Research of metal solidification in zero-g state

An experiment test apparatus that allows metal melting and resolidification in the three seconds available during free fall in a drop tower was built and tested in the tower. Droplets (approximately 0.05 cm) of pure nickel and 1090 steel were prepared in this fashion. The apparatus, including instrumentation, is described. As part of the instrumentation, a method for measuring temperature-time histories of the free floating metal droplets was developed. Finally, a metallurgical analysis of the specimens prepared in the apparatus is presented

Dissociating visuo-spatial and verbal working memory: It’s all in the features

Echoing many of the themes of the seminal work of Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968), this paper uses the Feature Model (Nairne, 1988, 1990; Neath & Nairne, 1995) to account for performance in working memory tasks. The Brooks verbal and visuo-spatial matrix tasks were performed alone, with articulatory suppression, or with a spatial suppression task; the results produced the expected dissociation. We used Approximate Bayesian Computation techniques to fit the Feature Model to the data and showed that the similarity-based interference process implemented in the model accounted for the data patterns well. We then fit the model to data from Guérard and Tremblay (2008); the latter study produced a double dissociation while calling upon more typical order reconstruction tasks. Again, the model performed well. The findings show that a double dissociation can be modelled without appealing to separate systems for verbal and visuo-spatial processing. The latter findings are significant as the Feature Model had not been used to model this type of dissociation before; importantly, this is also the first time the model is quantitatively fit to data. For the demonstration provided here, modularity was unnecessary if two assumptions were made: (1) the main difference between spatial and verbal working memory tasks is the features that are encoded; (2) secondary tasks selectively interfere with primary tasks to the extent that both tasks involve similar features. It is argued that a feature-based view is more parsimonious (see Morey, 2018) and offers flexibility in accounting for multiple benchmark effects in the field

Convergence of resonances on thin branched quantum wave guides

We prove an abstract criterion stating resolvent convergence in the case of operators acting in different Hilbert spaces. This result is then applied to the case of Laplacians on a family X_\eps of branched quantum waveguides. Combining it with an exterior complex scaling we show, in particular, that the resonances on X_\eps approximate those of the Laplacian with ``free'' boundary conditions on $X_0$, the skeleton graph of X_\eps.Comment: 48 pages, 1 figur

Transport in Ultraclean YBa2_2Cu3_3O7_7: neither Unitary nor Born Impurity Scattering

The thermal conductivity of ultraclean YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_7$ was measured at very low temperature in magnetic fields up to 13 T. The temperature and field dependence of the electronic heat conductivity show that two widespread assumptions of transport theory applied to unconventional superconductors fail for clean cuprates: impurity scattering cannot be treated in the usual unitary limit (nor indeed in the Born limit), and scattering of quasiparticles off vortices cannot be neglected. Our study also sheds light on the long-standing puzzle of a sudden onset of a "plateau" in the thermal conductivity of Bi-2212 versus field.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Physical Review Letter

Determination of Light and Strange Quark Masses from Full Lattice QCD

We compute the light and strange quark masses m_l = (m_u+m_d)/2 and m_s, respectively, in full lattice QCD with N_f=2 flavors of light dynamical quarks. The renormalization constants, which convert bare quark masses into renormalized quark masses, are computed nonperturbatively, including the effect of quark-line disconnected diagrams. We obtain m_l=4.7(2)(3) MeV and m_s=119(5)(8) MeV in the MSbar scheme at the scale 2 GeV.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure

Light pseudoscalar decay constants, quark masses, and low energy constants from three-flavor lattice QCD

As part of our program of lattice simulations of three flavor QCD with improved staggered quarks, we have calculated pseudoscalar meson masses and decay constants for a range of valence quark masses and sea quark masses on lattices with lattice spacings of about 0.125 fm and 0.09 fm. We fit the lattice data to forms computed with staggered chiral perturbation theory. Our results provide a sensitive test of the lattice simulations, and especially of the chiral behavior, including the effects of chiral logarithms. We find: f_\pi=129.5(0.9)(3.5)MeV, f_K=156.6(1.0)(3.6)MeV, and f_K/f_\pi=1.210(4)(13), where the errors are statistical and systematic. Following a recent paper by Marciano, our value of f_K/f_\pi implies |V_{us}|=0.2219(26). Further, we obtain m_u/m_d= 0.43(0)(1)(8), where the errors are from statistics, simulation systematics, and electromagnetic effects, respectively. The data can also be used to determine several of the constants of the low energy effective Lagrangian: in particular we find 2L_8-L_5=-0.2(1)(2) 10^{-3} at chiral scale m_\eta. This provides an alternative (though not independent) way of estimating m_u; 2L_8-L_5 is far outside the range that would allow m_u=0. Results for m_s^\msbar, \hat m^\msbar, and m_s/\hat m can be obtained from the same lattice data and chiral fits, and have been presented previously in joint work with the HPQCD and UKQCD collaborations. Using the perturbative mass renormalization reported in that work, we obtain m_u^\msbar=1.7(0)(1)(2)(2)MeV and m_d^\msbar=3.9(0)(1)(4)(2)MeV at scale 2 GeV, with errors from statistics, simulation, perturbation theory, and electromagnetic effects, respectively.Comment: 86 pages, 22 figures. v3: Remarks about m_u=0 and the strong CP problem modified; reference added. Figs 5--8 modified for clarity. Version to be published in Phys. Rev. D. v2: Expanded discussion of finite volume effects, normalization in Table I fixed, typos and minor errors correcte

Force traction microscopy: An inverse problem with pointwise observations

Force Traction Microscopy is an inversion method that allows to obtain the stress field applied by a living cell on the environment on the basis of a pointwise knowledge of the displacement produced by the cell itself. This classical biophysical problem, usually addressed in terms of Green functions, can be alternatively tackled using a variational framework and then a finite elements discretization. In such a case, a variation of the error functional under suitable regularization is operated in view of its minimization. This setting naturally suggests the introduction of a new equation, based on the adjoint operator of the elasticity problem. In this paper we illustrate the rigorous theory of the two-dimensional and three dimensional problem, involving in the former case a distributed control and in the latter case a surface control. The pointwise observations require to exploit the theory of elasticity extended to forcing terms that are Borel measure