1+1=3
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Sorry for those who don't speak (or read) spanish, but I read a very interesting article by Martin Caparros that put me to think about my country, its history and its present. In the article Caparros tells how the truly powerful in Argentina first used the military to face the "guerrilla" only with economic purposes. At that time, the people of Argentina supported the military. Now however, that time has become very inconvenient (because of all the violence) and the power has changed the story, and the people conveniently forgot who they supported and now sit on the other side. Caparros is scared that in the 70s he was fighting the military, and today he joins them in claiming that the official story today is not what really happened back then. The moral is that the power in Argentina is very skilled at having the people empathize with their interests and defend them for them, and it even has the power to change history when convenient (1984 like). His comments tie neatly with the current fight between the farmers (the most powerful group in Argentina) and the goverment that wanted to tax them more. The Argentinean people went to the streets defending their "peers", the "poor" farmers who might not make all the millions they were hoping for...

posted by fercook @ 9:28 AM   0 comments
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Our article came out in the arXiv, Quantum Fidelity and Thermal Phase Transitions. (arXiv:0806.4633v1 [quant-ph])

Finally, after struggling with the plotting program for a week ! We still need to add one more plot (Cv of LMG) to submit...

It's a nice article where we explore how to study thermal (as opposed to quantum) phase transitions using fidelity (or the static version of the Loschmidt echo). What amazes me is that at some point we derive formulas that don't need quantum mechanics AT ALL ! Instead, only partition functions are involved. Thus, one can apply them to classical systems (as we do), and something does come out.

I am also proud of the LMG treatment, I think it is original but I am getting some emails about previous work that I need to check out.

All in all, a solid PRA article.

posted by fercook @ 7:10 AM   0 comments
For large values of 1.