13,335 research outputs found
Disclination-mediated thermo-optical response in nematic glass sheets
Nematic solids respond strongly to changes in ambient heat or light,
significantly differently parallel and perpendicular to the director. This
phenomenon is well characterized for uniform director fields, but not for
defect textures. We analyze the elastic ground states of a nematic glass in the
membrane approximation as a function of temperature for some disclination
defects with an eye towards reversibly inducing three-dimensional shapes from
flat sheets of material, at the nano-scale all the way to macroscopic objects,
including non-developable surfaces. The latter offers a new paradigm to
actuation via switchable stretch in thin systems.Comment: Specific results for spiral defects now added. References to Witten,
Mahadevan and Ben Amar now added
How was the Hubble sequence 6 Gyrs ago?
The way galaxies assemble their mass to form the well-defined Hubble sequence
is amongst the most debated topic in modern cosmology. One difficulty is to
link distant galaxies to those at present epoch. We aim at establishing how
were the galaxies of the Hubble sequence, 6 Gyrs ago. We intend to derive a
past Hubble sequence that can be causally linked to the present-day one. We
selected samples of nearby galaxies from the SDSS and of distant galaxies from
the GOODS survey. We verified that each sample is representative of galaxies.
We further showed that the observational conditions necessary to retrieve their
morphological classification are similar in an unbiased way. Morphological
analysis has been done in an identical way for all galaxies in the two samples.
We found an absence of number evolution for elliptical and lenticular galaxies,
which strikingly contrasts with the strong evolution of spiral and peculiar
galaxies. Spiral galaxies were 2.3 times less abundant in the past, that is
exactly compensated by the strong decrease by a factor 5 of peculiar galaxies.
It strongly suggests that more than half of the present-day spirals had
peculiar morphologies, 6 Gyrs ago, and this has to be accounted by any scenario
of galactic disk evolution and formation. The past Hubble sequence can be used
to test these scenarios as well as to test evolution of fundamental planes for
spirals and bulges.Comment: Version accepted by Astronomy and Astrophysics, October 21 2009.
Including low resolution images. 11 pages, 8 figure
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