In this talk I summarize the topics addressed during the conference. We have discussed the most relevant cosmological observations of the last say 10 years and their implications for our understanding of the Universe. My finding throughout this meeting has been that it is amazing how our knowledge of cosmological parameters has improved during the last years. It comes as a surprise to many, tha...

We obtain an explicit representation for quasiradial γ-harmonic functions, which shows that these functions have essentially algebraic nature. In particular, we give a complete description of all γ which admit algebraic quasiradial solutions. Unlike the cases γ = ∞ and γ = 1, only finitely many algebraic solutions is shown to exist for any fixed |γ| > 1. Moreover, there is a special extremal se...

A relativistic bounce-averaged quasilinear diffusion equation is derived to describe stochastic particle transport associated with low-frequency electromagnetic fluctuations in a nonuniform magnetized plasma. Expressions for the relativistic quasilinear diffusion coefficients are calculated explicitly for magnetically-trapped particle distributions in axisymmetric magnetic geometry in terms of ...

The observation of non-classical correlations arising in two weakly coupled Bose–Einstein condensates was recently reported by Estève et al (2008 Nature 455 1216). In order to observe relative number fluctuations between the two condensates below the standard quantum limit, they utilized the process of ‘adiabatic passage’ to drive the system out of thermal equilibrium. They found that this redu...

In this paper we calculate and visualize the dynamics of an ensemble of electrons trapping in an electrostatic wave of slowly increasing amplitude, illustrating that, despite disordering of particles in angle during the trapping transition as they pass close to X-points, there is still an adiabatic invariant for the great majority of particles that allows the long-time distribution function to ...

The adiabatic theorem provides the basis for the adiabatic model of quantum computation. Recently the conditions required for the adiabatic theorem to hold have become a subject of some controversy. Here we show that the reported violations of the adiabatic theorem all arise from resonant transitions between energy levels. In the absence of fast driven oscillations the traditional adiabatic the...

We consider a reversal of the magnetic moment of a nanomagnet by a fluctuating spin torque induced by a nonequilibrium current of electron spins. This is an example of the problem of the escape of a particle from a metastable state subjected to a fluctuating nonconservative force. Spin torque is a nonconservative force, and its fluctuations are beyond the description of the fluctuation-dissipat...

We studied the efficiency of two different schemes for a quantum heat engine, by considering a single Dirac particle trapped in an infinite one-dimensional potential well as the "working substance." The first scheme is a cycle, composed of two adiabatic and two isoenergetic reversible trajectories in configuration space. The trajectories are driven by a quasistatic deformation of the potential ...

In this work, we present the generalization of some thermodynamic properties of the black body radiation (BBR) towards an n-dimensional Euclidean space. For this case, the Planck function and the Stefan–Boltzmann law have already been given by Landsberg and de Vos and some adjustments by Menon and Agrawal. However, since then, not much more has been done on this subject, and we believe there ar...