On the mechanical properties of an H-C rubber

The material properties of H-C binder including dynamic shear compliance, relaxation modulus, creep compliance, ultimate stress and ultimate strain are reported. Further useful information in the form of Modified Power Law and Prony Series curve fits are included as well as a master curve of reduced stress vs. strain. All tests are performed using standard procedures; however some inconsistency in material properties has been found. It was further determined that the time-temperature shift principle is not directly applicable in its simplest form; however, upon postulating two molecular mechanisms responsible for gross deformations it is found that each one can be associated with a different characteristic glass transition temperature such that, e.g. the dynamic compliance J(w) is the sum of two compliances J_α and J_γ J(w,t) = J_α(w, T^α_glass) + J_γ(w, T^γ_glass) which individually follow the time temperature superposition principle

Neutrino Mixing from SUSY breaking

We propose a mechanism to generate the neutrino mixing matrix from supersymmetric threshold corrections. Flavor violating soft breaking terms induce flavor changing self-energies that give a finite renormalization to the mixing matrix. The described threshold corrections get enhanced in case of quasi-degenerate neutrino masses. In this scenario, we adjust potentially arbitrary soft breaking parameters in a way to reproduce the observed neutrino mixing at one loop working with non-minimal flavor violating soft parameters. To incorporate small neutrino masses already at tree-level via a type I seesaw mechanism, we extend the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model with singlet Majorana neutrinos. The radiative corrections do not decouple with the scale of Supersymmetry and persist when the spectrum is shifted to higher values. Moreover, the mixing matrix renormalization with flavor-changing self-energies is not restricted to supersymmetric theories and give similar results in any theory with new flavor structures.Comment: 11 pages. Talk given at the Summer School and Workshop on the Standard Model and Beyond 2013; to appear in the Proceedings of the Corfu Summer Institute 2014 "School and Workshops on Elementary Particle Physics and Gravity

An Introduction to Quantum Computing for Non-Physicists

Richard Feynman's observation that quantum mechanical effects could not be simulated efficiently on a computer led to speculation that computation in general could be done more efficiently if it used quantum effects. This speculation appeared justified when Peter Shor described a polynomial time quantum algorithm for factoring integers. In quantum systems, the computational space increases exponentially with the size of the system which enables exponential parallelism. This parallelism could lead to exponentially faster quantum algorithms than possible classically. The catch is that accessing the results, which requires measurement, proves tricky and requires new non-traditional programming techniques. The aim of this paper is to guide computer scientists and other non-physicists through the conceptual and notational barriers that separate quantum computing from conventional computing. We introduce basic principles of quantum mechanics to explain where the power of quantum computers comes from and why it is difficult to harness. We describe quantum cryptography, teleportation, and dense coding. Various approaches to harnessing the power of quantum parallelism are explained, including Shor's algorithm, Grover's algorithm, and Hogg's algorithms. We conclude with a discussion of quantum error correction.Comment: 45 pages. To appear in ACM Computing Surveys. LATEX file. Exposition improved throughout thanks to reviewers' comment

A New Microtensile Tester for the Study of MEMS Materials with the Aid of Atomic Force Microscopy

An apparatus has been designed and implemented to measure the elastic tensile properties (Young's modulus and tensile strength) of surface micromachined polysilicon specimens. The tensile specimens are "dog-bone" shaped ending in a large "paddle" for convenient electrostatic or, in the improved apparatus, ultraviolet (UV) light curable adhesive gripping deposited with electrostatically controlled manipulation. The typical test section of the specimens is 400 µm long with 2 µm x 50 µm cross section. The new device supports a nanomechanics method developed in our laboratory to acquire surface topologies of deforming specimens by means of Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) to determine (fields of) strains via Digital Image Correlation (DIC). With this tool, high strength or non-linearly behaving materials can be tested under different environmental conditions by measuring the strains directly on the surface of the film with nanometer resolution

On the Numerical Determination of Relaxation and Retardation Spectra for Linearly Viscoelastic Materials

Knowledge of the relaxation spectrum is important because (1) it provides an intrinsic characterization of the mechanical properties for linearly viscoelastic materials and (2) it offers a rational way to derive the coefficients for a Prony or Dirichlet series representation of the relaxation modulus of importance to some engineering analyses. A numerical solution based on Simpson quadrature leads to an unstable solution in the sense that a decrease in integration intervals produces a progressively worse solution which oscillates between positive and negative values. This difficulty may be overcome by requiring that the curvature of the relaxation spectrum with respect to the relaxation times be minimized. The method is tested on the modified power law and good agreement with the exact and numerically determined relaxation spectrum is obtained. However, when the same method is used to determine the retardation spectrum, only the unstable solution is obtained, although the form of the integral equation is the same. This different behavior is attributed to the difference in the characteristics of the relaxation and retardation spectral functions

Pulmonary giant cells and traumatic asphyxia

A morphometrical analysis was performed to elucidate the significance of pulmonary polynuclear giant cells as a histological sign of asphyxiation. A total of 13 cases of homicidal strangulation of throttling, 8 cases of traumatic asphyxia due to chest compression and 10 control cases (cause of death: severe head injury, no signs of aspiration or other relevant pulmonary alterations, smokers and non-smokers) were investigated. The number of alveolar macrophages containing 1 or 2 nuclei and of polynuclear giant cells per microscopic field (0.000025 cm2) was estimated and a statistical evaluation was carried out. A considerable individual variation was observed in all groups with a tendency to higher numbers of cells in cases of smokers or advanced individual age. However, no significant differences were detectable in the content of alveolar macrophages and in particular of polynuclear giant cells between the asphyxiated individuals and the controls. Since polynuclear giant cells occurred in similar amounts in healthy, functionally normal lungs of non-asphyxiated individuals, the detection of such cells cannot be regarded as a reliable indicator for asphyxiation