Rapid behavioral transitions produce chaotic mixing by a planktonic microswimmer

Despite their vast morphological diversity, many invertebrates have similar larval forms characterized by ciliary bands, innervated arrays of beating cilia that facilitate swimming and feeding. Hydrodynamics suggests that these bands should tightly constrain the behavioral strategies available to the larvae; however, their apparent ubiquity suggests that these bands also confer substantial adaptive advantages. Here, we use hydrodynamic techniques to investigate "blinking," an unusual behavioral phenomenon observed in many invertebrate larvae in which ciliary bands across the body rapidly change beating direction and produce transient rearrangement of the local flow field. Using a general theoretical model combined with quantitative experiments on starfish larvae, we find that the natural rhythm of larval blinking is hydrodynamically optimal for inducing strong mixing of the local fluid environment due to transient streamline crossing, thereby maximizing the larvae's overall feeding rate. Our results are consistent with previous hypotheses that filter feeding organisms may use chaotic mixing dynamics to overcome circulation constraints in viscous environments, and it suggests physical underpinnings for complex neurally-driven behaviors in early-divergent animals.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure

Theory of the Quantum Critical Fluctuations in Cuprates

The statistical mechanics of the time-reversal and inversion symmetry breaking order parameter, possibly observed in the pseudogap region of the phase diagram of the Cuprates, can be represented by the Ashkin-Teller model. We add kinetic energy and dissipation to the model for a quantum generalization and show that the correlations are determined by two sets of charges, one interacting locally in time and logarithmically in space and the other locally in space and logarithmically in time. The quantum critical fluctuations are derived and shown to be of the form postulated in 1989 to give the marginal fermi-liquid properties. The model solved and the methods devised are likely to be of interest also to other quantum phase transitions

A comprehensive study of electric, thermoelectric and thermal conductivities of Graphene with short range unitary and charged impurities

Motivated by the experimental measurement of electrical and hall conductivity, thermopower and Nernst effect, we calculate the longitudinal and transverse electrical and heat transport in graphene in the presence of unitary scatterers as well as charged impurities. The temperature and carrier density dependence in this system display a number of anomalous features that arise due to the relativistic nature of the low energy fermionic degrees of freedom. We derive the properties in detail including the effect of unitary and charged impurities self-consistently, and present tables giving the analytic expressions for all the transport properties in the limit of small and large temperature compared to the chemical potential and the scattering rates. We compare our results with the available experimental data. While the qualitative variations with temperature and density of carriers or chemical potential of all transport properties can be reproduced, we find that a given set of parameters of the impurities fits the Hall conductivity, Thermopower and the Nernst effect quantitatively but cannot fit the conductivity quantitatively. On the other hand a single set of parameters for scattering from Coulomb impurities fits conductivity, hall resistance and thermopower but not Nernst

Freer Trade and Wages of the Unskilled: Is Marx Striking Again?

This paper was prepared for the Workshop on Trade and Wages at the American Enterprise Institute, September 10, 1993. It draws, and builds, on earlier work by Bhagwati (1991a), done at the Russell Sage Foundation whose financial support during 1990-1991 is gratefully acknowledged