Related papers: Are Textures Natural?
Why are simple, regular, and symmetric shapes common in nature? Many natural shapes arise as solutions to energy minimisation or other optimisation problems, but is there a general relation between optima and simple, regular shapes and…
When the topology of the universe is non trivial, it has been shown that there are constraints on the network of domain walls, cosmic strings and monopoles. I generalize these results to textures and study the cosmological implications of…
We argue that models in which an observable variation of the fine structure constant is explained by motion of a cosmic scalar field, are not stable under renormalization, and require massive fine tuning that cannot be explained by any…
Living organisms have developed a wide range of appearances from iridescent to matt textures. Interestingly, angular independent structural colors, where isotropy in the scattering structure is present, only produce coloration in the blue…
Modeling the distribution of natural images is challenging, partly because of strong statistical dependencies which can extend over hundreds of pixels. Recurrent neural networks have been successful in capturing long-range dependencies in a…
We recall the many obstacles which seemed, long ago, to prevent supersymmetry from possibly being a fundamental symmetry of Nature. We also present their solutions, leading to the construction of the supersymmetric extensions of the…
Space-Time in general relativity is a dynamical entity because it is subject to the Einstein field equations. The space-time metric provides different geometrical structures: conformal, volume, projective and linear connection. A deep…
Is it a mere accident that the weak scale is exactly so much smaller than the Planck scale, and at the same time exactly so much larger than the QCD scale? Or are the experimentally-measured values of the corresponding gauge couplings…
Microscopic symmetries impose strong constraints on the elasticity of a crystalline solid. In addition to the usual spatial symmetries captured by the tensorial character of the elastic tensor, hidden non-spatial symmetries can occur…
A way of counting free parameters in the quark mass matrices of the standard model, including the constraints coming from weak basis transformations, is presented; this allow to understand the exact physical meaning of the parallel and…
This review consists of two parts. The first part establishes certain astrophysical bounds on the smoothness of classical spacetime. Some of the best bounds to date are based on the absence of vacuum Cherenkov radiation in ultrahigh-energy…
We prove theoretically that when a soft solid is subjected to an extreme deformation, wrinkles can form on its surface at an angle that is oblique to a principal direction of stretch. These oblique wrinkles occur for a strain that is…
How do symmetries induce natural and useful quantum structures? This question is investigated in the context of models of three interacting particles in one-dimension. Such models display a wide spectrum of possibilities for dynamical…
We study properties of stable, strictly stable and locally outermost marginally outer trapped surfaces in spacelike hypersurfaces of spacetimes possessing certain symmetries such as isometries, homotheties and conformal Killings. We first…
In some scientific fields, a scaling is able to modify the topology of an observed object. Our goal in the present work is to introduce a new formalism adapted to the mathematical representation of this kind of phenomenon. To this end, we…
Volume alteration in solid materials is a common cause of material failure. Here we investigate the crack formation in thin elastic layers attached to a substrate. We show that small variations in the volume contraction and substrate…
Friction modulation technology enables the creation of textural effects on flat haptic displays. However, an intuitive and manageably small design space for construction of such haptic textures remains an unfulfilled goal for user interface…
The properties of cosmic strings have been investigated in detail for their implications in early-universe cosmology. Although many variations of the basic structure have been discovered, with implications for both the microscopic and…
Complex spatiotemporal patterns in nature significantly challenge reductionism-based modern science. The lack of a paradigm beyond reductionism hinders our understanding of the emergence of complexity. The diversity of countless patterns…
We consider simple models of tunneling of an object with intrinsic degrees of freedom. This important problem was not extensively studied until now, in spite of numerous applications in various areas of physics and astrophysics. We show…