Global fits to precision cosmological data which show that there is a dark energy component comprising about 2/3 of the total cosmological energy also hint that a dark energy with w = P/ρ < −1 is viable, even favored. Here we discuss implications of such a surprising w, including whether it jeopardizes vacuum stability. It appears to be secure in microscopic processes, but why bulk dark energy ...

Studies have shown that the position of a target stimulus is misperceived owing to ongoing motion. Although static forces (fixation, landmarks) affect perceived position, motion remains the overwhelming force driving estimates of position. Motion endpoint estimates biased in the direction of motion are perceptual signatures of motion's dominant role in localization. We sought conditions in whic...

Poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)-stabilized liposomes were recently shown to exhibit differences in cell uptake that were linked to the liposome charge. To determine the differences and similarities between charged and uncharged PEG-decorated liposomes, we directly measured the forces between two supported, neutral bilayers with terminally grafted PEG chains. The measurements were performed with the...

Beyond the scale of spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry light and strange baryons should be considered as systems of three constituent quarks with confining interaction and a chiral interaction that is mediated by Goldstone bosons between the constituent quarks. The flavor-spin structure and sign of the short-range part of the Goldstone boson exchange interaction reduces the SU(6)FS symmetr...

The previous analysis of the short-range NN repulsion originating from the Goldstone boson exchange hyperfine interaction between constituent quarks is revisited. We study in which respects the repulsion depends on the radial form of the spin-spin quark-quark force. We show that while the radial form affects the structure of the 6Q wave function, the short-range repulsion in the NN system persi...

We study the effects induced by heavy fields on the masses of light fields in supersymmetric theories, under the assumption that the heavy mass scale is much higher than the supersymmetry breaking scale. We show that the square-masses of light scalar fields can get two different types of significant corrections when a heavy multiplet is integrated out. The first is an indirect level-repulsion e...

We consider N × N Hermitian random matrices with independent identically distributed entries (Wigner matrices). The matrices are normalized so that the average spacing between consecutive eigenvalues is of order 1/N . Under suitable assumptions on the distribution of the single matrix element, we first prove that, away from the spectral edges, the empirical density of eigenvalues concentrates a...

We consider phonon polariton states which may arise in disordered dielectrics due to a random light-phonon coupling. We show that these states can be described within the model of disorder-induced crossing resonance (DICR). The dispersion laws and relaxation rates of these states have been explored. Polaritons are shown to be good candidates for the experimental observation of the effects of DI...

The Coulomb explosion of CH(3)I in an intense (10-100 TW cm(-2)), ultrashort (50 fs) and nonresonant (804 nm) laser field has been studied experimentally and justified theoretically. Ion images have been recorded using the velocity map imaging (VMI) technique for different singly and multiply charged ion fragments, CH(3)(p+) (p = 1) and I(q+) (q ≤ 3), arising from different Coulomb explosion ch...