2,745 research outputs found
The Design of Mechanically Compatible Fasteners for Human Mandible Reconstruction
Mechanically compatible fasteners for use with thin or weakened bone sections in the human mandible are being developed to help reduce large strain discontinuities across the bone/implant interface. Materials being considered for these fasteners are a polyetherertherketone (PEEK) resin with continuous quartz or carbon fiber for the screw. The screws were designed to have a shear strength equivalent to that of compact/trabecular bone and to be used with a conventional nut, nut plate, or an expandable shank/blind nut made of a ceramic filled polymer. Physical and finite element models of the mandible were developed in order to help select the best material fastener design. The models replicate the softer inner core of trabecular bone and the hard outer shell of compact bone. The inner core of the physical model consisted of an expanding foam and the hard outer shell consisted of ceramic particles in an epoxy matrix. This model has some of the cutting and drilling attributes of bone and may be appropriate as an educational tool for surgeons and medical students. The finite element model was exercised to establish boundary conditions consistent with the stress profiles associated with mandible bite forces and muscle loads. Work is continuing to compare stress/strain profiles of a reconstructed mandible with the results from the finite element model. When optimized, these design and fastening techniques may be applicable, not only to other skeletal structures, but to any composite structure
Correlation between Compact Radio Quasars and Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays
Some proposals to account for the highest energy cosmic rays predict that
they should point to their sources. We study the five highest energy events
(E>10^20 eV) and find they are all aligned with compact, radio-loud quasars.
The probability that these alignments are coincidental is 0.005, given the
accuracy of the position measurements and the rarity of such sources. The
source quasars have redshifts between 0.3 and 2.2. If the correlation pointed
out here is confirmed by further data, the primary must be a new hadron or one
produced by a novel mechanism.Comment: 8 pages, 3 tables, revtex. with some versions of latex it's necessary
to break out the tables and latex them separately using article.sty rather
than revtex.st
Two-loop renormalization-group theory for the quasi-one-dimensional Hubbard model at half filling
We derive two-loop renormalization-group equations for the half-filled
one-dimensional Hubbard chains coupled by the interchain hopping. Our
renormalization-group scheme for the quasi-one-dimensional electron system is a
natural extension of that for the purely one-dimensional systems in the sense
that transverse-momentum dependences are introduced in the g-ological coupling
constants and we regard the transverse momentum as a patch index. We develop
symmetry arguments for the particle-hole symmetric half-filled Hubbard model
and obtain constraints on the g-ological coupling constants by which resultant
renormalization equations are given in a compact form. By solving the
renormalization-group equations numerically, we estimate the magnitude of
excitation gaps and clarify that the charge gap is suppressed due to the
interchain hopping but is always finite even for the relevant interchain
hopping. To show the validity of the present analysis, we also apply this to
the two-leg ladder system. By utilizing the field-theoretical bosonization and
fermionization method, we derive low-energy effective theory and analyze the
magnitude of all the excitation gaps in detail. It is shown that the low-energy
excitations in the two-leg Hubbard ladder have SO(3) x SO(3) x U(1) symmetry
when the interchain hopping exceeds the magnitude of the charge gap.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures; Two appendices and one figure adde
Modification of classical electron transport due to collisions between electrons and fast ions
A Fokker-Planck model for the interaction of fast ions with the thermal
electrons in a quasi-neutral plasma is developed. When the fast ion population
has a net flux (i.e. the distribution of the fast ions is anisotropic in
velocity space) the electron distribution function is significantly perturbed
from Maxwellian by collisions with the fast ions, even if the fast ion density
is orders of magnitude smaller than the electron density. The Fokker-Planck
model is used to derive classical electron transport equations (a generalized
Ohm's law and a heat flow equation) that include the effects of the
electron-fast ion collisions. It is found that these collisions result in a
current term in the transport equations which can be significant even when
