1,800 research outputs found
Quantum Radiation of Oscillons
Many classical scalar field theories possess remarkable solutions: coherently
oscillating, localized clumps, known as oscillons. In many cases, the decay
rate of classical small amplitude oscillons is known to be exponentially
suppressed and so they are extremely long lived. In this work we compute the
decay rate of quantized oscillons. We find it to be a power law in the
amplitude and couplings of the theory. Therefore, the quantum decay rate is
very different to the classical decay rate and is often dominant. We show that
essentially all oscillons eventually decay by producing outgoing radiation. In
single field theories the outgoing radiation has typically linear growth, while
if the oscillon is coupled to other bosons the outgoing radiation can have
exponential growth. The latter is a form of parametric resonance: explosive
energy transfer from a localized clump into daughter fields. This may lead to
interesting phenomenology in the early universe. Our results are obtained from
a perturbative analysis, a non-perturbative Floquet analysis, and numerics.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures. V2: Expanded sections 1 and 2 plus other minor
changes, added references. V3: Updated to resemble version published in Phys.
Rev. D. V4: Slight rewording in 2nd paragrap
Dynamic communicability and epidemic spread: a case study on an empirical dynamic contact network
We analyze a recently proposed temporal centrality measure applied to an
empirical network based on person-to-person contacts in an emergency department
of a busy urban hospital. We show that temporal centrality identifies a
distinct set of top-spreaders than centrality based on the time-aggregated
binarized contact matrix, so that taken together, the accuracy of capturing
top-spreaders improves significantly. However, with respect to predicting
epidemic outcome, the temporal measure does not necessarily outperform less
complex measures. Our results also show that other temporal markers such as
duration observed and the time of first appearance in the the network can be
used in a simple predictive model to generate predictions that capture the
trend of the observed data remarkably well.Comment: 31 pages, 15 figures, 11 tables; typos corrected; references added;
Figure 3 added; some changes to the conclusion and introductio
Correlation between stick-slip frictional sliding and charge transfer
A decade ago, Budakian and Putterman (Phys. Rev. Lett., {\bf 85}, 1000
(2000)) ascribed friction to the formation of bonds arising from contact
charging when a gold tip of a surface force apparatus was dragged on
polymethylmethacrylate surface. We propose a stick-slip model that captures the
observed correlation between stick-slip events and charge transfer, and the
lack of dependence of the scale factor connecting the force jumps and charge
transfer on normal load. Here, stick-slip dynamics arises as a competition
between the visco-elastic and plastic deformation time scales and that due to
the pull speed with contact charging playing a minor role. Our model provides
an alternate basis for explaining most experimental results without ascribing
friction to contact charging.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, To be appeared in Physical Review
A high-reflectivity high-Q micromechanical Bragg-mirror
We report on the fabrication and characterization of a micromechanical
oscillator consisting only of a free-standing dielectric Bragg mirror with high
optical reflectivity and high mechanical quality. The fabrication technique is
a hybrid approach involving laser ablation and dry etching. The mirror has a
reflectivity of 99.6%, a mass of 400ng, and a mechanical quality factor Q of
approximately 10^4. Using this micromirror in a Fabry Perot cavity, a finesse
of 500 has been achieved. This is an important step towards designing tunable
high-Q high-finesse cavities on chip.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figure
TADA – a Machine Learning Tool for Functional Annotation based Prioritisation of Putative Pathogenic CNVs
Few methods have been developed to investigate copy number variants (CNVs) based on their predicted pathogenicity. We introduce TADA, a method to prioritise pathogenic CNVs through assisted manual filtering and automated classification, based on an extensive catalogue of functional annotation supported by rigourous enrichment analysis. We demonstrate that our classifiers are able to accurately predict pathogenic CNVs, outperforming current alternative methods, and produce a well-calibrated pathogenicity score. Our results suggest that functional annotation-based prioritisation of pathogenic CNVs is a promising approach to support clinical diagnostics and to further the understanding of mechanisms controlling the disease impact of larger genomic alterations
Self-cooling of a micro-mirror by radiation pressure
We demonstrate passive feedback cooling of a mechanical resonator based on
radiation pressure forces and assisted by photothermal forces in a high-finesse
optical cavity. The resonator is a free-standing high-reflectance micro-mirror
(of mass m=400ng and mechanical quality factor Q=10^4) that is used as
back-mirror in a detuned Fabry-Perot cavity of optical finesse F=500. We
observe an increased damping in the dynamics of the mechanical oscillator by a
factor of 30 and a corresponding cooling of the oscillator modes below 10 K
starting from room temperature. This effect is an important ingredient for
recently proposed schemes to prepare quantum entanglement of macroscopic
mechanical oscillators.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, minor correction
Attractive Casimir Forces in a Closed Geometry
We study the Casimir force acting on a conducting piston with arbitrary cross
section. We find the exact solution for a rectangular cross section and the
first three terms in the asymptotic expansion for small height to width ratio
when the cross section is arbitrary. Though weakened by the presence of the
walls, the Casimir force turns out to be always attractive. Claims of repulsive
Casimir forces for related configurations, like the cube, are invalidated by
cutoff dependence.Comment: An updated version to coincide with the one published December 2005
in PRL. 4 pages, 2 figure
Absolute and convective instabilities of parallel propagating circularly polarized Alfven waves: Beat instability
Ruderman and Simpson [Phys. Plasmas 11, 4178 (2004)] studied the absolute and convective decay instabilities of parallel propagating circularly polarized Alfven waves in plasmas where the sound speed c(S) is smaller than the Alfven speed upsilon(A). We extend their analysis for the beat instability which occurs in plasmas with c(S)>upsilon(A). We assume that the dimensionless amplitude of the circularly polarized Alfven wave (pump wave), a, is small. Applying Briggs' method we study the problem analytically using expansions in power series with respect to a. It is shown that the pump wave is absolutely unstable in a reference frame moving with the velocity U with respect to the rest plasma if U-lU-r, the instability is convective. The signaling problem is studied in a reference frame where the pump wave is convectively unstable. It is shown that the spatially amplifying waves exist only when the signaling frequency is in two narrow symmetric frequency bands with the widths of the order of a(3). These results enable us to extend for the case when c(S)>upsilon(A) the conclusions, previously made for the case when c(S)<upsilon(A), that circularly polarized Alfven waves propagating in the solar wind are convectively unstable in a reference frame of any spacecraft moving with the velocity not exceeding a few tens of km/s in the solar reference frame. The characteristic scale of spatial amplification for these waves exceeds 1 a.u
- …