Non-uniform convergence of two-photon decay rates for excited atomic states

Two-photon decay rates in simple atoms such as hydrogenlike systems represent rather interesting fundamental problems in atomic physics. The sum of the energies of the two emitted photons has to fulfill an energy conservation condition, the decay takes place via intermediate virtual states, and the total decay rate is obtained after an integration over the energy of one of the emitted photons. Here, we investigate cases with a virtual state having an energy intermediate between the initial and the final state of the decay process, and we show that due to non-uniform convergence, only a careful treatment of the singularities infinitesimally displaced from the photon integration contour leads to consistent and convergent results.Comment: 3 pages; LaTe

Local Simulation Algorithms for Coulomb Gases with Dynamical Dielectric Effects

We discuss the application of the local lattice technique of Maggs and Rossetto to problems that involve the motion of objects with different dielectric constants than the background. In these systems the simulation method produces a spurious interaction force which causes the particles to move in an unphysical manner. We show that this term can be removed using a variant of a method known from high-energy physics simulations, the multiboson method, and demonstrate the effectiveness of this corrective method on a system of neutral particles. We then apply our method to a one-component plasma to show the effect of the spurious interaction term on a charged system.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

Water does partially dissociate on the perfect TiO2(110) surface : a quantitative structure determination

There has been a long-standing controversy as to whether water can dissociate on perfect areas of a TiO2(110) surface; most early theoretical work indicated this dissociation was facile, while experiments indicated little or no dissociation. More recently the consensus of most theoretical calculations is that no dissociation occurs. New results presented here, based on analysis of scanned-energy mode photoelectron diffraction data from the OH component of O 1s photoemission, show the coexistence of molecular water and OH species in both atop (OHt) and bridging (OHbr) sites. OHbr can arise from reaction with oxygen vacancy defect sites (Ovac), but OHt have only been predicted to arise from dissociation on the perfect areas of the surface. The relative concentrations of OHt and OHbr sites arising from these two dissociation mechanisms are found to be fully consistent with the initial concentration Ovac sites, while the associated Ti-O bondlengths of the OHt and OHbr species are found to be 1.85±0.08Å and 1.94±0.07 Å, respectively

String Breaking in Four Dimensional Lattice QCD

Virtual quark pair screening leads to breaking of the string between fundamental representation quarks in QCD. For unquenched four dimensional lattice QCD, this (so far elusive) phenomenon is studied using the recently developed truncated determinant algorithm (TDA). The dynamical configurations were generated on an Athlon 650 MHz PC. Quark eigenmodes up to 420 MeV are included exactly in these TDA studies performed at low quark mass on large coarse (but O($a^2$) improved) lattices. A study of Wilson line correlators in Coulomb gauge extracted from an ensemble of 1000 two-flavor dynamical configurations reveals evidence for flattening of the string tension at distances R $\geq$ approximately 1 fm.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, Latex (deleted extraneous eps figure file