Accidental suppression of Landau damping of the transverse breathing mode in elongated Bose-Einstein condensates

We study transverse radial oscillations of an elongated Bose-Einstein condensate using finite temperature simulations, in the context of a recent experiment at ENS. We demonstrate the existence of a mode corresponding to an in-phase collective oscillation of both the condensate and thermal cloud. Excitation of this mode accounts for the very small damping rate observed experimentally, and we find excellent quantitative agreement between experiment and theory. In contrast to other condensate modes, interatomic collisions are found to be the dominant damping mechanism in this case.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Electro-diffusion in a plasma with two ion species

Electric field is a thermodynamic force that can drive collisional inter-ion-species transport in a multicomponent plasma. In an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) capsule, such transport causes fuel ion separation even with a target initially prepared to have equal number densities for the two fuel ion species. Unlike the baro-diffusion driven by ion pressure gradient and the thermo-diffusion driven by ion and electron temperature gradients, electro-diffusion has a critical dependence on the charge-to-mass ratio of the ion species. Specifically, it is shown here that electro-diffusion vanishes if the ion species have the same charge-to-mass ratio. An explicit expression for the electro-diffusion ratio is obtained and used to investigate the relative importance of electro- and baro-diffusion mechanisms. In particular, it is found that electro-diffusion reinforces baro-diffusion in the deuterium and tritium mix, but tends to cancel it in the deuterium and helium-3 mix.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Plasmas on 2012-03-06 (revised version 05/13/2012

Dynamics of long-range order in an exciton-polariton condensate

We report on time resolved measurements of the first order spatial coherence in an exciton polariton Bose-Einstein condensate. Long range spatial coherence is found to set in right at the onset of stimulated scattering, on a picosecond time scale. The coherence reaches its maximum value after the population and decays slower, staying up to a few hundreds of picoseconds. This behavior can be qualitatively reproduced, using a stochastic classical field model describing interaction between the polariton condensate and the exciton reservoir within a disordered potential.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Sound attenuation in the superconducting amorphous alloy ZrTiCuNiBe

The superconducting energy gap and the parameter of the intensity of electron scattering at two-level systems in amorphous ZrTiCuNiBe are determined from the results of measurements of sound attenuation. The mechanism of adiabatic renormalization of the amplitude of coherent tunneling is used for a quantitative description of the peculiarities of sound absorption in the vicinity of critical temperature.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX, 2 Postscript figures corrected, submitted to Low Temp. Phy

Rayleigh-Taylor instability of crystallization waves at the superfluid-solid 4He interface

At the superfluid-solid 4He interface there exist crystallization waves having much in common with gravitational-capillary waves at the interface between two normal fluids. The Rayleigh-Taylor instability is an instability of the interface which can be realized when the lighter fluid is propelling the heavier one. We investigate here the analogues of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability for the superfluid-solid 4He interface. In the case of a uniformly accelerated interface the instability occurs only for a growing solid phase when the magnitude of the acceleration exceeds some critical value independent of the surface stiffness. For the Richtmyer-Meshkov limiting case of an impulsively accelerated interface, the onset of instability does not depend on the sign of the interface acceleration. In both cases the effect of crystallization wave damping is to reduce the perturbation growth-rate of the Taylor unstable interface.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, RevTe

Existence of two-channel Kondo regime for tunneling impurities with resonant scattering

Dynamical tunneling systems have been proposed earlier to display a two-channel Kondo effect, the orbital index of the particle playing the role of a pseudospin in the equivalent Kondo problem, and the spin being a silent channel index. However, as shown recently by Aleiner et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 2629 (2001)], the predicted two-channel Kondo behavior can never be observed in the weak coupling regime, where the tunneling induced splitting of the levels of the tunneling system always dominates the physics. Here we show that the above scenario changes completely if the conduction electrons are scattered by resonant scattering off the tunneling impurity; Then - as a non-perturbative analysis reveals - the two-channel Kondo regime can easily be reached.Comment: 10 PRB page

Condensation and vortex formation in Bose-gas upon cooling

The mechanism for the transition of a Bose gas to the superfluid state via thermal fluctuations is considered. It is shown that in the process of external cooling some critical fluctuations (instantons) are formed above the critical temperature. The probability of the instanton formation is calculated in the three and two-dimensional cases. It is found that this probability increases as the system approaches the transition temperature. It is shown that the evolution of an individual instanton is impossible without the formation of vortices in its superfluid part

Long-Term Clustering, Scaling, and Universality in the Temporal Occurrence of Earthquakes

Scaling analysis reveals striking regularities in earthquake occurrence. The time between any one earthquake and that following it is random, but it is described by the same universal-probability distribution for any spatial region and magnitude range considered. When time is expressed in rescaled units, set by the averaged seismic activity, the self-similar nature of the process becomes apparent. The form of the probability distribution reveals that earthquakes tend to cluster in time, beyond the duration of aftershock sequences. Furthermore, if aftershock sequences are analysed in an analogous way, yet taking into account the fact that seismic activity is not constant but decays in time, the same universal distribution is found for the rescaled time between events.Comment: short paper, only 2 figure

On the influence of time and space correlations on the next earthquake magnitude

A crucial point in the debate on feasibility of earthquake prediction is the dependence of an earthquake magnitude from past seismicity. Indeed, whilst clustering in time and space is widely accepted, much more questionable is the existence of magnitude correlations. The standard approach generally assumes that magnitudes are independent and therefore in principle unpredictable. Here we show the existence of clustering in magnitude: earthquakes occur with higher probability close in time, space and magnitude to previous events. More precisely, the next earthquake tends to have a magnitude similar but smaller than the previous one. A dynamical scaling relation between magnitude, time and space distances reproduces the complex pattern of magnitude, spatial and temporal correlations observed in experimental seismic catalogs.Comment: 4 Figure

Cold three-body collisions in hydrogen-hydrogen-alkali atomic system

We have studied hydrogen-hydrogen-alkali three-body systems in the adiabatic hyperspherical representation. For the spin-stretched case, there exists a single $X$H molecular state when $X$ is one of the bosonic alkali atoms: $^7$Li, $^{23}$Na, $^{39}$K, $^{87}$Rb and $^{133}$Cs. As a result, the {\em only} recombination process is the one that leads to formation of $X$H molecules, H+H+$X$$\rightarrow$$X$H+H, and such molecules will be stable against vibrational relaxation. We have calculated the collision rates for recombination and collision induced dissociation as well as the elastic cross-sections for H+$X$H collisions up to a temperature of 0.5 K, including the partial wave contributions from $J^\Pi$=$0^+$ to $5^-$. We have also found that there is just one three-body bound state for such systems for $J^\Pi$=$0^+$ and no bound states for higher angular momenta.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 4 table