5,521 research outputs found
Temperature can enhance coherent oscillations at a Landau-Zener transition
We consider sweeping a system through a Landau-Zener avoided-crossing, when
that system is also coupled to an environment or noise. Unsurprisingly, we find
that decoherence suppresses the coherent oscillations of quantum superpositions
of system states, as superpositions decohere into mixed states. However, we
also find an effect we call "Lamb-assisted coherent oscillations", in which a
Lamb shift exponentially enhances the coherent oscillation amplitude. This
dominates for high-frequency environments such as super-Ohmic environments,
where the coherent oscillations can grow exponentially as either the
environment coupling or temperature are increased. The effect could be used as
an experimental probe for high-frequency environments in such systems as
molecular magnets, solid-state qubits, spin-polarized gases (neutrons or He3)
or Bose-condensates.Comment: 4 Pages & 4 Figs - New version: introduction extended & citations
adde
How Specifiers Learn About Structural Materials
Many wood products are underutilized in the construction of nonresidential buildings. To understand better why this is so, a mail survey was conducted in both Canada and the United States to determine how specifiers (arcitects and structural engineers) learn about building materials.Results indicate that, while architectural schools spend an adequate amount of time teaching students about timber design, engineering schools devote little time to teaching wood use as compared to time spent teaching students about steel and concrete. This is despite the fact that over 60% of the specifiers who work on buildings less than five stories in height have designed with wood. However, much of the learning about materials occurs on the job, where the most effective means of education include reading materials, data files, manuals, cororate promotion, and word of mouth. Specifiers who do not currently use wood are likely to be most influenced to do so through the use of physical examples such as demonstration buildings and case studies.Long-term cooperative programs, including lobbying efforts and promotional campaigns, are needed to ensure that material specifiers have the knowledge and training required to be able to use traditional and new wood products that are ideally suited for nonresidential construction in North America
First Lattice Study of the - Transition Form Factors
Experiments at Jefferson Laboratory, MIT-Bates, LEGS, Mainz, Bonn, GRAAL, and
Spring-8 offer new opportunities to understand in detail how nucleon resonance
() properties emerge from the nonperturbative aspects of QCD. Preliminary
data from CLAS collaboration, which cover a large range of photon virtuality
show interesting behavior with respect to dependence: in the region
, both the transverse amplitude, , and the
longitudinal amplitude, , decrease rapidly. In this work, we
attempt to use first-principles lattice QCD (for the first time) to provide a
model-independent study of the Roper-nucleon transition form factor.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, double colum
Spontaneous wettability patterning via creasing instability
Surfaces with patterned wettability contrast are important in industrial applications such as heat transfer, water collection, and particle separation. Traditional methods of fabricating such surfaces rely on microfabrication technologies, which are only applicable to certain substrates and are difficult to scale up and implement on curved surfaces. By taking advantage of a mechanical instability on a polyurethane elastomer film, we show that wettability patterns on both flat and curved surfaces can be generated spontaneously via a simple dip coating process. Variations in dipping time, sample prestress, and chemical treatment enable independent control of domain size (from about 100 to 500 μm), morphology, and wettability contrast, respectively. We characterize the wettability contrast using local surface energy measurements via the sessile droplet technique and tensiometry.United States. Army Research Office (Contract W911NF-13-D-0001
Entangled photons from a strongly coupled quantum dot-cavity system
A quantum dot strongly coupled to a photonic crystal has been recently
proposed as a source of entangled photon pairs [R. Johne et al., Phys. Rev.
Lett. 100, 240404 (2008)]. The biexction decay via intermediate polariton
states can be used to overcome the natural splitting between the exciton states
coupled to the horizontally and vertically polarized light modes, so that high
degrees of entanglement can be expected. We investigate theoretically the
features of realistic dot-cavity systems, including the effect of the different
oscillator strength of excitons resonances coupled to the different
polarizations of light. We show that in this case, an independent adjustment of
the cavity resonances is needed in order to keep a high entanglement degree. We
also consider the case when the biexciton-exciton transition is also strongly
coupled to a cavity mode. We show that a very fast emission rate can be
achieved allowing the repetition rates in the THz range. Such fast emission
should however be paid for by a very complex tuning of the many strongly
coupled resonances involved and by a loss of quantum efficiency. Altogether a
strongly coupled dot-cavity system seems to be very promising as a source of
entangled photon pairs.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure
"GiGa": the Billion Galaxy HI Survey -- Tracing Galaxy Assembly from Reionization to the Present
In this paper, we review the Billion Galaxy Survey that will be carried out
at radio--optical wavelengths to micro--nanoJansky levels with the telescopes
of the next decades. These are the Low-Frequency Array, the Square Kilometer
Array and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope as survey telescopes, and the
Thirty Meter class Telescopes for high spectral resolution+AO, and the James
Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for high spatial resolution near--mid IR follow-up.
With these facilities, we will be addressing fundamental questions like how
galaxies assemble with super-massive black-holes inside from the epoch of First
Light until the present, how these objects started and finished the
reionization of the universe, and how the processes of star-formation, stellar
evolution, and metal enrichment of the IGM proceeded over cosmic time. We also
summarize the high-resolution science that has been done thus far on high
redshift galaxies with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Faint galaxies have
steadily decreasing sizes at fainter fluxes and higher redshifts, reflecting
the hierarchical formation of galaxies over cosmic time. HST has imaged this
process in great structural detail to z<~6. We show that ultradeep
radio-optical surveys may slowly approach the natural confusion limit, where
objects start to unavoidably overlap because of their own sizes, which only SKA
can remedy with HI redshifts for individual sub-clumps. Finally, we summarize
how the 6.5 meter James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will measure first light,
reionization, and galaxy assembly in the near--mid-IR.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX2e requires 'aip' style (included), 8 postscript
figures. To appear in the proceedings of the `The Evolution of Galaxies
through the Neutral Hydrogen Window' conference, Arecibo Observatory Feb 1-3,
2008; Eds. R. Minchin & E. Momjian, AIP Conf Pro
UV Imaging Polarimetry of the peculiar Seyfert 2 galaxy Mrk 477
We present the results of UV imaging polarimetry of the Seyfert 2 galaxy Mrk
477 taken by the Faint Object Camera onboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
From a previous HST UV image (lambda ~ 2180A), Mrk 477 has been known to have
a pointlike bright UV hotspot in the central region, peculiar among nearby
Seyfert 2 galaxies. There are also claims of UV/optical variability, unusual
for a Seyfert 2 galaxy. Our data show that there is an off-nuclear scattering
region ~ 0."6 (~ 500 pc) NE from the hotspot. The data, after the subtraction
of the instrumental effect due to this bright hotspot region, might indicate
that the scattered light is also detected in the central 0."2 radius region and
is extended to a very wide angle. The hotspot location is consistent with the
symmetry center of the PA pattern, which represents the location of the hidden
nucleus, but our data do not provide a strong upper limit to the distance
between the symmetry center and the hotspot. We have obtained high spatial
resolution color map of the continuum which shows that the nuclear spiral arm
of 0."4 scale (~ 300pc) is significantly bluer than the off-nuclear mirror and
the hotspot region. The nature of the hotspot is briefly discussed.Comment: To appear in Ap
- …