332. NEQNET: last two weeks of March

Finally… This freezing March has come to the end. Why freezing? Well, for example, it featured snow storms stronger than the ones in January/February, how is that? Or temperature dropped below -15 on March 25th. Global warming? Not in Helsinki, Mr. Gore.

In the mean time, the audience of NEQNET has reached 300 people (email subscriptions and our RSS feed), while about 700 people read us on Twitter – your humble correspondent is currently the number 2 most followed person in Finland

You can subscribe to our daily email updates or RSS feed. You might be also interested to follow me on Twitter, since my Twitter stream contains much more than just activity on NEQNET.

And that’s what happened on NEQNET for the past two weeks…

1. String theory. Field theory. Quantum gravity

1.1. Glueballs and gluelumps as bound states of transverse constituent gluons by Fabien Buisseret (Mons). Fabien explains the physics behind his model of constituent gluon and nicely reviews many other questions in QCD – for example, QCD effective equation of state.

1.2. Holographic hydrodynamics by Miguel Paulos (DAMTP, Cambridge). Miguel is interested in strongly coupled QFT plasmas at finite chemical potential.

2. Cosmology

2.1. Dark matter via many copies of the Standard Model by Alex Vikman and Iggy Sawicki (NYU). As follows from the title, the authors discuss a new model of dark matter based on the large number of SM copies. This crazy idea works surprisingly well, simultaneously solving the hierarchy problem.

3. Physics: other

3.1. Turbulence: Statistical approach 1 and Turbulence: Statistical approach 2. I discuss statistical treatment of the developed turbulence regime developed by Taylor and Reynolds, Kolmogorov scaling and intermittency. The basic conclusion is that equations that appear when the system is treated statistically are not closed, which leads to closure problem familiar to many of us from kinetic theory.

3.2. FDT-violation in colloidal glasses under shear by Matthias Krueger (U. of Konstanz). Matthias briefly explains how FDT can be violated in glassy systems. The paper which this post is based on was recently published in PRL.

3.3. Turbulence: order and disorder in turbulent flow. This post is descriptional rather than theoretical. I explain what kind of ordered structures one can observe in various hydrodynamical problems featuring turbulent behavior.

3.4. Turbulence. Dynamical approach. I discuss approach to the turbulence problem based on chaos theory (in particular, strange attractors). I am especially interested to learn how ordered structures get affected by the transition to developed turbulence.

3.5. Fractional quantum Hall effect in some multicomponent systems. Very nice review of fractional quantum Hall effect (Laughlin states, composite fermions, modern applications) by Zlatko Papic (Belgrad).

3.6. Some properties of the Burgers dynamics with Brownian or white-noise initial velocity by Patrick Valageas (Saclay). This is an in-depth analysis of statistical properties of Burgers turbulence.

4. Fun and stuff

4.1. Scientist?s gadgets: Tablet PC and handwriting formulae recognition, where I explain why purchase of a Tablet PC is at least worth considering for a theoretical physicist. Hopefully, handwriting formulae recognition will soon hit the level where it can be considered useful…

4.2. Richard Hamming?s ?You and your research?. A repost of amazing lecture “You and your research” by Richard Hamming. He explains how very good physicists differ from the ones like your humble correspondent

4.3. Global crisis: one interesting plot. We analyse current US federal deficit and find that it is not that scary as Soros says. Nice discussion in comments.

4.4. Scientist?s gadgets: desktop software. I am trying to convince you that you have to use your desktop effectively (not like Moshe Rozali and Lubos Motl ) I also run a contest – the winners are to get invite codes for BumpTop private beta. These winners were determined today morning – Theoretical Minimum and uunuagedecole. Congratulations, guys!

4.5. House market bubble: brief update. That’s what it is – a bit of analysis of US house market, which is not currently doing very well.

4.6. Global crisis and one more plot to think about – namely, I present the plot of the treasury yield curve and try to figure out what are its correlations with GDP and investment.

4.7. Human Activity in the Web by Filippo Radicchi (Turin), who tries to perform statistical analysis of the user activity on such sites as Google. His main conclusion is that one has to study statistics associated with user groups featuring similar patterns of behavior.

Stay tuned!