25,166 research outputs found
Thermodynamic phase transitions and shock singularities
We show that under rather general assumptions on the form of the entropy
function, the energy balance equation for a system in thermodynamic equilibrium
is equivalent to a set of nonlinear equations of hydrodynamic type. This set of
equations is integrable via the method of the characteristics and it provides
the equation of state for the gas. The shock wave catastrophe set identifies
the phase transition. A family of explicitly solvable models of
non-hydrodynamic type such as the classical plasma and the ideal Bose gas are
also discussed.Comment: revised version, 18 pages, 6 figure
Development of lightweight fire retardant, low-smoke, high-strength, thermally stable aircraft floor paneling
Fire resistance mechanical property tests were conducted on sandwich configurations composed of resin-fiberglass laminates bonded with adhesives to Nomex honeycomb core. The test results were compared to proposed and current requirements for aircraft floor panel applications to demonstrate that the fire safety of the airplane could be improved without sacrificing mechanical performance of the aircraft floor panels
Effective Kinetic Theory for High Temperature Gauge Theories
Quasiparticle dynamics in relativistic plasmas associated with hot,
weakly-coupled gauge theories (such as QCD at asymptotically high temperature
) can be described by an effective kinetic theory, valid on sufficiently
large time and distance scales. The appropriate Boltzmann equations depend on
effective scattering rates for various types of collisions that can occur in
the plasma. The resulting effective kinetic theory may be used to evaluate
observables which are dominantly sensitive to the dynamics of typical
ultrarelativistic excitations. This includes transport coefficients
(viscosities and diffusion constants) and energy loss rates. We show how to
formulate effective Boltzmann equations which will be adequate to compute such
observables to leading order in the running coupling of high-temperature
gauge theories [and all orders in ]. As previously proposed
in the literature, a leading-order treatment requires including both
particle scattering processes as well as effective ``'' collinear
splitting processes in the Boltzmann equations. The latter account for nearly
collinear bremsstrahlung and pair production/annihilation processes which take
place in the presence of fluctuations in the background gauge field. Our
effective kinetic theory is applicable not only to near-equilibrium systems
(relevant for the calculation of transport coefficients), but also to highly
non-equilibrium situations, provided some simple conditions on distribution
functions are satisfied.Comment: 40 pages, new subsection on soft gauge field instabilities adde
High-energy gluon bremsstrahlung in a finite medium: harmonic oscillator versus single scattering approximation
A particle produced in a hard collision can lose energy through
bremsstrahlung. It has long been of interest to calculate the effect on
bremsstrahlung if the particle is produced inside a finite-size QCD medium such
as a quark-gluon plasma. For the case of very high-energy particles traveling
through the background of a weakly-coupled quark-gluon plasma, it is known how
to reduce this problem to an equivalent problem in non-relativistic
two-dimensional quantum mechanics. Analytic solutions, however, have always
resorted to further approximations. One is a harmonic oscillator approximation
to the corresponding quantum mechanics problem, which is appropriate for
sufficiently thick media. Another is to formally treat the particle as having
only a single significant scattering from the plasma (known as the N=1 term of
the opacity expansion), which is appropriate for sufficiently thin media. In a
broad range of intermediate cases, these two very different approximations give
surprisingly similar but slightly differing results if one works to leading
logarithmic order in the particle energy, and there has been confusion about
the range of validity of each approximation. In this paper, I sort out in
detail the parametric range of validity of these two approximations at leading
logarithmic order. For simplicity, I study the problem for small alpha_s and
large logarithms but alpha_s log << 1.Comment: 40 pages, 23 figures [Primary change since v1: addition of new
appendix reviewing transverse momentum distribution from multiple scattering
The Biot-Savart operator and electrodynamics on subdomains of the three-sphere
We study steady-state magnetic fields in the geometric setting of positive
curvature on subdomains of the three-dimensional sphere. By generalizing the
Biot-Savart law to an integral operator BS acting on all vector fields, we show
that electrodynamics in such a setting behaves rather similarly to Euclidean
electrodynamics. For instance, for current J and magnetic field BS(J), we show
that Maxwell's equations naturally hold. In all instances, the formulas we give
are geometrically meaningful: they are preserved by orientation-preserving
isometries of the three-sphere.
This article describes several properties of BS: we show it is self-adjoint,
bounded, and extends to a compact operator on a Hilbert space. For vector
fields that act like currents, we prove the curl operator is a left inverse to
BS; thus the Biot-Savart operator is important in the study of curl
eigenvalues, with applications to energy-minimization problems in geometry and
physics. We conclude with two examples, which indicate our bounds are typically
within an order of magnitude of being sharp.Comment: 24 pages (was 28 pages) Revised to include a new introduction, a
detailed example, and results about helicity; other changes for readabilit
Two-dimensional topological gravity and equivariant cohomology
In this paper, we examine the analogy between topological string theory and
equivariant cohomology. We also show that the equivariant cohomology of a
topological conformal field theory carries a certain algebraic structure, which
we call a gravity algebra. (Error on page 9 corrected: BRS current contains
total derivatives.)Comment: 18 page
SDiff(2) and uniqueness of the Pleba\'{n}ski equation
The group of area preserving diffeomorphisms showed importance in the
problems of self-dual gravity and integrability theory. We discuss how
representations of this infinite-dimensional Lie group can arise in
mathematical physics from pure local considerations. Then using Lie algebra
extensions and cohomology we derive the second Pleba\'{n}ski equation and its
geometry. We do not use K\"ahler or other additional structures but obtain the
equation solely from the geometry of area preserving transformations group. We
conclude that the Pleba\'{n}ski equation is Lie remarkable
Dynamical stabilization of matter-wave solitons revisited
We consider dynamical stabilization of Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) by
time-dependent modulation of the scattering length. The problem has been
studied before by several methods: Gaussian variational approximation, the
method of moments, method of modulated Townes soliton, and the direct averaging
of the Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation. We summarize these methods and find that
the numerically obtained stabilized solution has different configuration than
that assumed by the theoretical methods (in particular a phase of the
wavefunction is not quadratic with ). We show that there is presently no
clear evidence for stabilization in a strict sense, because in the numerical
experiments only metastable (slowly decaying) solutions have been obtained. In
other words, neither numerical nor mathematical evidence for a new kind of
soliton solutions have been revealed so far. The existence of the metastable
solutions is nevertheless an interesting and complicated phenomenon on its own.
We try some non-Gaussian variational trial functions to obtain better
predictions for the critical nonlinearity for metastabilization but
other dynamical properties of the solutions remain difficult to predict
Development of aircraft lavatory compartments with improved fire resistance characteristics, phase 1: Fire containment test of a wide body aircraft lavatory module
A test was conducted to evaluate the fire containment characteristics of a Boeing 747 lavatory module. Results showed that the fire was contained within the lavatory during the 30-minute test period with the door closed. The resistance of the lavatory wall and ceiling panels and general lavatory construction to burn-through under the test conditions was demonstrated
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