Optical modes in linear arrays of dielectric spherical particles: A numerical investigation

We have investigated bound modes in finite linear chains of dielectric particles of various lengths, interparticle spacing and particle materials. Through a unique application of the multisphere Mie scattering formalism, we have developed numerical methods to calculate eigen-optical modes for various arrays of particles. These numerical methods involve the use of the multisphere scattering formalism as the entries in NxN matrices where N represents the number of particles in the chain. Eigenmodes of these matrices correspond to the eigen-optical modes of interest. We identified the eigenmodes with the highest quality factor by the application of a modified version of the Newton-Raphson algorithm. We found that convergence is strong using this algorithm for linear chains of up to several hundreds of particles. By comparing the dipolar approach with the more complex approach which utilizes a combination of both dipolar and quadrupolar approaches, we demonstrated that the dipolar approach has an accuracy of approximately 99%. We found that the quality factor Q of the mode increases with the cubed value of the number of particles in chain in agreement with the previously developed theory, the effects of disordering of particle sizes and inter-particle distances will be discussed.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings of SPI

Rapid rotation of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a harmonic plus quartic trap

A two-dimensional rapidly rotating Bose-Einstein condensate in an anharmonic trap with quadratic and quartic radial confinement is studied analytically with the Thomas-Fermi approximation and numerically with the full time-independent Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The quartic trap potential allows the rotation speed $\Omega$ to exceed the radial harmonic frequency $\omega_\perp$. In the regime $\Omega \gtrsim \omega_\perp$, the condensate contains a dense vortex array (approximated as solid-body rotation for the analytical studies). At a critical angular velocity $\Omega_h$, a central hole appears in the condensate. Numerical studies confirm the predicted value of $\Omega_h$, even for interaction parameters that are not in the Thomas-Fermi limit. The behavior is also investigated at larger angular velocities, where the system is expected to undergo a transition to a giant vortex (with pure irrotational flow).Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

Measurements of the Influence of Acceleration and Temperature of Bodies on their Weight

A brief review of experimental research of the influence of acceleration and temperatures of test mass upon gravitation force, executed between the 1990s and the beginning of 2000 is provided.Results of weighing a rotor of a mechanical gyroscope with a horizontal axis, an anisotropic crystal with the big difference of the speed of longitudinal acoustic waves, measurements of temperature dependence of weight of metal bars of non-magnetic materials, and also measurement of restitution coefficients at quasi-elastic impact of a steel ball about a massive plate are given. A negative temperature dependence of the weight of a brass core was measured. All observably experimental effects, have probably a general physical reason connected with the weight change dependent upon acceleration of a body or at thermal movement of its microparticles.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures. Presented at the 5-th Symposium on New Frontiers and Future Concepts (STAIF-2008

Towards active microfluidics: Interface turbulence in thin liquid films with floating molecular machines

Thin liquid films with floating active protein machines are considered. Cyclic mechanical motions within the machines, representing microscopic swimmers, lead to molecular propulsion forces applied to the air-liquid interface. We show that, when the rate of energy supply to the machines exceeds a threshold, the flat interface becomes linearly unstable. As the result of this instability, the regime of interface turbulence, characterized by irregular traveling waves and propagating machine clusters, is established. Numerical investigations of this nonlinear regime are performed. Conditions for the experimental observation of the instability are discussed.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, RevTeX, submitted to Physical Review

Flexoelectric effect in finite samples

Static flexoelectric effect in a finite sample of a solid is addressed in terms of phenomenological theory for the case of a thin plate subjected to bending. It has been shown that despite an explicit asymmetry inherent to the bulk constitutive electromechanical equations which take into account the flexoelectric coupling, the electromechanical response for a finite sample is "symmetric". "Symmetric" means that if a sensor and an actuator are made of a flexoelectric element, performance of such devices can be characterized by the same effective piezoelectric coefficient. This behavior is consistent with the thermodynamic arguments offered earlier, being in conflict with the current point of view on the matter in literature. This result was obtained using standard mechanical boundary conditions valid for the case where the polarization vanishes at the surface. It was shown that, for the case where there is the polarization is nonzero at the surface, the aforementioned symmetry of electromechanical response may be violated if standard mechanical boundary conditions are used, leading to a conflict with the thermodynamic arguments. It was argued that this conflict may be resolved when using modified mechanical boundary conditions. It was also shown that the contribution of surface piezoelectricity to the flexoelectric response of a finite sample is expected to be comparable to that of the static bulk contribution (including the material with high values of the dielectric constant) and to scale as the bulk value of the dielectric constant (similar to the bulk contribution). This finding implies that if the experimentally measured flexoelectric coefficient scales as the dielectric constant of the material, this does not imply that the measured flexoelectric response is controlled by the static bulk contribution to the flexoelectric effect

Locally accurate MPS approximations for ground states of one-dimensional gapped local Hamiltonians

A key feature of ground states of gapped local 1D Hamiltonians is their relatively low entanglement --- they are well approximated by matrix product states (MPS) with bond dimension scaling polynomially in the length $N$ of the chain, while general states require a bond dimension scaling exponentially. We show that the bond dimension of these MPS approximations can be improved to a constant, independent of the chain length, if we relax our notion of approximation to be more local: for all length-$k$ segments of the chain, the reduced density matrices of our approximations are $\epsilon$-close to those of the exact state. If the state is a ground state of a gapped local Hamiltonian, the bond dimension of the approximation scales like $(k/\epsilon)^{1+o(1)}$, and at the expense of worse but still $\text{poly}(k,1/\epsilon)$ scaling of the bond dimension, we give an alternate construction with the additional features that it can be generated by a constant-depth quantum circuit with nearest-neighbor gates, and that it applies generally for any state with exponentially decaying correlations. For a completely general state, we give an approximation with bond dimension $\exp(O(k/\epsilon))$, which is exponentially worse, but still independent of $N$. Then, we consider the prospect of designing an algorithm to find a local approximation for ground states of gapped local 1D Hamiltonians. When the Hamiltonian is translationally invariant, we show that the ability to find $O(1)$-accurate local approximations to the ground state in $T(N)$ time implies the ability to estimate the ground state energy to $O(1)$ precision in $O(T(N)\log(N))$ time.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures. v2: Theorem 1 extended to include construction for general states; Lemma 7 & Theorem 2 slightly improved; figures added; lemmas rearranged for clarity; typos fixed. v3: Reformatted & additional references inserte