total current is zero. The new transport equations are analyzed in the context
of a number of scenarios including particle heating in ICF and MIF
plasmas and ion beam heating of dense plasmas
The Structure of Alkali Halide Dimers: A Critical Test of Ionic Models and New Ab Initio Results
In semiempirical ionic models a number of adjustable parameters have to be fitted to experimental data of either monomer molecules or crystals. This leads to strong correlations between these constants and prevents a unique test and a clear physical interpretation of the fit parameters. Moreover, it is not clear whether these constants remain unchanged when the model is applied to dimers or larger clusters. It is shown that these correlations can be substantially reduced when reliable information about dimers is available from experiments or ab initio calculations. Starting with Dunham coefficients of the monomer potential determined from microwave measurements, we have calculated the monomer to dimer bond expansion and the bond angle without any additional adjustable parameter. Assuming that the overlap repulsion between nearest neighbors remains unchanged, the bond expansion is mainly determined by the simple Coulomb repulsion between equally charged ions and depends only very little on the effective ion polarizabilities. Deviation of the bond angle from 90° sensitively tests the difference of effective polarizabilities of the two ions. A comparison with previously available data and new ab initio MP2 results presented here for the heavyâatom containing dimers shows that bond angles can be modeled reasonably well with SeitzâRuffa corrected Pauling polarizabilities while calculated bond expansions are much too long. This shows that changes of the overlap repulsion term must be considered for reliable predictions of the structure of dimers and larger clusters
Statistical mechanics in the context of special relativity II
The special relativity laws emerge as one-parameter (light speed)
generalizations of the corresponding laws of classical physics. These
generalizations, imposed by the Lorentz transformations, affect both the
definition of the various physical observables (e.g. momentum, energy, etc), as
well as the mathematical apparatus of the theory. Here, following the general
lines of [Phys. Rev. E {\bf 66}, 056125 (2002)], we show that the Lorentz
transformations impose also a proper one-parameter generalization of the
classical Boltzmann-Gibbs-Shannon entropy. The obtained relativistic entropy
permits to construct a coherent and selfconsistent relativistic statistical
theory, preserving the main features of the ordinary statistical theory, which
recovers in the classical limit. The predicted distribution function is a
one-parameter continuous deformation of the classical Maxwell-Boltzmann
distribution and has a simple analytic form, showing power law tails in
accordance with the experimental evidence. Furthermore the new statistical
mechanics can be obtained as stationary case of a generalized kinetic theory
governed by an evolution equation obeying the H-theorem and reproducing the
Boltzmann equation of the ordinary kinetics in the classical limit.Comment: 14 pages, no figures, proof correction
Hubbard U and Hund's Exchange J in Transition Metal Oxides: Screening vs. Localization Trends from Constrained Random Phase Approximation
In this work, we address the question of calculating the local effective
Coulomb interaction matrix in materials with strong electronic Coulomb
interactions from first principles. To this purpose, we implement the
constrained random phase approximation (cRPA) into a density functional code
within the linearized augmented plane wave (LAPW) framework.
We apply our approach to the 3d and 4d early transition metal oxides SrMO3
(M=V, Cr, Mn) and (M=Nb, Mo, Tc) in their paramagnetic phases. For these
systems, we explicitly assess the differences between two physically motivated
low-energy Hamiltonians: The first is the three-orbital model comprising the
t2g states only, that is often used for early transition metal oxides. The
second choice is a model where both, metal d- and oxygen p-states are retained
in the construction of Wannier functions, but the Hubbard interactions are
applied to the d-states only ("d-dp Hamiltonian"). Interestingly, since -- for
a given compound -- both U and J depend on the choice of the model, so do their
trends within a family of these compounds. In the 3d perovskite series SrMO3
the effective Coulomb interactions in the t2g Hamiltonian decrease along the
series, due to the more efficient screening. The inverse -- generally expected
-- trend, increasing interactions with increasing atomic number, is however
recovered within the more localized "d-dp Hamiltonian". Similar conclusions are
established in the layered 4d perovskites series Sr2MO4 (M=Mo, Tc, Ru, Rh).
