We outline the universal and finite temperature critical properties of the 3D-XY model, extended to anisotropic extreme type-II superconductors, as well as the universal quantum critical properties in 2D. On this basis we review: (i) the mounting evidence for 3D-XY behavior in optimally doped cuprate superconductors and the 3D to 2D crossover in the underdoped regime; (ii) the finite size limit...

We show that all of the relevant features of a phase transition can be determined using a non-order-parameter field which is a physical state of the theory. This fact allows us to describe the deconfining transition of the pure Yang-Mills theory via the physical excitations rather than using the Polyakov loop.

The low energy excitation of the rotating D3-branes is thermodynamically stable up to a critical angular momentum density. This indicates that there is a corresponding phase transition of the N=4 large N super Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature. On the side of supergravity, we investigate the phase transition in the grand canonical ensemble and canonical ensemble. Some critical exponents o...

Four-dimensional quantum gravity is a complex theory due to the unboundedness of the pure gravitational action, its non-renormalizability and non-polynomial nature 1. We will concentrate here on the simplicial formulation of quantum gravity also known as Regge calculus (for a review, see refs. 2,3). One of the advantages of the approach lies in the fact that it can be formulated in any space-ti...

Self-avoiding walks, lattice trees and lattice animals, and percolation are among the simplest models exhibiting the general features of critical phenomena. A basic problem is to prove the existence of critical exponents governing their behavior near the critical point. This problem gains importance from interrelations between these models and models of ferromagnetism such as the Ising model, a...

We present numerical data and scaling theories for the critical behavior of random resistor networks near the percolation threshold. We determine the critical exponents of a suitably defined resistance correlation function by a Padé analysis of low-concentration expansions as a function of dimensionality. We verify that d=6 is the critical dimensionality for the onset of mean-field behavior. We...

We study the effects of curved background geometries on the critical behavior of scalar field theory. In particular we concentrate on two maximally symmetric spaces: d-dimensional spheres and hyperboloids. In the first part of the paper, by applying the Ginzburg criterion, we find that for large correlation length the Gaussian approximation is valid on the hyperboloid for any dimension d ≥ 2, w...

Overall, the results of this research demonstrated the effectiveness of behavior-based safety (BBS) interventions for increasing safe work behaviors and reducing injuries. Without exception, organizations participating in our research realized an improvement in their safety records after implementing a BBS process. Such success, however, was not always easily achieved. This helped identify a nu...

We study the universal thermodynamic properties of systems consisting of many coupled oscillators operating in the vicinity of a homogeneous oscillating instability. In the thermodynamic limit, the Hopf bifurcation is a dynamic critical point far from equilibrium described by a statistical field theory. We perform a perturbative renormalization group study, and show that at the critical point a...

The following critical phenomenon was recently discovered. When a memoryless source is compressed using a variable-length fixed-distortion code, the fastest convergence rate of the (pointwise) compression ratio to R(D) is either O( √ n) or O(logn). We show it is always O( √ n), except for discrete, uniformly distributed sources. Keywords—Redundancy, rate-distortion theory, lossy data compression