5,031 research outputs found
Effect of nanoclay loading on zeta potential of polyester nanocomposite fibre
Polyester (PET) nanocomposite fibres have been melt spun by adding master batches of linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) loaded with organophilic nanoclay after compatibilizing the PET and LLDPE. The spun fibres show increased hydrophobicity which further increases progressively with the amount of nanoclay loaded into the fibre. The addition of this nanoclay also results in improved dyeability of the nanocomposite fibres with acid dyes due to the presence of quaternary ammonium organic substituent that is present in the nanoclay. There is slight decrease in tensile strength of the fibre accompanied by the decrease in elongation %, indicating that the addition of nanoclay makes the filaments stiffer. The onset of crystallization temperature occurs at higher temperature in case of composite fibres than in case of neat PET fibre because of nucleating effect of nanoclay
Hopping Conduction in Uniaxially Stressed Si:B near the Insulator-Metal Transition
Using uniaxial stress to tune the critical density near that of the sample,
we have studied in detail the low-temperature conductivity of p-type Si:B in
the insulating phase very near the metal-insulator transition. For all values
of temperature and stress, the conductivity collapses onto a single universal
scaling curve. For large values of the argument, the scaling function is well
fit by the exponentially activated form associated with variable range hopping
when electron-electron interactions cause a soft Coulomb gap in the density of
states at the Fermi energy. The temperature dependence of the prefactor,
corresponding to the T-dependence of the critical curve, has been determined
reliably for this system, and is proportional to the square-root of T. We show
explicitly that nevlecting the prefactor leads to substantial errors in the
determination of the scaling parameters and the critical exponents derived from
them. The conductivity is not consistent with Mott variable-range hopping in
the critical region nor does it obey this form for any range of the parameters.
Instead, for smaller argument of the scaling function, the conductivity of Si:B
is well fit by an exponential form with exponent 0.31 related to the critical
exponents of the system at the metal- insulator transition.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure
Shock wave collisions in AdS5: approximate numerical solutions
We numerically study the evolution of a boost-invariant N=4 SYM medium using
AdS/CFT. We consider a toy model for the collision of gravitational shock
waves, finding that the energy density first increases, reaches a maximum and
then starts to decrease, matching hydrodynamics for late times. For the initial
conditions we consider, the hydrodynamic scale governing the late time
behaviour is to very good approximation determined by the area of the black
hole horizon at initial times. Our results provide a toy model for the early
time evolution of the bulk system in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figure
Water poverty in the northeastern hill region (India): potential alleviation through multiple-use water systems: cross-learnings from Nepal Hills
Water poverty index / Construction / Multiple use / Water storage / Farming systems / Villages / Social aspects / Drip irrigation / India / Nepal / Nagaland / Mon district / Lampong Sheanghah
Critical exponents in Ising spin glasses
We determine accurate values of ordering temperatures and critical exponents
for Ising Spin Glass transitions in dimension 4, using a combination of finite
size scaling and non-equilibrium scaling techniques. We find that the exponents
and vary with the form of the interaction distribution, indicating
non-universality at Ising spin glass transitions. These results confirm
conclusions drawn from numerical data for dimension 3.Comment: 6 pages, RevTeX (or Latex, etc), 10 figures, Submitted to PR
Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction with Structured Memory Hierarchies
This paper presents a novel framework for human trajectory prediction based
on multimodal data (video and radar). Motivated by recent neuroscience
discoveries, we propose incorporating a structured memory component in the
human trajectory prediction pipeline to capture historical information to
improve performance. We introduce structured LSTM cells for modelling the
memory content hierarchically, preserving the spatiotemporal structure of the
information and enabling us to capture both short-term and long-term context.
We demonstrate how this architecture can be extended to integrate salient
information from multiple modalities to automatically store and retrieve
important information for decision making without any supervision. We evaluate
the effectiveness of the proposed models on a novel multimodal dataset that we
introduce, consisting of 40,000 pedestrian trajectories, acquired jointly from
a radar system and a CCTV camera system installed in a public place. The
performance is also evaluated on the publicly available New York Grand Central
pedestrian database. In both settings, the proposed models demonstrate their
capability to better anticipate future pedestrian motion compared to existing
state of the art.Comment: To appear in ECML-PKDD 201
Beyond the Mean Field Approximation for Spin Glasses
We study the d-dimensional random Ising model using a Bethe-Peierls
approximation in the framework of the replica method. We take into account the
correct interaction only inside replicated clusters of spins. Our ansatz is
that the interaction of the borders of the clusters with the external world can
be described via an effective interaction among replicas. The Bethe-Peierls
model is mapped into a single Ising model with a random gaussian field, whose
strength (related to the effective coupling between two replicas) is determined
via a self-consistency equation. This allows us to obtain analytic estimates of
the internal energy and of the critical temperature in d dimensions.Comment: plane TeX file,19 pages. 3 figures may be requested to Paladin at
axscaq.aquila.infn.i
On Upward Drawings of Trees on a Given Grid
Computing a minimum-area planar straight-line drawing of a graph is known to
be NP-hard for planar graphs, even when restricted to outerplanar graphs.
However, the complexity question is open for trees. Only a few hardness results
are known for straight-line drawings of trees under various restrictions such
as edge length or slope constraints. On the other hand, there exist
polynomial-time algorithms for computing minimum-width (resp., minimum-height)
upward drawings of trees, where the height (resp., width) is unbounded.
In this paper we take a major step in understanding the complexity of the
area minimization problem for strictly-upward drawings of trees, which is one
of the most common styles for drawing rooted trees. We prove that given a
rooted tree and a grid, it is NP-hard to decide whether
admits a strictly-upward (unordered) drawing in the given grid.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017
Star formation activity in the Galactic H II region Sh2-297
We present a multiwavelength study of the Galactic H II region Sh2-297,
located in Canis Major OB1 complex. Optical spectroscopic observations are used
to constrain the spectral type of ionizing star HD 53623 as B0V. The classical
nature of this H II region is affirmed by the low values of electron density
and emission measure, which are calculated to be 756 cm^-3 and 9.15 x 10^5
cm^-6 pc using the radio continuum observations at 610 and 1280 MHz, and VLA
archival data at 1420 MHz. To understand local star formation, we identified
the young stellar object (YSO) candidates in a region of area ~ 7.5' x 7.5'
centered on Sh2-297 using grism slitless spectroscopy (to identify the Halpha
emission line stars), and near infrared (NIR) observations. NIR YSO candidates
are further classified into various evolutionary stages using color-color (CC)
and color-magnitude (CM) diagrams, giving 50 red sources (H-K > 0.6) and 26
Class II-like sources. The mass and age range of the YSOs are estimated to be ~
0.1 - 2 Msolar and 0.5 - 2 Myr using optical (V/V-I) and NIR (J/J-H) CM
diagrams. The mean age of the YSOs is found to be ~ 1 Myr, which is of the
order of dynamical age of 1.07 Myr of the H II region. Using the estimated
range of visual extinction (1.1 - 25 mag) from literature and NIR data for the
region, spectral energy distribution (SED) models have been implemented for
selected YSOs which show masses and ages to be consistent with estimated
values. The spatial distribution of YSOs shows an evolutionary sequence,
suggesting triggered star formation in the region. The star formation seems to
have propagated from the ionizing star towards the cold dark cloud LDN1657A
located west of Sh2-297.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in The
Astrophysical Journa
Conductivity of Metallic Si:B near the Metal-Insulator Transition: Comparison between Unstressed and Uniaxially Stressed Samples
The low-temperature dc conductivities of barely metallic samples of p-type
Si:B are compared for a series of samples with different dopant concentrations,
n, in the absence of stress (cubic symmetry), and for a single sample driven
from the metallic into the insulating phase by uniaxial compression, S. For all
values of temperature and stress, the conductivity of the stressed sample
collapses onto a single universal scaling curve. The scaling fit indicates that
the conductivity of si:B is proportional to the square-root of T in the
critical range. Our data yield a critical conductivity exponent of 1.6,
considerably larger than the value reported in earlier experiments where the
transition was crossed by varying the dopant concentration. The larger exponent
is based on data in a narrow range of stress near the critical value within
which scaling holds. We show explicitly that the temperature dependences of the
conductivity of stressed and unstressed Si:B are different, suggesting that a
direct comparison of the critical behavior and critical exponents for stress-
tuned and concentration-tuned transitions may not be warranted
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