Radiative Bulk Viscosity

Viscous resistance to changes in the volume of a gas arises when different degrees of freedom have different relaxation times. Collisions tend to oppose the resulting departures from equilibrium and, in so doing, generate entropy. Even for a classical gas of hard spheres, when the mean free paths or mean flight times of constituent particles are long, we find a nonvanishing bulk viscosity. Here we apply a method recently used to uncover this result for a classical rarefied gas to radiative transfer theory and derive an expression for the radiative stress tensor for a gray medium with absorption and Thomson scattering. We determine the transport coefficients through the calculation of the comoving entropy generation. When scattering dominates absorption, the bulk viscosity becomes much larger than either the shear viscosity or the thermal conductivity.Comment: 17 pages. Latex with referee style file of MNRAS (mn.sty). MNRAS, in pres

Additive Volume of Sets Contained in Few Arithmetic Progressions

A conjecture of Freiman gives an exact formula for the largest volume of a finite set $A$ of integers with given cardinality $k = |A|$ and doubling $T = |2A|$. The formula is known to hold when $T \le 3k-4$, for some small range over $3k-4$ and for families of structured sets called chains. In this paper we extend the formula to sets of every dimension and prove it for sets composed of three segments, giving structural results for the extremal case. A weaker extension to sets composed of a bounded number of segments is also discussed.Comment: 16 page

A prospectus for a theory of variable variability

It is proposed that the kind of stellar variability exhibited by the Sun in its magnetic activity cycle should be considered as a prototype of a class of stellar variability. The signature includes long 'periods' (compared to that of the radial fundamental model), erratic behavior, and intermittency. As other phenomena in the same variability class we nominate the liminosity fluctuations of ZZ Ceti stars and the solar 160 m oscillation. We discuss the possibility that analogous physical mechanisms are at work in all these cases, namely instabilities driven in a thin layer. These instabilities should be favorable to grave modes (in angle) and should arise in conditions that may allow more than one kind of instability to occur at once. The interaction of these competing instabilities produces complicated temporal variations. Given suitable idealizations, it is shown how to begin to compute solutions of small, but finite, amplitude

Destabilizing Taylor-Couette flow with suction

We consider the effect of radial fluid injection and suction on Taylor-Couette flow. Injection at the outer cylinder and suction at the inner cylinder generally results in a linearly unstable steady spiralling flow, even for cylindrical shears that are linearly stable in the absence of a radial flux. We study nonlinear aspects of the unstable motions with the energy stability method. Our results, though specialized, may have implications for drag reduction by suction, accretion in astrophysical disks, and perhaps even in the flow in the earth's polar vortex.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figure