11,098 research outputs found
Precision Measurements of Stretching and Compression in Fluid Mixing
The mixing of an impurity into a flowing fluid is an important process in
many areas of science, including geophysical processes, chemical reactors, and
microfluidic devices. In some cases, for example periodic flows, the concepts
of nonlinear dynamics provide a deep theoretical basis for understanding
mixing. Unfortunately, the building blocks of this theory, i.e. the fixed
points and invariant manifolds of the associated Poincare map, have remained
inaccessible to direct experimental study, thus limiting the insight that could
be obtained. Using precision measurements of tracer particle trajectories in a
two-dimensional fluid flow producing chaotic mixing, we directly measure the
time-dependent stretching and compression fields. These quantities, previously
available only numerically, attain local maxima along lines coinciding with the
stable and unstable manifolds, thus revealing the dynamical structures that
control mixing. Contours or level sets of a passive impurity field are found to
be aligned parallel to the lines of large compression (unstable manifolds) at
each instant. This connection appears to persist as the onset of turbulence is
approached.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
Quantum Gauge Equivalence in QED
We discuss gauge transformations in QED coupled to a charged spinor field,
and examine whether we can gauge-transform the entire formulation of the theory
from one gauge to another, so that not only the gauge and spinor fields, but
also the forms of the operator-valued Hamiltonians are transformed. The
discussion includes the covariant gauge, in which the gauge condition and
Gauss's law are not primary constraints on operator-valued quantities; it also
includes the Coulomb gauge, and the spatial axial gauge, in which the
constraints are imposed on operator-valued fields by applying the
Dirac-Bergmann procedure. We show how to transform the covariant, Coulomb and
spatial axial gauges to what we call
``common form,'' in which all particle excitation modes have identical
properties. We also show that, once that common form has been reached, QED in
different gauges has a common time-evolution operator that defines
time-translation for states that represent systems of electrons and photons.
By combining gauge transformations with changes of representation from
standard to common form, the entire apparatus of a gauge theory can be
transformed from one gauge to another.Comment: Contribution for a special issue of Foundations of Physics honoring
Fritz Rohrlich; edited by Larry P. Horwitz, Tel-Aviv University, and Alwyn
van der Merwe, University of Denver (Plenum Publishing, New York); 40 pages,
REVTEX, Preprint UCONN-93-3, 1 figure available upon request from author
Hammerhead, an ultrahigh resolution ePix camera for wavelength-dispersive spectrometers
Wavelength-dispersive spectrometers (WDS) are often used in synchrotron and
FEL applications where high energy resolution (in the order of eV) is
important. Increasing WDS energy resolution requires increasing spatial
resolution of the detectors in the dispersion direction. The common approaches
with strip detectors or small pixel detectors are not ideal. We present a novel
approach, with a sensor using rectangular pixels with a high aspect ratio
(between strips and pixels, further called "strixels"), and strixel
redistribution to match the square pixel arrays of typical ASICs while avoiding
the considerable effort of redesigning ASICs. This results in a sensor area of
17.4 mm x 77 mm, with a fine pitch of 25 m in the horizontal direction
resulting in 3072 columns and 176 rows. The sensors use ePix100 readout ASICs,
leveraging their low noise (43 e, or 180 eV rms). We present results
obtained with a Hammerhead ePix100 camera, showing that the small pitch (25
m) in the dispersion direction maximizes performance for both high and low
photon occupancies, resulting in optimal WDS energy resolution. The low noise
level at high photon occupancy allows precise photon counting, while at low
occupancy, both the energy and the subpixel position can be reconstructed for
every photon, allowing an ultrahigh resolution (in the order of 1 m) in
the dispersion direction and rejection of scattered beam and harmonics. Using
strixel sensors with redistribution and flip-chip bonding to standard ePix
readout ASICs results in ultrahigh position resolution (1 m) and low
noise in WDS applications, leveraging the advantages of hybrid pixel detectors
(high production yield, good availability, relatively inexpensive) while
minimizing development complexity through sharing the ASIC, hardware, software
and DAQ development with existing versions of ePix cameras.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure
Regrowth-related defect formation and evolution in 1 MeV amorphized (001) Ge
Geimplanted with 1MeV Si⁺ at a dose of 1×10¹⁵cm⁻² creates a buried amorphous layer that, upon regrowth, exhibits several forms of defects–end-of-range (EOR), regrowth-related, and clamshell defects. Unlike Si, no planar {311} defects are observed. The minimal EOR defects are small dotlike defects and are very unstable, dissolving between 450 and 550°C. This is in contrast to Si, where the EOR defects are very stable. The amorphous layer results in both regrowth-related defects and clamshell defects, which were more stable than the EOR damage.This work is supported by Semiconductor Research Corporation
Contract No. 00057787
Rain, power laws, and advection
Localized rain events have been found to follow power-law size and duration
distributions over several decades, suggesting parallels between precipitation
and seismic activity [O. Peters et al., PRL 88, 018701 (2002)]. Similar power
laws are generated by treating rain as a passive tracer undergoing advection in
a velocity field generated by a two-dimensional system of point vortices.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure
Clinical factors associated with the non-utilization of an anaesthesia incident reporting system
Background Incident reporting is a widely recommended method to measure undesirable events in anaesthesia. Under-utilization is a major weakness of voluntary incident reporting systems. Little is known about factors influencing reporting practices, particularly the clinical environment, anaesthesia team composition, severity of the incident, and perceived risk of litigation. The purpose of this study was to assess each of these, using an existing anaesthesia database. Methods We performed a retrospective cohort study and analysed 46 207 surgical patients. We used multivariate analysis to identify factors associated with the non-utilization of the reporting system. Results We found that in 7022 (15.1%) of the procedures performed, the incident reporting system was not used. Factors associated with the non-use of the system were regional anaesthesia/local anaesthesia, odds ratio (OR) 1.64 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.03-2.62], emergency procedures OR 1.15 (95% CI: 1.05-1.27), and a consultant anaesthetist working without a trainee, OR 1.71 (95% CI: 1.03-2.82). In contrast, factors such as longer duration of surgery, OR 0.85 (95% CI: 0.76-0.94), the presence of a senior anaesthesia trainee, OR 0.86 (95% CI: 0.81-0.92), and the occurrence of severe complications with a high risk of litigation (i.e. death, nerve injuries) were less associated with a non-use of the reporting system, OR 0.65 (95% CI: 0.44-0.97). Team composition and time of day had no measurable impact on reporting practices. Conclusions Clinical factors play a significant role in the utilization of an anaesthesia incident reporting system and more particularly, severity of complications and higher liability risks which appear more as incentives than barriers to incident reportin
Slow decay of concentration variance due to no-slip walls in chaotic mixing
Chaotic mixing in a closed vessel is studied experimentally and numerically
in different 2-D flow configurations. For a purely hyperbolic phase space, it
is well-known that concentration fluctuations converge to an eigenmode of the
advection-diffusion operator and decay exponentially with time. We illustrate
how the unstable manifold of hyperbolic periodic points dominates the resulting
persistent pattern. We show for different physical viscous flows that, in the
case of a fully chaotic Poincare section, parabolic periodic points at the
walls lead to slower (algebraic) decay. A persistent pattern, the backbone of
which is the unstable manifold of parabolic points, can be observed. However,
slow stretching at the wall forbids the rapid propagation of stretched
filaments throughout the whole domain, and hence delays the formation of an
eigenmode until it is no longer experimentally observable. Inspired by the
baker's map, we introduce a 1-D model with a parabolic point that gives a good
account of the slow decay observed in experiments. We derive a universal decay
law for such systems parametrized by the rate at which a particle approaches
the no-slip wall.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figure
Friction Drag on a Particle Moving in a Nematic Liquid Crystal
The flow of a liquid crystal around a particle does not only depend on its
shape and the viscosity coefficients but also on the direction of the
molecules. We studied the resulting drag force on a sphere moving in a nematic
liquid crystal (MBBA) in a low Reynold's number approach for a fixed director
field (low Ericksen number regime) using the computational artificial
compressibility method. Taking the necessary disclination loop around the
sphere into account, the value of the drag force anisotropy
(F_\perp/F_\parallel=1.50) for an exactly computed field is in good agreement
with experiments (~1.5) done by conductivity diffusion measurements. We also
present data for weak anchoring of the molecules on the particle surface and of
trial fields, which show to be sufficiently good for most applications.
Furthermore, the behaviour of the friction close to the transition point
nematic isotropic and for a rod-like and a disc-like liquid crystal will be
given.Comment: 23 pages RevTeX, including 3 PS figures, 1 PS table and 1 PS-LaTeX
figure; Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
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