Compared to their isoelectronic and isostructural 3d analogues, the 4d 113
perovskite oxides SrMO3 (M=Nb, Mo, Tc) exhibit weaker screening effects.
Interestingly, this leads to an effectively larger U on 4d shells than on 3d
when a t2g model is constructed.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figure
Solar Oscillations and Convection: II. Excitation of Radial Oscillations
Solar p-mode oscillations are excited by the work of stochastic,
non-adiabatic, pressure fluctuations on the compressive modes. We evaluate the
expression for the radial mode excitation rate derived by Nordlund and Stein
(Paper I) using numerical simulations of near surface solar convection. We
first apply this expression to the three radial modes of the simulation and
obtain good agreement between the predicted excitation rate and the actual mode
damping rates as determined from their energies and the widths of their
resolved spectral profiles. We then apply this expression for the mode
excitation rate to the solar modes and obtain excellent agreement with the low
l damping rates determined from GOLF data. Excitation occurs close to the
surface, mainly in the intergranular lanes and near the boundaries of granules
(where turbulence and radiative cooling are large). The non-adiabatic pressure
fluctuations near the surface are produced by small instantaneous local
imbalances between the divergence of the radiative and convective fluxes near
the solar surface. Below the surface, the non-adiabatic pressure fluctuations
are produced primarily by turbulent pressure fluctuations (Reynolds stresses).
The frequency dependence of the mode excitation is due to effects of the mode
structure and the pressure fluctuation spectrum. Excitation is small at low
frequencies due to mode properties -- the mode compression decreases and the
mode mass increases at low frequency. Excitation is small at high frequencies
due to the pressure fluctuation spectrum -- pressure fluctuations become small
at high frequencies because they are due to convection which is a long time
scale phenomena compared to the dominant p-mode periods.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ (scheduled for Dec 10, 2000 issue).
17 pages, 27 figures, some with reduced resolution -- high resolution
versions available at http://www.astro.ku.dk/~aake/astro-ph/0008048
Galactic Cosmic Rays from Supernova Remnants: II Shock Acceleration of Gas and Dust
This is the second paper (the first was astro-ph/9704267) of a series
analysing the Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR) composition and origin. In this we
present a quantitative model of GCR origin and acceleration based on the
acceleration of a mixture of interstellar and/or circumstellar gas and dust by
supernova remnant blast waves. We present results from a nonlinear shock model
which includes (i) the direct acceleration of interstellar gas-phase ions, (ii)
a simplified model for the direct acceleration of weakly charged dust grains to
energies of order 100keV/amu simultaneously with the gas ions, (iii) frictional
energy losses of the grains colliding with the gas, (iv) sputtering of ions of
refractory elements from the accelerated grains and (v) the further shock
acceleration of the sputtered ions to cosmic ray energies. The calculated GCR
composition and spectra are in good agreement with observations.Comment: to appear in ApJ, 51 pages, LaTeX with AAS macros, 9 postscript
figures, also available from ftp://wonka.physics.ncsu.edu/pub/elliso
Constraints on the Intergalactic Transport of Cosmic Rays
Motivated by recent experimental proposals to search for extragalactic cosmic
rays (including anti-matter from distant galaxies), we study particle
propagation through the intergalactic medium (IGM). We first use estimates of
the magnetic field strength between galaxies to constrain the mean free path
for diffusion of particles through the IGM. We then develop a simple analytic
model to describe the diffusion of cosmic rays. Given the current age of
galaxies, our results indicate that, in reasonable models, a completely
negligible number of particles can enter our Galaxy from distances greater than
Mpc for relatively low energies ( GeV/n). We also find
that particle destruction in galaxies along the diffusion path produces an
exponential suppression of the possible flux of extragalactic cosmic rays.
Finally, we use gamma ray constraints to argue that the distance to any
hypothetical domains of anti-matter must be roughly comparable to the horizon
scale.Comment: 24 pages, AAS LaTex, 1 figure, accepted to Ap
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