Online uniformly inserting points on the sphere

Uniformly inserting points on the sphere has been found useful in many scientific and engineering fields. Different from the offline version where the number of points is known in advance, we consider the online version of this problem. The requests for point insertion arrive one by one and the target is to insert points as uniformly as possible. To measure the uniformity we use gap ratio which is defined as the ratio of the maximal gap to the minimal gap of two arbitrary inserted points. We propose a two-phase online insertion strategy with gap ratio of at most 3.69. Moreover, the lower bound of the gap ratio is proved to be at least 1.78

Modelling of Path Arrival Rate for In-Room Radio Channels with Directive Antennas

We analyze the path arrival rate for an inroom radio channel with directive antennas. The impulse response of this channel exhibits a transition from early separate components followed by a diffuse reverberation tail. Under the assumption that the transmitter's (or receiver's) position and orientation are picked uniformly at random we derive an exact expression of the mean arrival rate for a rectangular room predicted by the mirror source theory. The rate is quadratic in delay, inversely proportional to the room volume, and proportional to the product of beam coverage fractions of the transmitter and receiver antennas. Making use of the exact formula, we characterize the onset of the diffuse tail by defining a "mixing time" as the point in time where the arrival rate exceeds one component per transmit pulse duration. We also give an approximation for the power-delay spectrum. It turns out that the power-delay spectrum is unaffected by the antenna directivity. However, Monte Carlo simulations show that antenna directivity does indeed play an important role for the distribution of instantaneous mean delay and rms delay spreadComment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. Antennas and Propagatio

Simulation studies of a phenomenological model for elongated virus capsid formation

We study a phenomenological model in which the simulated packing of hard, attractive spheres on a prolate spheroid surface with convexity constraints produces structures identical to those of prolate virus capsid structures. Our simulation approach combines the traditional Monte Carlo method with a modified method of random sampling on an ellipsoidal surface and a convex hull searching algorithm. Using this approach we identify the minimum physical requirements for non-icosahedral, elongated virus capsids, such as two aberrant flock house virus (FHV) particles and the prolate prohead of bacteriophage $\phi_{29}$, and discuss the implication of our simulation results in the context of recent experimental findings. Our predicted structures may also be experimentally realized by evaporation-driven assembly of colloidal spheres

Structure of penetrable-rod fluids: Exact properties and comparison between Monte Carlo simulations and two analytic theories

Bounded potentials are good models to represent the effective two-body interaction in some colloidal systems, such as dilute solutions of polymer chains in good solvents. The simplest bounded potential is that of penetrable spheres, which takes a positive finite value if the two spheres are overlapped, being 0 otherwise. Even in the one-dimensional case, the penetrable-rod model is far from trivial, since interactions are not restricted to nearest neighbors and so its exact solution is not known. In this paper we first derive the exact correlation functions of penetrable-rod fluids to second order in density at any temperature, as well as in the high-temperature and zero-temperature limits at any density. Next, two simple analytic theories are constructed: a high-temperature approximation based on the exact asymptotic behavior in the limit $T\to\infty$ and a low-temperature approximation inspired by the exact result in the opposite limit $T\to 0$. Finally, we perform Monte Carlo simulations for a wide range of temperatures and densities to assess the validity of both theories. It is found that they complement each other quite well, exhibiting a good agreement with the simulation data within their respective domains of applicability and becoming practically equivalent on the borderline of those domains. A perspective on the extension of both approaches to the more realistic three-dimensional case is provided.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, 4 tables: v2: minor changes; published final versio

Statistical approach to Casimir-Polder potentials in heterogeneous media

We explore the statistical properties of the Casimir-Polder potential between a dielectric sphere and a three-dimensional heterogeneous medium, by means of extensive numerical simulations based on the scattering theory of Casimir forces. The simulations allow us to confirm recent predictions for the mean and standard deviation of the Casimir potential, and give us access to its full distribution function in the limit of a dilute distribution of heterogeneities. These predictions are compared with a simple statistical model based on a pairwise summation of the individual contributions of the constituting elements of the medium.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure

Characterization of Maximally Random Jammed Sphere Packings: II. Correlation Functions and Density Fluctuations

In the first paper of this series, we introduced Voronoi correlation functions to characterize the structure of maximally random jammed (MRJ) sphere packings across length scales. In the present paper, we determine a variety of correlation functions that can be rigorously related to effective physical properties of MRJ sphere packings and compare them to the corresponding statistical descriptors for overlapping spheres and equilibrium hard-sphere systems. Such structural descriptors arise in rigorous bounds and formulas for effective transport properties, diffusion and reactions constants, elastic moduli, and electromagnetic characteristics. First, we calculate the two-point, surface-void, and surface-surface correlation functions, for which we derive explicit analytical formulas for finite hard-sphere packings. We show analytically how the contacts between spheres in the MRJ packings translate into distinct functional behaviors of these two-point correlation functions that do not arise in the other two models examined here. Then, we show how the spectral density distinguishes the MRJ packings from the other disordered systems in that the spectral density vanishes in the limit of infinite wavelengths. These packings are hyperuniform, which means that density fluctuations on large length scales are anomalously suppressed. Moreover, we study and compute exclusion probabilities and pore size distributions as well as local density fluctuations. We conjecture that for general disordered hard-sphere packings, a central limit theorem holds for the number of points within an spherical observation window. Our analysis links problems of interest in material science, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. In the third paper, we will evaluate bounds and estimates of a host of different physical properties of the MRJ sphere packings based on the structural characteristics analyzed in this paper.Comment: 25 pages, 13 Figures; corrected typos, updated reference

Spin relaxation dynamics of quasiclassical electrons in ballistic quantum dots with strong spin-orbit coupling

We performed path integral simulations of spin evolution controlled by the Rashba spin-orbit interaction in the semiclassical regime for chaotic and regular quantum dots. The spin polarization dynamics have been found to be strikingly different from the D'yakonov-Perel' (DP) spin relaxation in bulk systems. Also an important distinction have been found between long time spin evolutions in classically chaotic and regular systems. In the former case the spin polarization relaxes to zero within relaxation time much larger than the DP relaxation, while in the latter case it evolves to a time independent residual value. The quantum mechanical analysis of the spin evolution based on the exact solution of the Schroedinger equation with Rashba SOI has confirmed the results of the classical simulations for the circular dot, which is expected to be valid in general regular systems. In contrast, the spin relaxation down to zero in chaotic dots contradicts to what have to be expected from quantum mechanics. This signals on importance at long time of the mesoscopic echo effect missed in the semiclassical simulations.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure

A practical guide to computer simulations

Here practical aspects of conducting research via computer simulations are discussed. The following issues are addressed: software engineering, object-oriented software development, programming style, macros, make files, scripts, libraries, random numbers, testing, debugging, data plotting, curve fitting, finite-size scaling, information retrieval, and preparing presentations. Because of the limited space, usually only short introductions to the specific areas are given and references to more extensive literature are cited. All examples of code are in C/C++.Comment: 69 pages, with permission of Wiley-VCH, see http://www.wiley-vch.de (some screenshots with poor quality due to arXiv size restrictions) A comprehensively extended version will appear in spring 2009 as book at Word-Scientific, see http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/6988.htm