Investigation of Convection Cells Via Truncated Eigenmode Decomposition

Convection cells are found in a variety of contexts throughout physics, including plasmas within the stellar interior and in neutral fluids such as planetary atmospheres. Rayleigh Benard Convection (RBC) is the most well studied model for this behavior, describing convection in fluids that are heated from below and cooled from above, resulting in a temperature gradient which can drive instabilities. Under the right conditions, this instability develops and drives convective heat transport, which is still actively researched in fluid and plasma dynamics today. We study the neutral fluid configuration of this system using a novel modeling approach that approximates the solutions of the 2D nonlinear Boussinesq equations via a truncated sum of linear eigenmodes. The contribution of each eigenmode to the nonlinear state is determined by an appropriately defined inner product, which we discuss. The effectiveness of this approximation is assessed by calculating the error between the truncated sum and the full nonlinear solution. Importantly, we find that a number of stable eigenmodes contribute significantly to the nonlinear state. As a physical application of this new modeling approach to describe RBC, we calculate the Nusselt number time averaged over the saturated dynamics

Tree-body loss of of trapped ultracold 87^{87}Rb atoms due to a Feshbach resonance

The loss of ultracold trapped atoms in the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance is treated as a two-stage reaction, using the Breit-Wigner theory. The first stage is the formation of a resonant diatomic molecule, and the second one is its deactivation by inelastic collisions with other atoms. This model is applied to the analysis of recent experiments on $^{87}$Rb, leading to an estimated value of $7\times 10^{-11}$ cm$^{3}/$s for the deactivation rate coefficient.Comment: LaTeX, 4 pages with 1 figures, uses REVTeX4, uses improved experimental dat

Electronic energy relaxation and transition frequency jumps of single molecules at 30 mK

Transition frequency jumps for single terrylene molecules in a polyethylene matrix caused by resonant laser irradiation are investigated at 30 mK. These jumps are not accompanied by substantial sample heating. A model for the effect is: proposed, based on the interaction of tunneling two-level systems (TLSs) surrounding the single molecule with high-energy nonthermal phonons emitted by the molecule during electronic energy relaxation. The radius of the effective interaction volume is estimated to be r(m) approximate to 12.5 nm, and the interaction cross section for nonequilibrium phonon -TLS scattering is estimated as similar to 10(-22) cm(-2)

Nuclear quadrupole resonances in compact vapor cells: the crossover from the NMR to the NQR interaction regimes

We present the first experimental study that maps the transformation of nuclear quadrupole resonances from the pure nuclear quadrupole regime to the quadrupole-perturbed Zeeman regime. The transformation presents an interesting quantum-mechanical problem, since the quantization axis changes from being aligned along the axis of the electric-field gradient tensor to being aligned along the magnetic field. We achieve large nuclear quadrupole shifts for I = 3/2 131-Xe by using a 1 mm^3 cubic cell with walls of different materials. When the magnetic and quadrupolar interactions are of comparable size, perturbation theory is not suitable for calculating the transition energies. Rather than use perturbation theory, we compare our data to theoretical calculations using a Liouvillian approach and find excellent agreement.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Stability of fermionic Feshbach molecules in a Bose-Fermi mixture

In the wake of successful experiments in Fermi condensates, experimental attention is broadening to study resonant interactions in degenerate Bose-Fermi mixtures. Here we consider the properties and stability of the fermionic molecules that can be created in such a mixture near a Feshbach resonance (FR). To do this, we consider the two-body scattering matrix in the many-body environment, and assess its complex poles. The stability properties of these molecules strongly depend on their centre-of-mass motion, because they must satisfy Fermi statistics. At low centre-of-mass momenta the molecules are more stable than in the absence of the environment (due to Pauli-blocking effects), while at high centre-of-mass momenta nontrivial many body effects render them somewhat less stable

Microscopic Dynamics in a Strongly Interacting Bose-Einstein Condensate

An initially stable 85Rb Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) was subjected to a carefully controlled magnetic field pulse in the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance. This pulse probed the strongly interacting regime for the condensate, with calculated values for the diluteness parameter (na^3) ranging from 0.01 to 0.5. The field pulse was observed to cause loss of atoms from the condensate on remarkably short time scales (>=10 microsec). The dependence of this loss on magnetic field pulse shape and amplitude was measured. For triangular pulses shorter than 1 ms, decreasing the pulse length actually increased the loss, until extremely short time scales (a few tens of microseconds) were reached. Such time scales and dependencies are very different from those expected in traditional condensate inelastic loss processes, suggesting the presence of new microscopic BEC physics.Comment: 4 pages in latex2E, 4 eps figures; revised Fig.1, revised scatt.lengths, added discussion, new refs., resubmitted to PR

Unveiling a Population of X-ray Non-Detected AGN

We define a sample of 27 radio-excess AGN in the Chandra Deep Field North by selecting galaxies that do not obey the radio/infrared correlation for radio-quiet AGN and star-forming galaxies. Approximately 60% of these radio-excess AGN are X-ray undetected in the 2 Ms Chandra catalog, even at exposures of > 1 Ms; 25% lack even 2-sigma X-ray detections. The absorbing columns to the faint X-ray-detected objects are 10^22 cm^-2 < N_H < 10^24 cm^-2, i.e., they are obscured but unlikely to be Compton thick. Using a local sample of radio-selected AGN, we show that a low ratio of X-ray to radio emission, as seen in the X-ray weakly- and non-detected samples, is correlated with the viewing angle of the central engine, and therefore with obscuration. Our technique can explore the proportion of obscured AGN in the distant Universe; the results reported here for radio-excess objects are consistent with but at the low end of the overall theoretical predictions for Compton-thick objects.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, 15 pages, 10 figures, 4 table

Atom--Molecule Coherence in a Bose-Einstein Condensate

Coherent coupling between atoms and molecules in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) has been observed. Oscillations between atomic and molecular states were excited by sudden changes in the magnetic field near a Feshbach resonance and persisted for many periods of the oscillation. The oscillation frequency was measured over a large range of magnetic fields and is in excellent quantitative agreement with the energy difference between the colliding atom threshold energy and the energy of the bound molecular state. This agreement indicates that we have created a quantum superposition of atoms and diatomic molecules, which are chemically different species.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure