The Mandelstam--Leibbrandt Prescription and the Discretized Light Front Quantization

It is shown that the quantization of the unphysical degrees of freedom, which leads to the Mandelstam--Leibbrandt prescription for the infrared spurious singularities in the continuum light cone gauge, does indeed suggest some quite natural recipe to treat the zero modes in the Discretized Light Front Quantization of gauge theories.Comment: 5 pages, LaTeX, Talk given at the Fourth International Workshop on Light Cone Quantization and Non--Perturbative Dynamics, Polana Zgorzelisk

Turbulent breakage of ductile aggregates

In this paper we study breakage rate statistics of small colloidal aggregates in non-homogeneous anisotropic turbulence. We use pseudo-spectral direct numerical simulation of turbulent channel flow and Lagrangian tracking to follow the motion of the aggregates, modelled as sub-Kolmogorov massless particles. We focus specifically on the effects produced by ductile rupture: This rupture is initially activated when fluctuating hydrodynamic stresses exceed a critical value, $\sigma>\sigma_{cr}$, and is brought to completion when the energy absorbed by the aggregate meets the critical breakage value. We show that ductile rupture breakage rates are significantly reduced with respect to the case of instantaneous brittle rupture (i.e. breakage occurs as soon as $\sigma>\sigma_{cr}$). These discrepancies are due to the different energy values at play as well as to the statistical features of energy distribution in the anisotropic turbulence case examined.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. E (April 2015

The Unruh effect revisited

A new and exact derivation of the Bogoliubov coefficients is obtained for the simplest case of a spinless, neutral, massive field in a uniformly accelerated frame with a constant acceleration. The method can be suitably generalized in a straightforward manner to any field with spin and charges.Comment: 5 page

Neutral Massive Spin 1/2 Particles Emission in a Rindler Spacetime

The Unruh effect for the rate of emission and absorption of neutral massive Majorana spinor particles -- the most plausible consituents of Dark Matter -- in a Rindler spacetime is thoroughly investigated. The corresponding Bogolyubov coefficients are explicitly calculated and the consistency with Fermi-Dirac statistics and the Pauli principle is actually verified.Comment: v2: clarifications added to Introduction and Conclusions, added appendices; v3 removed review part, published versio

Time persistency of floating particle clusters in free-surface turbulence

We study the dispersion of light particles floating on a flat shear-free surface of an open channel in which the flow is turbulent. This configuration mimics the motion of buoyant matter (e.g. phytoplankton, pollutants or nutrients) in water bodies when surface waves and ripples are smooth or absent. We perform direct numerical simulation of turbulence coupled with Lagrangian particle tracking, considering different values of the shear Reynolds number (Re{\tau} = 171 and 509) and of the Stokes number (0.06 < St < 1 in viscous units). Results show that particle buoyancy induces clusters that evolve towards a long-term fractal distribution in a time much longer than the Lagrangian integral fluid time scale, indicating that such clusters over-live the surface turbulent structures which produced them. We quantify cluster dynamics, crucial when modeling dispersion in free-surface flow turbulence, via the time evolution of the cluster correlation dimension

Axial Anomaly in the Presence of the Aharonov-Bohm Gauge Field

We investigate on the plane the axial anomaly for euclidean Dirac fermions in the presence of a background Aharonov--Bohm gauge potential. The non perturbative analysis depends on the self--adjoint extensions of the Dirac operator and the result is shown to be influenced by the actual way of understanding the local axial current. The role of the quantum mechanical parameters involved in the expression for the axial anomaly is discussed. A derivation of the effective action by means of the stereographic projection is also considered.Comment: 15 pages, Plain.TeX, Preprint DFUB/94 - 1