Dmitry Podolsky has got his PhD from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He currently works as postdoc at Case Western Reserve University. He is also one of the editors of NEQNET.

367. ATLAS/CERN 2009 multimedia contest: video of the day

Are you a graduate student at physics department who is badly annoyed by the fact that your girlfriend calls you nerd? Do you want to be like Brian Cox instead? (oh God, my answer would be resounding No ) or at least to get an internship at CERN, to take a closer look on LHC [...]

366. Some interesting recent papers in Arxiv

Just wanted to acknowledge their existence, although I’ll not be really able to review them due to the lack of time… 1. Quantum field theory 1.1. “Non-Abelian Duality and Confinement in N=2 Supersymmetric QCD” by Michail Shifman and Alesha Yung. The authors study transitions from weak to strong coupling in N = 2 SQCD that [...]

365. Inertial confinement – using lasers for compression

I hope you are not getting bored too much by my discussion of thermonuclear fusion in inertial confinement reactors, because today I’m going to continue and finally start explaining why do they want to use lasers in HiPER to compress plasma. Basically, the main bonus of using lasers is their ability to concentrate huge energy [...]

364. Thermonuclear reactors. More on inertial confinement

Last time I did not quite finish with the discussion of physics of inertial confinement, so let me continue… An important parameter that characterizes plasma in reactors with inertial confinement is the ratio between the geometric size of the region where reactions take place and the mean free path of -particles. It basically determines the [...]

362. Kepler sees first light

Star cluster NGC6791 from the Kepler’s first light image Just a small part of Kepler’s field of view. The star in the center of the field is known to have large Jupiter-like planet called TrES-2. Just wanted to let you know (if you did not hear about that already), that Kepler has just seen the [...]

361. NEQNET: first two weeks of April

Well, it seems that other two weeks have passed… What’s up? First of all, it looks like I figured out why energy seems to dissipate inhomogeneously in a turbulent flow with very large Reynolds numbers (kindly see the list N4 below). Apart from this topic, other things that I was interested in during these two [...]

360. ISS Tour: video of the day

A great International Space Station tour by Col. Michael Fincke, commander of 18th expedition. The view from station’s windows will blow your mind. Michael is a lot of fun, while Yuri Lonchakov is way too serious (I saw several videos of him at this point, and it seems that he is always like that ) [...]

359. Michael Griffin to fill professor’s position in Alabama

The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAHuntsville) has named Michael Griffin, one of the world’s leading aerospace engineers, as an eminent scholar and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. The announcement was made today by President David Williams. In 2005, Dr. Griffin was appointed as the 11th NASA Administrator, serving in that role until [...]

358. Thermonuclear reactors. Inertial confinement

I am currently keeping studying thermonuclear fusion and reactors a bit and, I should admit, I’m absolutely in love with HiPER and inertial confinement as an idea – it is so much more elegant than magnetic confinement used in Tokamaks… But before I’ll turn to the discussion of inertial confinement reactors, let me finish with [...]

357. Vortex line representation. Coulomb interaction of vortex lines

After brief introduction into vortex line representation we are probably ready to discuss the interaction of vortex lines between each other. But before I proceed to the actual derivation, let me focus for a bit on not so terribly popular (but powerful) formulation of ideal hydrodynamics – Hamiltonian formulation. The Lagrangian of incompressible fluid (I [...]