1,736,425 research outputs found
Reactor monitoring and safeguards using antineutrino detectors
Nuclear reactors have served as the antineutrino source for many fundamental
physics experiments. The techniques developed by these experiments make it
possible to use these very weakly interacting particles for a practical
purpose. The large flux of antineutrinos that leaves a reactor carries
information about two quantities of interest for safeguards: the reactor power
and fissile inventory. Measurements made with antineutrino detectors could
therefore offer an alternative means for verifying the power history and
fissile inventory of a reactors, as part of International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) and other reactor safeguards regimes. Several efforts to develop this
monitoring technique are underway across the globe.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, Proceedings of XXIII International Conference on
Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics (Neutrino 2008); v2: minor additions to
reference
Semiclassical atom theory applied to solid-state physics
Using the semiclassical neutral atom theory, we extend to fourth order the
modified gradient expansion of the exchange energy of density functional
theory. This expansion can be applied both to large atoms and solid-state
problems. Moreover, we show that it can be employed to construct a simple and
non-empirical generalized gradient approximation (GGA) exchange-correlation
functional competitive with state-of-the-art GGAs for solids, but also
reasonably accurate for large atoms and ordinary chemistry.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure
Path integrals for stiff polymers applied to membrane physics
Path integrals similar to those describing stiff polymers arise in the
Helfrich model for membranes. We show how these types of path integrals can be
evaluated and apply our results to study the thermodynamics of a minority
stripe phase in a bulk membrane. The fluctuation induced contribution to the
line tension between the stripe and the bulk phase is computed, as well as the
effective interaction between the two phases in the tensionless case where the
two phases have differing bending rigidities.Comment: 11 pages RevTex, 4 figure
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