50,808 research outputs found
Physics of thin-film ferroelectric oxides
This review covers the important advances in recent years in the physics of
thin film ferroelectric oxides, the strongest emphasis being on those aspects
particular to ferroelectrics in thin film form. We introduce the current state
of development in the application of ferroelectric thin films for electronic
devices and discuss the physics relevant for the performance and failure of
these devices. Following this we cover the enormous progress that has been made
in the first principles computational approach to understanding ferroelectrics.
We then discuss in detail the important role that strain plays in determining
the properties of epitaxial thin ferroelectric films. Finally, we look at the
emerging possibilities for nanoscale ferroelectrics, with particular emphasis
on ferroelectrics in non conventional nanoscale geometries.Comment: This is an invited review for Reviews of Modern Physics. We welcome
feedback and will endeavour to incorporate comments received promptly into
the final versio
Impact of layer defects in ferroelectric thin films
Based on a modified Ising model in a transverse field we demonstrate that
defect layers in ferroelectric thin films, such as layers with impurities,
vacancies or dislocations, are able to induce a strong increase or decrease of
the polarization depending on the variation of the exchange interaction within
the defect layers. A Green's function technique enables us to calculate the
polarization, the excitation energy and the critical temperature of the
material with structural defects. Numerically we find the polarization as
function of temperature, film thickness and the interaction strengths between
the layers. The theoretical results are in reasonable accordance to
experimental datas of different ferroelectric thin films.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure
Design and performance of an aerodynamic molecular beam and beam detection system
Design and performance of aerodynamic molecular beam syste
Approximability results for stable marriage problems with ties
We consider instances of the classical stable marriage problem in which persons may include ties in their preference lists. We show that, in such a setting, strong lower bounds hold for the approximability of each of the problems of finding an egalitarian, minimum regret and sex-equal stable matching. We also consider stable marriage instances in which persons may express unacceptable partners in addition to ties. In this setting, we prove that there are constants delta, delta' such that each of the problems of approximating a maximum and minimum cardinality stable matching within factors of delta, delta' (respectively) is NP-hard, under strong restrictions. We also give an approximation algorithm for both problems that has a performance guarantee expressible in terms of the number of lists with ties. This significantly improves on the best-known previous performance guarantee, for the case that the ties are sparse. Our results have applications to large-scale centralized matching schemes
Stability of Filters for the Navier-Stokes Equation
Data assimilation methodologies are designed to incorporate noisy
observations of a physical system into an underlying model in order to infer
the properties of the state of the system. Filters refer to a class of data
assimilation algorithms designed to update the estimation of the state in a
on-line fashion, as data is acquired sequentially. For linear problems subject
to Gaussian noise filtering can be performed exactly using the Kalman filter.
For nonlinear systems it can be approximated in a systematic way by particle
filters. However in high dimensions these particle filtering methods can break
down. Hence, for the large nonlinear systems arising in applications such as
weather forecasting, various ad hoc filters are used, mostly based on making
Gaussian approximations. The purpose of this work is to study the properties of
these ad hoc filters, working in the context of the 2D incompressible
Navier-Stokes equation. By working in this infinite dimensional setting we
provide an analysis which is useful for understanding high dimensional
filtering, and is robust to mesh-refinement. We describe theoretical results
showing that, in the small observational noise limit, the filters can be tuned
to accurately track the signal itself (filter stability), provided the system
is observed in a sufficiently large low dimensional space; roughly speaking
this space should be large enough to contain the unstable modes of the
linearized dynamics. Numerical results are given which illustrate the theory.
In a simplified scenario we also derive, and study numerically, a stochastic
PDE which determines filter stability in the limit of frequent observations,
subject to large observational noise. The positive results herein concerning
filter stability complement recent numerical studies which demonstrate that the
ad hoc filters perform poorly in reproducing statistical variation about the
true signal
A multicomponent model of the infrared emission from Comet Halley
A model based on a mixture of coated silicates and amorphous carbon grains produces a good spectral match to the available Halley data and is consistent with the compositional and morphological information derived from interplanetary dust particle studies and Halley flyby data. The dark appearance of comets may be due to carbonaceous coatings on the dominant (by mass) silicates. The lack of a 10 micrometer feature may be due to the presence of large silicate grains. The optical properties of pure materials apparently are not representative of cometary materials. The determination of the optical properties of additional silicates and carbonaceous materials would clearly be of use
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