We revisit anthropic arguments purporting to explain the measured value of the cosmological constant. We argue that different ways of assigning probabilities to candidate universes lead to totally different anthropic predictions. As an explicit example, we show that weighting different universes by the total number of possible observations leads to...
After a review of the isentropic compressible magnetohydrodynamics (ICMHD) equations, a quaternionic framework for studying the alignment dynamics of a general fluid flow is explained and applied to the ICMHD equations.
We present a general theoretical framework to discuss mechanisms of morphogen transport and gradient formation in a cell layer. Trafficking events on the cellular scale lead to transport on larger scales. We discuss in particular the case of transcytosis where morphogens undergo repeated rounds of internalization into cells and recycling. Based on ...
Hyperbolic monopole motion is studied for well separated monopoles. It is shown that the motion of a hyperbolic monopole in the presence of one or more fixed monopoles is equivalent to geodesic motion on a particular submanifold of the full moduli space. The metric on this submanifold is found to be a generalisation of the multi-centre Taub-NUT met...
Helicity in vortex structures and spectra is studied in the developmental stages of a numerical simulation of the Navier-Stokes equations using three-dimensional visualizations and spectra. First, time scales are set using the growth and decay of energy dissipation, the peak value of vorticity, and the helicity. Then, two stages between the early t...
We consider many-body states of bosonic spinor atoms which, at the mean-field level, can be characterized by a single-particle wave function. Such states include BEC phases and insulating Mott states with one atom per site. We describe and apply a classification scheme that makes explicit spin symmetries of such states and enables one to naturally ...
This is a review about LISA and its technology demonstrator, LISA PathFinder. We first describe the conceptual problems which need to be overcome in order to set up a working interferometric detector of low frequency Gravitational Waves (GW), then summarise the solutions to them as currently conceived by the LISA mission team. This will show that s...
We construct explicitly time-dependent exact solutions to the field equations of six-dimensional (6D) gauged chiral supergravity, compactified to 4D in the presence of up to two three-branes situated within the extra dimensions. The solutions we find are scaling solutions, and are plausibly attractors which represent the late-time evolution of a br...
We use the Ricci flow with surgery to study four-dimensional SU(2) x U(1)-symmetric metrics on a manifold with fixed boundary given by a squashed 3-sphere. Depending on the initial metric we show that the flow converges to either the Taub-Bolt or the Taub-NUT metric, the latter case potentially requiring surgery at some point in the evolution. The ...
The effect of quantum and thermal fluctuations on the phase diagram of spin-2 BECs is examined. They are found to play an important role in the nematic part of the phase diagram, where a mean-field treatment of two-body interactions is unable to lift the accidental degeneracy between nematic states. Quantum and thermal fluctuations resolve this deg...
