
in this case.Comment: 42 page
Theoretical investigation of moir\'e patterns in quantum images
Moir\'e patterns are produced when two periodic structures with different
spatial frequencies are superposed. The transmission of the resulting structure
gives rise to spatial beatings which are called moir\'e fringes. In classical
optics, the interest in moir\'e fringes comes from the fact that the spatial
beating given by the frequency difference gives information about details(high
spatial frequency) of a given spatial structure. We show that moir\'e fringes
can also arise in the spatial distribution of the coincidence count rate of
twin photons from the parametric down-conversion, when spatial structures with
different frequencies are placed in the path of each one of the twin beams. In
other words,we demonstrate how moir\'e fringes can arise from quantum images
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