Heat Transport in Mesoscopic Systems

Phonon heat transport in mesoscopic systems is investigated using methods analogous to the Landauer description of electrical conductance. A "universal heat conductance" expression that depends on the properties of the conducting pathway only through the mode cutoff frequencies is derived. Corrections due to reflections at the junction between the thermal body and the conducting bridge are found to be small except at very low temperatures where only the lowest few bridge modes are excited. Various non-equilibrium phonon distributions are studied: a narrow band distribution leads to clear steps in the cooling curve, analogous to the quantized resistance values in narrow wires, but a thermal distribution is too broad to show such features.Comment: To be published in Superlattices and Microstructures, special issue in honor of Rolf Landauer, March 198

A microfluidic technique for generating monodisperse submicron-sized drops

International audienceWe present a route for producing monodisperse micro and nanodrops that is based on a liquid-gas phase transition occurring within a microfluidic device. A gas which is soluble in water is mixed with an insoluble one and injected into an aqueous surfactant solution, using a microfluidic device that produces monodisperse bubbles. As the soluble gas diffuses out of the bubbles, they shrink and the remaining insoluble gas condenses into drops. Their radius can be tuned over a wide range by changing the initial gas mixing ratio

Low-temperature heat transfer in nanowires

The new regime of low-temperature heat transfer in suspended nanowires is predicted. It takes place when (i) only ``acoustic'' phonon modes of the wire are thermally populated and (ii) phonons are subject to the effective elastic scattering. Qualitatively, the main peculiarities of heat transfer originate due to appearance of the flexural modes with high density of states in the wire phonon spectrum. They give rise to the $T^{1/2}$ temperature dependence of the wire thermal conductance. The experimental situations where the new regime is likely to be detected are discussed.Comment: RevTex file, 1 PS figur

Effect of phonon scattering by surface roughness on the universal thermal conductance

The effect of phonon scattering by surface roughness on the thermal conductance in mesoscopic systems at low temperatures is calculated using full elasticity theory. The low frequency behavior of the scattering shows novel power law dependences arising from the unusual properties of the elastic modes. This leads to new predictions for the low temperature depression of the thermal conductance below the ideal universal value. Comparison with the data of Schwab et al. [Nature 404, 974 (2000)] suggests that surface roughness on a scale of the width of the thermal pathway is important in the experiment.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Bloch-Wall Phase Transition in the Spherical Model

The temperature-induced second-order phase transition from Bloch to linear (Ising-like) domain walls in uniaxial ferromagnets is investigated for the model of D-component classical spin vectors in the limit D \to \infty. This exactly soluble model is equivalent to the standard spherical model in the homogeneous case, but deviates from it and is free from unphysical behavior in a general inhomogeneous situation. It is shown that the thermal fluctuations of the transverse magnetization in the wall (the Bloch-wall order parameter) result in the diminishing of the wall transition temperature T_B in comparison to its mean-field value, thus favouring the existence of linear walls. For finite values of T_B an additional anisotropy in the basis plane x,y is required; in purely uniaxial ferromagnets a domain wall behaves like a 2-dimensional system with a continuous spin symmetry and does not order into the Bloch one.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figure

Gentle Perturbations of the Free Bose Gas I

It is demonstrated that the thermal structure of the noncritical free Bose Gas is completely described by certain periodic generalized Gaussian stochastic process or equivalently by certain periodic generalized Gaussian random field. Elementary properties of this Gaussian stochastic thermal structure have been established. Gentle perturbations of several types of the free thermal stochastic structure are studied. In particular new models of non-Gaussian thermal structures have been constructed and a new functional integral representation of the corresponding euclidean-time Green functions have been obtained rigorously.Comment: 51 pages, LaTeX fil

Implications of a High-Mass Diphoton Resonance for Heavy Quark Searches

Heavy vector-like quarks coupled to a scalar $S$ will induce a coupling of this scalar to gluons and possibly (if electrically charged) photons. The decay of the heavy quark into $Sq$, with $q$ being a Standard Model quark, provides, if kinematically allowed, new channels for heavy quark searches. Inspired by naturalness considerations, we consider the case of a vector-like partner of the top quark. For illustration, we show that a singlet partner can be searched for at the 13$\,$TeV LHC through its decay into a scalar resonance in the $2\gamma+\ell + X$ final states, especially if the diphoton branching ratio of the scalar $S$ is further enhanced by the contribution of non coloured particles. We then show that conventional heavy quark searches are also sensitive to this new decay mode, when $S$ decays hadronically, by slightly tightening the current selection cuts. Finally, we comment about the possibility of disentangling, by scrutinising appropriate kinematic distributions, heavy quark decays to $St$ from other standard decay modes.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures and 1 table; v3: typos fixed. Matches published versio

Bound Magnetic Polaron Interactions in Insulating Doped Diluted Magnetic Semiconductors

The magnetic behavior of insulating doped diluted magnetic semiconductors (DMS) is characterized by the interaction of large collective spins known as bound magnetic polarons. Experimental measurements of the susceptibility of these materials have suggested that the polaron-polaron interaction is ferromagnetic, in contrast to the antiferromagnetic carrier-carrier interactions that are characteristic of nonmagnetic semiconductors. To explain this behavior, a model has been developed in which polarons interact via both the standard direct carrier-carrier exchange interaction (due to virtual carrier hopping) and an indirect carrier-ion-carrier exchange interaction (due to the interactions of polarons with magnetic ions in an interstitial region). Using a variational procedure, the optimal values of the model parameters were determined as a function of temperature. At temperatures of interest, the parameters describing polaron-polaron interactions were found to be nearly temperature-independent. For reasonable values of these constant parameters, we find that indirect ferromagnetic interactions can dominate the direct antiferromagnetic interactions and cause the polarons to align. This result supports the experimental evidence for ferromagnetism in insulating doped DMS.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Applications of quark-hadron duality in F2 structure function

Inclusive electron-proton and electron-deuteron inelastic cross sections have been measured at Jefferson Lab (JLab) in the resonance region, at large Bjorken x, up to 0.92, and four-momentum transfer squared Q2 up to 7.5 GeV2 in the experiment E00-116. These measurements are used to extend to larger x and Q2 precision, quantitative, studies of the phenomenon of quark-hadron duality. Our analysis confirms, both globally and locally, the apparent violation of quark-hadron duality previously observed at a Q2 of 3.5 GeV2 when resonance data are compared to structure function data created from CTEQ6M and MRST2004 parton distribution functions (PDFs). More importantly, our new data show that this discrepancy saturates by Q2 ~ 4 Gev2, becoming Q2 independent. This suggests only small violations of Q2 evolution by contributions from the higher-twist terms in the resonance region which is confirmed by our comparisons to ALEKHIN and ALLM97.We conclude that the unconstrained strength of the CTEQ6M and MRST2004 PDFs at large x is the major source of the disagreement between data and these parameterizations in the kinematic regime we study and that, in view of quark-hadron duality, properly averaged resonance region data could be used in global QCD fits to reduce PDF uncertainties at large x.Comment: 35 page