Fano direct products as rationally connected fibrations

Combining the connectedness principle of Shokurov and Kollár, we develop a new technique of studying birational maps of natural Fano fiber spaces. We prove that the only structures of a rationally connected fibration on direct products of typical Fano varieties are projections onto the factors. In particular, the groups of biregular and birational self-maps of Fano direct products coincide. __________ Translated from Fundamentalnaya i Prikladnaya Matematika, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 183–206, 2004.     

Calculation of the bond ionicity in complex oxides

A technique for calculating the bond ionicity of crystalline materials using electronegativities of elements and taking into account the structure of polyhedra of the complex-oxide structure is proposed.     

The effect of technological microdefects of structure on service life of polymer materials

Within the framework of the kinetic theory of strength, relations for estimation of durability of thermoplastic materials under stationary and non-stationary thermomechanical impacts are obtained It is shown that durability decreases linearly with increase in the natural (Napierian) logarithm of the mean size of microcracks formed during manufacturing of polymer products. __________ Translated from Izvestiya Vysshikh Uchebnykh Zavedenii, Fizika, No. 7, pp. 3–6, July, 2007.     

Hydrodynamics of an expanding fireball

A set of relativistic hydrodynamic equations is solved numerically on the basis of the flux-corrected SHASTA method for one-, two-, and three-dimensional geometries. The accuracy of the proposed method is demonstrated via a comparison with exact analytic solutions for the one-dimensional Riemann problem and a boost-invariant longitudinal expansion in the Bjorken model. The example of an expanding three-dimensional fireball for which initial conditions approximately correspond to PbPb collisions at an energy of about 160 GeV per nucleon is considered. This example indicates that the presumed dynamics of the expansion may affect substantially the results of an analysis of in-medium properties of hadrons that relies on data from experiments with leptons.