History of Supersymmetric Extensions of the Standard Model

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 Standard Model. Finally we discuss briefly the early experimental searches for Supersymmetry.Comment: 40 pages, 10 figures, 3 Table

“‘Relentless Geography’: Los Angeles’ Imagined Cartographies in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange,”

What would a map of Los Angeles drawn from the ground up look like? In his groundbreaking work The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre argues that the conceived space of urban planners is fundamentally distinct from lived space, which cannot be mapped out. In her impressive city-wide narrative, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) demonstrates the effects of imposing conceived space upon the lived space of inner city Los Angeles residents, and what happens when the counter-model of space being lived by a city’s inhabitants rebels. Yamashita’s text mirrors this disjuncture between represented and lived space through the use of narrative surrealism. Space is magically reconfigured in the city, shrinking the uninhabited Downtown and expanding over-populated yet underrepresented neighborhoods, literally shifting geographically until its mapping matches the social space of those on the ground rather than those who map it from above. Literary criticism on the novel to date has largely interpreted Tropic of Orange as a commentary on the effects of globalization; not enough attention has been paid to the novel’s surreal expansion of Los Angeles’ inner city. Using Lefebvre’s “science of space,” anchored by Los Angeles’ city planning schemas, I argue that Yamashita offers a different map, one perceived by the subsets of LA’s population that fall through the cracks of the city’s grid. Tropic of Orange’s unorthodox formal structure, when combined with its narrative surrealism, creates a differential space in the text, transforming the novel into the Los Angeles imagined by its anonymous users

Topological defects and misfit strain in magnetic stripe domains of lateral multilayers with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy

Stripe domains are studied in perpendicular magnetic anisotropy films nanostructured with a periodic thickness modulation that induces the lateral modulation of both stripe periods and inplane magnetization. The resulting system is the 2D equivalent of a strained superlattice with properties controlled by interfacial misfit strain within the magnetic stripe structure and shape anisotropy. This allows us to observe, experimentally for the first time, the continuous structural transformation of a grain boundary in this 2D magnetic crystal in the whole angular range. The magnetization reversal process can be tailored through the effect of misfit strain due to the coupling between disclinations in the magnetic stripe pattern and domain walls in the in-plane magnetization configuration

Uniqueness of SRB measures for transitive diffeomorphisms on surfaces

We give a description of ergodic components of SRB measures in terms of ergodic homoclinic classes associated to hyperbolic periodic points. For transitive surface diffeomorphisms, we prove that there exists at most one SRB measure.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure