Air-cushioning in impact problems

This paper concerns the displacement potential formulation to study the post-impact influence of an aircushioning layer on the two-dimensional impact of a liquid half-space by a rigid body. The liquid and air are both ideal and incompressible and attention is focussed on cases when the density ratio between the air and liquid is small. In particular, the correction to classical Wagner theory is analysed in detail for the impact of circular cylinders and wedges

Hellman-Feynman operator sampling in Diffusion Monte Carlo calculations

Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) calculations typically yield highly accurate results in solid-state and quantum-chemical calculations. However, operators that do not commute with the Hamiltonian are at best sampled correctly up to second order in the error of the underlying trial wavefunction, once simple corrections have been applied. This error is of the same order as that for the energy in variational calculations. Operators that suffer from these problems include potential energies and the density. This paper presents a new method, based on the Hellman-Feynman theorem, for the correct DMC sampling of all operators diagonal in real space. Our method is easy to implement in any standard DMC code

The challenge of the chiral Potts model

The chiral Potts model continues to pose particular challenges in statistical mechanics: it is ``exactly solvable'' in the sense that it satisfies the Yang-Baxter relation, but actually obtaining the solution is not easy. Its free energy was calculated in 1988 and the order parameter was conjectured in full generality a year later. However, a derivation of that conjecture had to wait until 2005. Here we discuss that derivation.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, 29 reference

Quantum Monte Carlo modelling of the spherically averaged structure factor of a many-electron system

The interaction and exchange-correlation contributions to the ground-state energy of an arbitrary many-electron system can be obtained from a spherical average of the wavevector-dependent diagonal structure factor (SF). We model the continuous-k spherically averaged SF using quantum Monte Carlo calculations in finite simulation cells. We thus derive a method that allows to substantially reduce the troublesome Coulomb finite-size errors that are usually present in ground-state energy calculations. To demonstrate this, we perform variational Monte Carlo calculations of the interaction energy of the homogeneous electron gas. The method is, however, equally applicable to arbitrary inhomogeneous systems.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Flocking Regimes in a Simple Lattice Model

We study a one-dimensional lattice flocking model incorporating all three of the flocking criteria proposed by Reynolds [Computer Graphics vol.21 4 (1987)]: alignment, centring and separation. The model generalises that introduced by O. J. O' Loan and M. R. Evans [J. Phys. A. vol. 32 L99 (1999)]. We motivate the dynamical rules by microscopic sampling considerations. The model exhibits various flocking regimes: the alternating flock, the homogeneous flock and dipole structures. We investigate these regimes numerically and within a continuum mean-field theory.Comment: 24 pages 7 figure

Benchmark Quantum Monte Carlo calculations of the ground-state kinetic, interaction, and total energy of the three-dimensional electron gas

We report variational and diffusion Quantum Monte Carlo ground-state energies of the three-dimensional electron gas using a model periodic Coulomb interaction and backflow corrections for N=54, 102, 178, and 226 electrons. We remove finite-size effects by extrapolation and we find lower energies than previously reported. Using the Hellman-Feynman operator sampling method introduced in Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 126406 (2007), we compute accurately, within the fixed-node pproximation, the separate kinetic and interaction contributions to the total ground-state energy. The difference between the interaction energies obtained from the original Slater-determinant nodes and the backflow-displaced nodes is found to be considerably larger than the difference between the corresponding kinetic energies

Deep-Elastic pp Scattering at LHC from Low-x Gluons

Deep-elastic pp scattering at c.m. energy 14 TeV at LHC in the momentum transfer range 4 GeV*2 < |t| < 10 GeV*2 is planned to be measured by the TOTEM group. We study this process in a model where the deep-elastic scattering is due to a single hard collision of a valence quark from one proton with a valence quark from the other proton. The hard collision originates from the low-x gluon cloud around one valence quark interacting with that of the other. The low-x gluon cloud can be identified as color glass condensate and has size ~0.3 F. Our prediction is that pp differential cross section in the large |t| region decreases smoothly as momentum transfer increases. This is in contrast to the prediction of pp differential cross section with visible oscillations and smaller cross sections by a large number of other models.Comment: 10 pages, including 4 figure

Formation of a Metallic Contact: Jump to Contact Revisited

The transition from tunneling to metallic contact between two surfaces does not always involve a jump, but can be smooth. We have observed that the configuration and material composition of the electrodes before contact largely determines the presence or absence of a jump. Moreover, when jumps are found preferential values of conductance have been identified. Through combination of experiments, molecular dynamics, and first-principles transport calculations these conductance values are identified with atomic contacts of either monomers, dimers or double-bond contacts.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure