The meandering instability of a viscous thread

A viscous thread falling from a nozzle onto a surface exhibits the famous rope-coiling effect, in which the thread buckles to form loops. If the surface is replaced by a belt moving with speed $U$, the rotational symmetry of the buckling instability is broken and a wealth of interesting states are observed [See S. Chiu-Webster and J. R. Lister, J. Fluid Mech., {\bf 569}, 89 (2006)]. We experimentally studied this "fluid mechanical sewing machine" in a new, more precise apparatus. As $U$ is reduced, the steady catenary thread bifurcates into a meandering state in which the thread displacements are only transverse to the motion of the belt. We measured the amplitude and frequency $\omega$ of the meandering close to the bifurcation. For smaller $U$, single-frequency meandering bifurcates to a two-frequency "figure eight" state, which contains a significant $2\omega$ component and parallel as well as transverse displacements. This eventually reverts to single-frequency coiling at still smaller $U$. More complex, highly hysteretic states with additional frequencies are observed for larger nozzle heights. We propose to understand this zoology in terms of the generic amplitude equations appropriate for resonant interactions between two oscillatory modes with frequencies $\omega$ and $2\omega$. The form of the amplitude equations captures both the axisymmetry of the U=0 coiling state and the symmetry-breaking effects induced by the moving belt.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, revised, resubmitted to Physical Review

Climatic controls on diffuse groundwater recharge across Australia

Reviews of field studies of groundwater recharge have attempted to investigate how climate characteristics control recharge, but due to a lack of data have not been able to draw any strong conclusions beyond that rainfall is the major determinant. This study has used numerical modelling for a range of Köppen-Geiger climate types (tropical, arid and temperate) to investigate the effect of climate variables on recharge for different soil and vegetation types. For the majority of climate types, the correlation between the modelled recharge and total annual rainfall is weaker than the correlation between recharge and the annual rainfall parameters reflecting rainfall intensity. Under similar soil and vegetation conditions for the same annual rainfall, annual recharge in regions with winter-dominated rainfall is greater than in regions with summer-dominated rainfall. The importance of climate parameters other than rainfall in recharge estimation is highest in the tropical climate type. Mean annual values of solar radiation and vapour pressure deficit show a greater importance in recharge estimation than mean annual values of the daily mean temperature. Climate parameters have the lowest relative importance in recharge estimation in the arid climate type (with cold winters) and the temperate climate type. For 75% of all soil, vegetation and climate types investigated, recharge elasticity varies between 2 and 4 indicating a 20% to 40% change in recharge for a 10% change in annual rainfall. Understanding how climate controls recharge under the observed historical climate allows more informed choices of analogue sites if they are to be used for climate change impact assessments

Deep learning cardiac motion analysis for human survival prediction

Motion analysis is used in computer vision to understand the behaviour of moving objects in sequences of images. Optimising the interpretation of dynamic biological systems requires accurate and precise motion tracking as well as efficient representations of high-dimensional motion trajectories so that these can be used for prediction tasks. Here we use image sequences of the heart, acquired using cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, to create time-resolved three-dimensional segmentations using a fully convolutional network trained on anatomical shape priors. This dense motion model formed the input to a supervised denoising autoencoder (4Dsurvival), which is a hybrid network consisting of an autoencoder that learns a task-specific latent code representation trained on observed outcome data, yielding a latent representation optimised for survival prediction. To handle right-censored survival outcomes, our network used a Cox partial likelihood loss function. In a study of 302 patients the predictive accuracy (quantified by Harrell's C-index) was significantly higher (p < .0001) for our model C=0.73 (95$\%$ CI: 0.68 - 0.78) than the human benchmark of C=0.59 (95$\%$ CI: 0.53 - 0.65). This work demonstrates how a complex computer vision task using high-dimensional medical image data can efficiently predict human survival

Ion-Beam Induced Current in High-Resistance Materials

The peculiarities of electric current in high-resistance materials, such as semiconductors or semimetals, irradiated by ion beams are considered. It is shown that after ion--beam irradiation an unusual electric current may arise directed against the applied voltage. Such a negative current is a transient effect appearing at the initial stage of the process. The possibility of using this effect for studying the characteristics of irradiated materials is discussed. A new method for defining the mean projected range of ions is suggested.Comment: 1 file, 7 pages, RevTex, no figure

Computational Study of the Ro-Vibrational Spectrum of CO-CO₂

An accurate ab initio ground-state intermolecular potential energy surface (PES) was determined for the CO-CO2 van der Waals dimer. The Lanczos algorithm was used to compute rovibrational energies on this PES. For both the C-in and O-in T-shaped isomers, the fundamental transition frequencies agree well with previous experimental results. We confirm that the in-plane states previously observed are geared states. In addition, we have computed and assigned many other vibrational states. The rotational constants we determine from J = 1 energy levels agree well with their experimental counterparts. Planar and out-of-plane cuts of some of the wavefunctions we compute are quite different, indicating strong coupling between the bend and torsional modes. Because the stable isomers are T-shaped, vibration along the out-of-plane coordinates is very floppy. In CO-CO2, when the molecule is out-of-plane, interconversion of the isomers is possible, but the barrier height is higher than the in-plane geared barrier height