6,140 research outputs found
Lattice dynamics of anharmonic solids from first principles
An accurate and easily extendable method to deal with lattice dynamics of
solids is offered. It is based on first-principles molecular dynamics
simulations and provides a consistent way to extract the best possible harmonic
- or higher order - potential energy surface at finite temperatures. It is
designed to work even for strongly anharmonic systems where the traditional
quasiharmonic approximation fails. The accuracy and convergence of the method
are controlled in a straightforward way. Excellent agreement of the calculated
phonon dispersion relations at finite temperature with experimental results for
bcc Li and bcc Zr is demonstrated
Atlas Data-Challenge 1 on NorduGrid
The first LHC application ever to be executed in a computational Grid
environment is the so-called ATLAS Data-Challenge 1, more specifically, the
part assigned to the Scandinavian members of the ATLAS Collaboration. Taking
advantage of the NorduGrid testbed and tools, physicists from Denmark, Norway
and Sweden were able to participate in the overall exercise starting in July
2002 and continuing through the rest of 2002 and the first part of 2003 using
solely the NorduGrid environment. This allowed to distribute input data over a
wide area, and rely on the NorduGrid resource discovery mechanism to find an
optimal cluster for job submission. During the whole Data-Challenge 1, more
than 2 TB of input data was processed and more than 2.5 TB of output data was
produced by more than 4750 Grid jobs.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy Physics and Nuclear
Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 7 pages, 3 ps figure
Processing and Transmission of Information
Contains reports on five research projects.National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NGL 22-009-013)National Science Foundation (Grant GK-5800
Non-Adiabatic Potential-Energy Surfaces by Constrained Density-Functional Theory
Non-adiabatic effects play an important role in many chemical processes. In
order to study the underlying non-adiabatic potential-energy surfaces (PESs),
we present a locally-constrained density-functional theory approach, which
enables us to confine electrons to sub-spaces of the Hilbert space, e.g. to
selected atoms or groups of atoms. This allows to calculate non-adiabatic PESs
for defined charge and spin states of the chosen subsystems. The capability of
the method is demonstrated by calculating non-adiabatic PESs for the scattering
of a sodium and a chlorine atom, for the interaction of a chlorine molecule
with a small metal cluster, and for the dissociation of an oxygen molecule at
the Al(111) surface.Comment: 11 pages including 7 figures; related publications can be found at
http://www.fhi-berlin.mpg.de/th/th.htm
Macroscopic Strings and "Quirks" at Colliders
We consider extensions of the standard model containing additional heavy
particles ("quirks") charged under a new unbroken non-abelian gauge group as
well as the standard model. We assume that the quirk mass m is in the
phenomenologically interesting range 100 GeV--TeV, and that the new gauge group
gets strong at a scale Lambda < m. In this case breaking of strings is
exponentially suppressed, and quirk production results in strings that are long
compared to 1/Lambda. The existence of these long stable strings leads to
highly exotic events at colliders. For 100 eV < Lambda < keV the strings are
macroscopic, giving rise to events with two separated quirk tracks with
measurable curvature toward each other due to the string interaction. For keV <
Lambda < MeV the typical strings are mesoscopic: too small to resolve in the
detector, but large compared to atomic scales. In this case, the bound state
appears as a single particle, but its mass is the invariant mass of a quirk
pair, which has an event-by-event distribution. For MeV < Lambda < m the
strings are microscopic, and the quirks annihilate promptly within the
detector. For colored quirks, this can lead to hadronic fireball events with
10^3 hadrons with energy of order GeV emitted in conjunction with hard decay
products from the final annihilation.Comment: Added discussion of photon-jet decay, fixed minor typo
Glucose metabolism and oscillatory behavior of pancreatic islets
A variety of oscillations are observed in pancreatic islets.We establish a
model, incorporating two oscillatory systems of different time scales: One is
the well-known bursting model in pancreatic beta-cells and the other is the
glucose-insulin feedback model which considers direct and indirect feedback of
secreted insulin. These two are coupled to interact with each other in the
combined model, and two basic assumptions are made on the basis of biological
observations: The conductance g_{K(ATP)} for the ATP-dependent potassium
current is a decreasing function of the glucose concentration whereas the
insulin secretion rate is given by a function of the intracellular calcium
concentration. Obtained via extensive numerical simulations are complex
oscillations including clusters of bursts, slow and fast calcium oscillations,
and so on. We also consider how the intracellular glucose concentration depends
upon the extracellular glucose concentration, and examine the inhibitory
effects of insulin.Comment: 11 pages, 16 figure
Simple test for high Jc and low Rs superconducting thin films
A simple method, fishing high-Tc superconductor thin films out of liquid
nitrogen bath by a permanent magnet (field > Hc1) due to the effect of high
flux pinning, has been suggested to identify films having high critical current
density (Jc > 106 A/cm2 at 77 K) and thus a low microwave surface resistance
(Rs). We have demonstrated that a Nd-Fe-B magnet, having a maximum field of ~
0.5 T, could fish out Tl-1223 superconducting thin films on LSAT substrate with
a thickness of ~ 5000 Angstrong having Jc > 1 MA/cm2 (at 77 K) whereas it could
not fish out other films with Jc < 0.1 MA/cm2 at 77 K. The fished out films
exhibit Rs values 237 - 245 ((at 77 K and 10 GHz, which is lower than that (Rs
= 317 (() of the best YBCO film at the same temperature and frequency. On the
other hand, the non-fishable films show very high Rs values. This method is a
very simple tool to test for high Jc and good microwave properties of
superconducting films of large area which otherwise require a special and
expensive tool.Comment: 5 pages including 2 figures, to be published as Rapid Commun. in
Supercond. Sci. Techno
- …