12,746 research outputs found
Problems in J times B plasma acceleration Semiannual progress report
Shock tube accelerator, heat transfer gauge, homopolar accelerator theory, and transport effects in boundary layers in plasma
Air pollution from aircraft
A series of fundamental problems related to jet engine air pollution and combustion were examined. These include soot formation and oxidation, nitric oxide and carbon monoxide emissions mechanisms, pollutant dispension, flow and combustion characteristics of the NASA swirl can combustor, fuel atomization and fuel-air mixing processes, fuel spray drop velocity and size measurement, ignition and blowout. A summary of this work, and a bibliography of 41 theses and publications which describe this work, with abstracts, is included
Self heating and nonlinear current-voltage characteristics in bilayer graphene
We demonstrate by experiments and numerical simulations that the
low-temperature current-voltage characteristics in diffusive bilayer graphene
(BLG) exhibit a strong superlinearity at finite bias voltages. The
superlinearity is weakly dependent on doping and on the length of the graphene
sample. This effect can be understood as a result of Joule heating. It is
stronger in BLG than in monolayer graphene (MLG), since the conductivity of BLG
is more sensitive to temperature due to the higher density of electronic states
at the Dirac point.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, REVTeX 4.
Quantum dynamics of a dc-SQUID coupled to an asymmetric Cooper pair transistor
We present a theoretical analysis of the quantum dynamics of a
superconducting circuit based on a highly asymmetric Cooper pair transistor
(ACPT) in parallel to a dc-SQUID. Starting from the full Hamiltonian we show
that the circuit can be modeled as a charge qubit (ACPT) coupled to an
anharmonic oscillator (dc-SQUID). Depending on the anharmonicity of the SQUID,
the Hamiltonian can be reduced either to one that describes two coupled qubits
or to the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian. Here the dc-SQUID can be viewed as a
tunable micron-size resonator. The coupling term, which is a combination of a
capacitive and a Josephson coupling between the two qubits, can be tuned from
the very strong- to the zero-coupling regimes. It describes very precisely the
tunable coupling strength measured in this circuit and explains the
'quantronium' as well as the adiabatic quantum transfer read-out.Comment: 20 page
Decoherence processes in a current biased dc SQUID
A current bias dc SQUID behaves as an anharmonic quantum oscillator
controlled by a bias current and an applied magnetic flux. We consider here its
two level limit consisting of the two lower energy states | 0 \right> and |
1 \right>. We have measured energy relaxation times and microwave absorption
for different bias currents and fluxes in the low microwave power limit.
Decoherence times are extracted. The low frequency flux and current noise have
been measured independently by analyzing the probability of current switching
from the superconducting to the finite voltage state, as a function of applied
flux. The high frequency part of the current noise is derived from the
electromagnetic environment of the circuit. The decoherence of this quantum
circuit can be fully accounted by these current and flux noise sources.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Effect of spin orbit scattering on the magnetic and superconducting properties of nearly ferromagnetic metals: application to granular Pt
We calculate the effect of scattering on the static, exchange enhanced, spin
susceptibility and show that in particular spin orbit scattering leads to a
reduction of the giant moments and spin glass freezing temperature due to
dilute magnetic impurities. The harmful spin fluctuation contribution to the
intra-grain pairing interaction is strongly reduced opening the way for BCS
superconductivity. We are thus able to explain the superconducting and magnetic
properties recently observed in granular Pt as due to scattering effects in
single small grains.Comment: 9 pages 3 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Letter
Nanosecond quantum state detection in a current biased dc SQUID
This article presents our procedure to measure the quantum state of a dc
SQUID within a few nanoseconds, using an adiabatic dc flux pulse. Detection of
the ground state is governed by standard macroscopic quantum theory (MQT), with
a small correction due to residual noise in the bias current. In the two level
limit, where the SQUID constitutes a phase qubit, an observed contrast of 0.54
indicates a significant loss in contrast compared to the MQT prediction. It is
attributed to spurious depolarization (loss of excited state occupancy) during
the leading edge of the adiabatic flux measurement pulse. We give a simple
phenomenological relaxation model which is able to predict the observed
contrast of multilevel Rabi oscillations for various microwave amplitudes.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure
Shot noise and conductivity at high bias in bilayer graphene: Signatures of electron-optical phonon coupling
We have studied electronic conductivity and shot noise of bilayer graphene
(BLG) sheets at high bias voltages and low bath temperature K. As a
function of bias, we find initially an increase of the differential
conductivity, which we attribute to self-heating. At higher bias, the
conductivity saturates and even decreases due to backscattering from optical
phonons. The electron-phonon interactions are also responsible for the decay of
the Fano factor at bias voltages V. The high bias electronic
temperature has been calculated from shot noise measurements, and it goes up to
K at V. Using the theoretical temperature dependence of BLG
conductivity, we extract an effective electron-optical phonon scattering time
. In a 230 nm long BLG sample of mobility
cmVs, we find that decreases with increasing
voltage and is close to the charged impurity scattering time fs
at V.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures. Extended version of the high bias part of version
1. The low bias part is discussed in arXiv:1102.065
Fluorescent visualization of a spreading surfactant
The spreading of surfactants on thin films is an industrially and medically
important phenomenon, but the dynamics are highly nonlinear and visualization
of the surfactant dynamics has been a long-standing experimental challenge. We
perform the first quantitative, spatiotemporally-resolved measurements of the
spreading of an insoluble surfactant on a thin fluid layer. During the
spreading process, we directly observe both the radial height profile of the
spreading droplet and the spatial distribution of the fluorescently-tagged
surfactant. We find that the leading edge of spreading circular layer of
surfactant forms a Marangoni ridge in the underlying fluid, with a trough
trailing the ridge as expected. However, several novel features are observed
using the fluorescence technique, including a peak in the surfactant
concentration which trails the leading edge, and a flat, monolayer-scale
spreading film which differs from concentration profiles predicted by current
models. Both the Marangoni ridge and surfactant leading edge can be described
to spread as . We find spreading exponents, and for the ridge peak and
surfactant leading edge, respectively, which are in good agreement with
theoretical predictions of . In addition, we observe that the
surfactant leading edge initially leads the peak of the Marangoni ridge, with
the peak later catching up to the leading edge
Energy relaxation in graphene and its measurement with supercurrent
We study inelastic energy relaxation in graphene for low energies to find out
how electrons scatter with acoustic phonons and other electrons. By coupling
the graphene to superconductors, we create a strong dependence of the measured
signal, i.e.,\ critical Josephson current, on the electron population on
different energy states. Since the relative population of high- and low-energy
states is determined by the inelastic scattering processes, the critical
current becomes an effective probe for their strength. We argue that the
electron-electron interaction is the dominant relaxation method and, in our
model of two-dimensional electron-electron scattering, we find a scattering
time ps at T=500 mK, 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than
predicted by theory.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures submitted to Physical Review
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