886 research outputs found
Excitons and biexcitons in symmetric electron-hole bilayers
Symmetric electron-hole bilayer systems have been studied at zero temperature
using the diffusion quantum Monte Carlo method. A flexible trial wave function
is used that can describe fluid, excitonic and biexcitonic phases. We calculate
condensate fractions and pair correlation functions for a large number of
densities rs and layer separations d. At small d we find a one-component fluid
phase, an excitonic fluid phase, and a biexcitonic fluid phase, and the
transitions among them appear to be continuous. At d = 0, excitons appear to
survive down to about rs = 0.5 a.u., and biexcitons form at rs > 2.5 a.u.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
Continuum variational and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo calculations
This topical review describes the methodology of continuum variational and
diffusion quantum Monte Carlo calculations. These stochastic methods are based
on many-body wave functions and are capable of achieving very high accuracy.
The algorithms are intrinsically parallel and well-suited to petascale
computers, and the computational cost scales as a polynomial of the number of
particles. A guide to the systems and topics which have been investigated using
these methods is given. The bulk of the article is devoted to an overview of
the basic quantum Monte Carlo methods, the forms and optimisation of wave
functions, performing calculations within periodic boundary conditions, using
pseudopotentials, excited-state calculations, sources of calculational
inaccuracy, and calculating energy differences and forces
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Tail-regression estimator for heavy-tailed distributions of known tail indices and its application to continuum quantum Monte Carlo data.
Standard statistical analysis is unable to provide reliable confidence intervals on expectation values of probability distributions that do not satisfy the conditions of the central limit theorem. We present a regression-based estimator of an arbitrary moment of a probability distribution with power-law heavy tails that exploits knowledge of the exponents of its asymptotic decay to bypass this issue entirely. Our method is applied to synthetic data and to energy and atomic force data from variational and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo calculations, whose distributions have known asymptotic forms [J. R. Trail, Phys. Rev. E 77, 016703 (2008)PLEEE81539-375510.1103/PhysRevE.77.016703; A. Badinski et al., J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 22, 074202 (2010)JCOMEL0953-898410.1088/0953-8984/22/7/074202]. We obtain convergent, accurate confidence intervals on the variance of the local energy of an electron gas and on the Hellmann-Feynman force on an atom in the all-electron carbon dimer. In each of these cases the uncertainty on our estimator is 45% and 60 times smaller, respectively, than the nominal (ill-defined) standard error
Why metallic surfaces with grooves a few nanometers deep and wide may strongly absorb visible light
It is theoretically shown that nanometric silver lamellar gratings present
very strong visible light absorption inside the grooves, leading to electric
field intensities by several orders of magnitude larger than that of the
impinging light. This effect, due to the excitation of long wave vector surface
plasmon polaritons with particular small penetration depth in the metal, may
explain the abnormal optical absorption observed a long time ago on almost flat
Ag films. Surface enhanced Raman scattering in rough metallic films could also
be due to the excitation of such plasmon polaritons in the grain boundaries or
notches of the films.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let
Quantum Monte Carlo study of a positron in an electron gas
Quantum Monte Carlo calculations of the relaxation energy, pair-correlation function, and annihilating-pair momentum density are presented for a positron immersed in a homogeneous electron gas. We find smaller relaxation energies and contact pair-correlation functions in the important low-density regime than predicted by earlier studies. Our annihilating-pair momentum densities have almost zero weight above the Fermi momentum due to the cancellation of electron-electron and electron-positron correlation effects
Efficient excitation of cavity resonances of subwavelength metallic gratings
One dimensional rectangular metallic gratings enable enhanced transmission of
light for specific resonance frequencies. Two kinds of modes participating to
enhanced transmission have already been demonstrated : (i) waveguide modes and
(ii) surface plasmon polaritons (SPP). Since the original paper of Hessel and
Oliner \cite{hessel} pointing out the existence of (i), no progress was made in
their understanding. We present here a carefull analysis, and show that the
coupling between the light and such resonances can be tremendously improved
using an {\it evanescent} wave. This leads to enhanced localisation of light in
cavities, yielding, in particular, to a very selective light transmission
through these gratings.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let
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