Migratory birds are known to use the Earth’s magnetic field as an orientation cue on their 13 tremendous journeys between their breeding and overwintering grounds. The magnetic 14 compass of migratory birds relies on the magnetic field’s inclination, i.e. the angle between 15 the magnetic field lines and the Earth’s surface. As a consequence, vertical or horizontal field 16 lines corresponding ...

Women's underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a prominent concern in our society and many others. Closer inspection of this phenomenon reveals a more nuanced picture, however, with women achieving parity with men at the Ph.D. level in certain STEM fields, while also being underrepresented in some non-STEM fields. It is important to consider an...

In this work a minimization problem for the magnetic Ginzburg-Landau functional in a circular domain with randomly distributed small holes is considered. We develop a new analytical approach for solving a non-standard boundary value problem for the magnetic field presented as a function of the n-tuple of degrees of vortices pinned by the n holes. The key feature of this approach is that the sol...

We find the analogue of the Boillat metric of Born-Infeld theory for the M5-brane. We show that it provides the propagation cone of all 5-brane degrees. In an arbitrary background field, this cone never lies outside the Einstein cone. An energy momentum tensor for the three-form is defined and shown to satisfy the Dominant Energy Condition. Using it, we rule out the existence of everywhere smoo...

We study vortex fluctuations in strongly anisotropic layered superconductors placed in tilted magnetic fields where there are two alignments of vortices: pancake vortices (PV s) oriented along the c-axis, and Josephson vortices (JV s) aligned along the ab-plane. For low enough out-of-plane magnetic fields Hc, the JV sublattice pins some PV s, confining several of their degrees of freedom. This ...

Advances in nanofabrication and nano-scale measurement methods now allow for fabrication of highly detailed nanometer-scale topographic features. As geometric features greatly impact the formation of an electromagnetic field in response to incident light, this in turn calls for the study of the effects of new features of nanostructures on their performance in applications such as localized surf...