Heat Transfer in Turbulent Rayleigh-Benard Convection below the Ultimate Regime

A Rayleigh-B\'enard cell has been designed to explore the Prandtl (Pr) dependence of turbulent convection in the cross-over range $0.7<Pr<21$ and for the full range of soft and hard turbulences, up to Rayleigh number $Ra\simeq 10^{11}$. The set-up benefits from the favourable characteristics of cryogenic helium-4 in fluid mechanics, in-situ fluid property measurements, and special care on thermometry and calorimetric instrumentation. The cell is cylindrical with $diameter/height=0.5$. The effective heat transfer $Nu(Ra,Pr)$ has been measured with unprecedented accuracy for cryogenic turbulent convection experiments in this range of Rayleigh numbers. Spin-off of this study include improved fits of helium thermodynamics and viscosity properties. Three main results were found. First the $Nu(Ra)$ dependence exhibits a bimodality of the flow with $4-7$ difference in $Nu$ for given $Ra$ and $Pr$. Second, a systematic study of the side-wall influence reveals a measurable effect on the heat transfer. Third, the $Nu(Pr)$ dependence is very small or null : the absolute value of the average logarithmic slope $(dlnNu/dlnPr)_{Ra}$ is smaller than 0.03 in our range of $Pr$, which allows to disciminate between contradictory experiments [Ashkenazi \textit{et al.}, Phys. Rev.Lett. 83:3641 (1999)][Ahlers \textit{et al.}, Phys.Rev.Lett. 86:3320 (2001)].Comment: submitted for publication to JLTP (august 2003

Shot-noise statistics in diffusive conductors

We study the full probability distribution of the charge transmitted through a mesoscopic diffusive conductor during a measurement time T. We have considered a semi-classical model, with an exclusion principle in a discretized single-particle phase-space. In the large T limit, numerical simulations show a universal probability distribution which agrees very well with the quantum mechanical prediction of Lee, Levitov and Yakovets [PRB {51} 4079 (1995)] for the charge counting statistics. Special attention is given to its third cumulant, including an analysis of finite size effects and of some experimental constraints for its accurate measurement.Comment: Submitted to Eur. Phys. J. B (Jan. 2002

Thermally induced coherence in a Mott insulator of bosonic atoms

Conventional wisdom is that increasing temperature causes quantum coherence to decrease. Using finite temperature perturbation theory and exact calculations for the strongly correlated bosonic Mott insulating state we show a practical counter-example that can be explored in optical lattice experiments: the short-range coherence of the Mott insulating phase can increase substantially with increasing temperature. We demonstrate that this phenomenon originates from thermally produced defects that can tunnel with ease. Since the near zero temperature coherence properties have been measured with high precision we expect these results to be verifiable in current experiments.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Model dependence of the neutrino-deuteron disintegration cross sections at low energies

Model dependence of the reaction rates for the weak breakup of deuterons by low energy neutrinos is studied starting from the cross sections derived from potential models and also from pionless effective field theory. Choosing the spread of the reaction yields, caused basically by the different ways the two-body currents are treated, as a measure of the model dependent uncertainty, we conclude that the breakup reactions are $\sim$ 2 - 3 % uncertain, and that even the ratio of the charged to neutral current reaction rates is also $\sim$ 2 % uncertain.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, 6 tables, version published in Phys. Rev. C 75, 044610 (2007

Minimal Riesz Energy Point Configurations for Rectifiable d-Dimensional Manifolds

For a compact set A in Euclidean space we consider the asymptotic behavior of optimal (and near optimal) N-point configurations that minimize the Riesz s-energy (corresponding to the potential 1/t^s) over all N-point subsets of A, where s>0. For a large class of manifolds A having finite, positive d-dimensional Hausdorff measure, we show that such minimizing configurations have asymptotic limit distribution (as N tends to infinity with s fixed) equal to d-dimensional Hausdorff measure whenever s>d or s=d. In the latter case we obtain an explicit formula for the dominant term in the minimum energy. Our results are new even for the case of the d-dimensional sphere.Comment: paper: 29 pages and addendum: 4 page

Geometrical frustration in the spin liquid beta'-Me3EtSb[Pd(dmit)2]2 and the valence bond solid Me3EtP[Pd(dmit)2]2

We show that the electronic structures of the title compounds predicted by density functional theory (DFT) are well described by tight binding models. We determine the frustration ratio, J'/J, of the Heisenberg model on the anisotropic triangular lattice, which describes the spin degrees of freedom in the Mott insulating phase for a range of Pd(dmit)2 salts. All of the antiferromagnetic materials studied have J'/J 0.9, consistent with predictions for the Heisenberg model. All salts with 0.5 < J'/J < 0.9, where many-body theories find a number of competing ground states, are known, experimentally, to be charge ordered, valence bond solids or spin liquids.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett. 4+11 pages, 3+15 figures, major rewrite, added calculations of Hubbard