81 research outputs found
Spacecraft Dynamics as Related to Laboratory Experiments in Space
Proceedings are presented of a conference sponsored by the Physics and Chemistry Experiments in Space Working Group to discuss the scientific and engineering aspects involved in the design and performance of reduced to zero gravity experiments affected by spacecraft environments and dynamics. The dynamics of drops, geophysical fluids, and superfluid helium are considered as well as two phase flow, combustion, and heat transfer. Interactions between spacecraft motions and the atmospheric cloud physics laboratory experiments are also examined
An Arbitrary Curvilinear Coordinate Method for Particle-In-Cell Modeling
A new approach to the kinetic simulation of plasmas in complex geometries,
based on the Particle-in- Cell (PIC) simulation method, is explored. In the two
dimensional (2d) electrostatic version of our method, called the Arbitrary
Curvilinear Coordinate PIC (ACC-PIC) method, all essential PIC operations are
carried out in 2d on a uniform grid on the unit square logical domain, and
mapped to a nonuniform boundary-fitted grid on the physical domain. As the
resulting logical grid equations of motion are not separable, we have developed
an extension of the semi-implicit Modified Leapfrog (ML) integration technique
to preserve the symplectic nature of the logical grid particle mover. A
generalized, curvilinear coordinate formulation of Poisson's equations to solve
for the electrostatic fields on the uniform logical grid is also developed. By
our formulation, we compute the plasma charge density on the logical grid based
on the particles' positions on the logical domain. That is, the plasma
particles are weighted to the uniform logical grid and the self-consistent mean
electrostatic fields obtained from the solution of the logical grid Poisson
equation are interpolated to the particle positions on the logical grid. This
process eliminates the complexity associated with the weighting and
interpolation processes on the nonuniform physical grid and allows us to run
the PIC method on arbitrary boundary-fitted meshes.Comment: Submitted to Computational Science & Discovery December 201
Symplectic integrators with adaptive time steps
In recent decades, there have been many attempts to construct symplectic
integrators with variable time steps, with rather disappointing results. In
this paper we identify the causes for this lack of performance, and find that
they fall into two categories. In the first, the time step is considered a
function of time alone, \Delta=\Delta(t). In this case, backwards error
analysis shows that while the algorithms remain symplectic, parametric
instabilities arise because of resonance between oscillations of \Delta(t) and
the orbital motion. In the second category the time step is a function of phase
space variables \Delta=\Delta(q,p). In this case, the system of equations to be
solved is analyzed by introducing a new time variable \tau with dt=\Delta(q,p)
d\tau. The transformed equations are no longer in Hamiltonian form, and thus
are not guaranteed to be stable even when integrated using a method which is
symplectic for constant \Delta. We analyze two methods for integrating the
transformed equations which do, however, preserve the structure of the original
equations. The first is an extended phase space method, which has been
successfully used in previous studies of adaptive time step symplectic
integrators. The second, novel, method is based on a non-canonical
mixed-variable generating function. Numerical trials for both of these methods
show good results, without parametric instabilities or spurious growth or
damping. It is then shown how to adapt the time step to an error estimate found
by backward error analysis, in order to optimize the time-stepping scheme.
Numerical results are obtained using this formulation and compared with other
time-stepping schemes for the extended phase space symplectic method.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Plasma Phys. Control. Fusio
Learning object relationships which determine the outcome of actions
Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Anisotropic Colossal Magnetoresistance Effects in Fe_{1-x}Cu_xCr_2S_4
A detailed study of the electronic transport and magnetic properties of
FeCuCrS () on single crystals is presented. The
resistivity is investigated for K in magnetic fields up to
14 Tesla and under hydrostatic pressure up to 16 kbar. In addition
magnetization and ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) measurements were performed.
FMR and magnetization data reveal a pronounced magnetic anisotropy, which
develops below the Curie temperature, , and increases strongly
towards lower temperatures. Increasing the Cu concentration reduces this
effect. At temperatures below 35 K the magnetoresistance, , exhibits a strong dependence on the direction of the
magnetic field, probably due to an enhanced anisotropy. Applying the field
along the hard axis leads to a change of sign and a strong increase of the
absolute value of the magnetoresistance. On the other hand the
magnetoresistance remains positive down to lower temperatures, exhibiting a
smeared out maximum with the magnetic field applied along the easy axis. The
results are discussed in the ionic picture using a triple-exchange model for
electron hopping as well as a half-metal utilizing a band picture.Comment: some typos correcte
- …