From old wars to new wars and global terrorism

Even before 9/11 there were claims that the nature of war had changed fundamentally. The 9/11 attacks created an urgent need to understand contemporary wars and their relationship to older conventional and terrorist wars, both of which exhibit remarkable regularities. The frequency-intensity distribution of fatalities in "old wars", 1816-1980, is a power-law with exponent 1.80. Global terrorist attacks, 1968-present, also follow a power-law with exponent 1.71 for G7 countries and 2.5 for non-G7 countries. Here we analyze two ongoing, high-profile wars on opposite sides of the globe - Colombia and Iraq. Our analysis uses our own unique dataset for killings and injuries in Colombia, plus publicly available data for civilians killed in Iraq. We show strong evidence for power-law behavior within each war. Despite substantial differences in contexts and data coverage, the power-law coefficients for both wars are tending toward 2.5, which is a value characteristic of non-G7 terrorism as opposed to old wars. We propose a plausible yet analytically-solvable model of modern insurgent warfare, which can explain these observations.Comment: For more information, please contact [email protected] or [email protected]

The Spin-Orbit Evolution of GJ 667C System: The Effect of Composition and Other Planet's Perturbations

Potentially habitable planets within the habitable zone of M-dwarfs are affected by tidal interaction. We studied the tidal evolution in GJ 667C using a numerical code we call TIDEV. We reviewed the problem of the dynamical evolution focusing on the effects that a rheological treatment, different compositions and the inclusion of orbital perturbations, have on the spin-down time and the probability to be trapped in a low spin-orbit resonance. Composition have a strong effect on the spin-down time, changing, in some cases, by almost a factor of 2 with respect to the value estimated for a reference Earth-like model. We calculated the time to reach a low resonance value (3:2) for the configuration of 6 planets. Capture probabilities are affected when assuming different compositions and eccentricities variations. We chose planets b and c to evaluate the probabilities of capture in resonances below 5:2 for two compositions: Earth-like and Waterworld planets. We found that perturbations, although having a secular effect on eccentricities, have a low impact on capture probabilities and noth- ing on spin-down times. The implications of the eccentricity variations and actual habitability of the GJ 667C system are discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS - V

Negative-Energy Perturbations in Circularly Cylindrical Equilibria within the Framework of Maxwell-Drift Kinetic Theory

The conditions for the existence of negative-energy perturbations (which could be nonlinearly unstable and cause anomalous transport) are investigated in the framework of linearized collisionless Maxwell-drift kinetic theory for the case of equilibria of magnetically confined, circularly cylindrical plasmas and vanishing initial field perturbations. For wave vectors with a non-vanishing component parallel to the magnetic field, the plane equilibrium conditions (derived by Throumoulopoulos and Pfirsch [Phys Rev. E {\bf 49}, 3290 (1994)]) are shown to remain valid, while the condition for perpendicular perturbations (which are found to be the most important modes) is modified. Consequently, besides the tokamak equilibrium regime in which the existence of negative-energy perturbations is related to the threshold value of 2/3 of the quantity $\eta_\nu = \frac {\partial \ln T_\nu} {\partial \ln N_\nu}$, a new regime appears, not present in plane equilibria, in which negative-energy perturbations exist for {\em any} value of $\eta_\nu$. For various analytic cold-ion tokamak equilibria a substantial fraction of thermal electrons are associated with negative-energy perturbations (active particles). In particular, for linearly stable equilibria of a paramagnetic plasma with flat electron temperature profile ($\eta_e=0$), the entire velocity space is occupied by active electrons. The part of the velocity space occupied by active particles increases from the center to the plasma edge and is larger in a paramagnetic plasma than in a diamagnetic plasma with the same pressure profile. It is also shown that, unlike in plane equilibria, negative-energy perturbations exist in force-free reversed-field pinch equilibria with a substantial fraction of active particles.Comment: 31 pages, late

The Dynamics of the Colombian Civil Conflict: A New Data Set

We present a detailed, high-frequency data set on the civil conflict in Colombia during the period 1988-2002. We briefly introduce the Colombian case and the methodological issues that hinder data collection in civil wars, before presenting the pattern over time of conflict actions and intensity for all sides involved in the confrontation. We also describe the pattern of victimisation by group and the victimisation of civilians out of clashes

Negative-energy perturbations in cylindrical equilibria with a radial electric field

The impact of an equilibrium radial electric field $E$ on negative-energy perturbations (NEPs) (which are potentially dangerous because they can lead to either linear or nonlinear explosive instabilities) in cylindrical equilibria of magnetically confined plasmas is investigated within the framework of Maxwell-drift kinetic theory. It turns out that for wave vectors with a non-vanishing component parallel to the magnetic field the conditions for the existence of NEPs in equilibria with E=0 [G. N. Throumoulopoulos and D. Pfirsch, Phys. Rev. E 53, 2767 (1996)] remain valid, while the condition for the existence of perpendicular NEPs, which are found to be the most important perturbations, is modified. For $|e_i\phi|\approx T_i$ ($\phi$ is the electrostatic potential) and $T_i/T_e > \beta_c\approx P/(B^2/8\pi)$ ($P$ is the total plasma pressure), a case which is of operational interest in magnetic confinement systems, the existence of perpendicular NEPs depends on $e_\nu E$, where $e_\nu$ is the charge of the particle species $\nu$. In this case the electric field can reduce the NEPs activity in the edge region of tokamaklike and stellaratorlike equilibria with identical parabolic pressure profiles, the reduction of electron NEPs being more pronounced than that of ion NEPs.Comment: 30 pages, late

Finding the Higgs Boson through Supersymmetry

The study of displaced vertices containing two b--jets may provide a double discovery at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): we show how it may not only reveal evidence for supersymmetry, but also provide a way to uncover the Higgs boson necessary in the formulation of the electroweak theory in a large region of the parameter space. We quantify this explicitly using the simplest minimal supergravity model with bilinear breaking of R-parity, which accounts for the observed pattern of neutrino masses and mixings seen in neutrino oscillation experiments.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures. Final version to appear at PRD. Discussion and results were enlarge

Bound-state dark matter with Majorana neutrinos

We propose a simple scenario in which dark matter (DM) emerges as a stable neutral hadronic thermal relics, its stability following from an exact $\operatorname{U}(1)_D$ symmetry. Neutrinos pick up radiatively induced Majorana masses from the exchange of colored DM constituents. There is a common origin for both dark matter and neutrino mass, with a lower bound for neutrinoless double beta decay. Direct DM searches at nuclear recoil experiments will test the proposal, which may also lead to other phenomenological signals at future hadron collider and lepton flavour violation experiments.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1803.0852

Displacement Data Assimilation

We show that modifying a Bayesian data assimilation scheme by incorporating kinematically-consistent displacement corrections produces a scheme that is demonstrably better at estimating partially observed state vectors in a setting where feature information important. While the displacement transformation is not tied to any particular assimilation scheme, here we implement it within an ensemble Kalman Filter and demonstrate its effectiveness in tracking stochastically perturbed vortices.Comment: 26 Pages, 9 figures, 5 table

Probing neutrino mass with multilepton production at the Tevatron in the simplest R-parity violation model

We analyze the production of multileptons in the simplest supergravity model with bilinear violation of R parity at the Fermilab Tevatron. Despite the small R-parity violating couplings needed to generate the neutrino masses indicated by current atmospheric neutrino data, the lightest supersymmetric particle is unstable and can decay inside the detector. This leads to a phenomenology quite distinct from that of the R-parity conserving scenario. We quantify by how much the supersymmetric multilepton signals differ from the R-parity conserving expectations, displaying our results in the $m_0 \otimes m_{1/2}$ plane. We show that the presence of bilinear R-parity violating interactions enhances the supersymmetric multilepton signals over most of the parameter space, specially at moderate and large $m_0$.Comment: 26 pages, 23 figures. Revised version with some results corrected and references added. Conclusions remain the sam