Foaming in stout beers

We review the differences between bubble formation in champagne and other carbonated drinks, and stout beers which contain a mixture of dissolved nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The presence of dissolved nitrogen in stout beers gives them a number of properties of interest to connoisseurs and physicists. These remarkable properties come at a price: stout beers do not foam spontaneously and special technology, such as the widgets used in cans, is needed to promote foaming. Nevertheless the same mechanism, nucleation by gas pockets trapped in cellulose fibres, responsible for foaming in carbonated drinks is active in stout beers, but at an impractically slow rate. This gentle rate of bubble nucleation makes stout beers an excellent model system for the scientific investigation of the nucleation of gas bubbles. The equipment needed is very modest, putting such experiments within reach of undergraduate laboratories. Finally we consider the suggestion that a widget could be constructed by coating the inside of a beer can with cellulose fibres.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures. Review articl

The discrete-time compensated Kalman filter

A suboptimal dynamic compensator to be used in conjunction with the ordinary discrete time Kalman filter was derived. The resultant compensated Kalman Filter has the property that steady state bias estimation errors, resulting from modelling errors, were eliminated

Preliminary design study of a high resolution meteor radar

A design study for a high resolution meteor radar system is carried out with the objective of measuring upper atmospheric winds and particularly studying short period atmospheric waves in the 80 to 120 km altitude region. The transmitter that is to be used emits a peak power of 4 Mw. The system is designed to measure the wind velocity and height of a meteor trail very accurately. This is achieved using a specially developed digital reduction procedure to determine wind velocity and range together with an interferometer for measuring both the azimuth and elevation angles of the region with a long baseline vernier measurement being used to refine the elevation angle measurement. The resultant accuracies are calculated to be + or - 0.9 m/s for the wind, + or - 230 m for the range and + or - 0.12 deg for the elevation angle, giving a height accuracy of + or - 375 m. The prospects for further development of this system are also discussed

Unified description of pairing, trionic and quarteting states for one-dimensional SU(4) attractive fermions

Paired states, trions and quarteting states in one-dimensional SU(4) attractive fermions are investigated via exact Bethe ansatz calculations. In particular, quantum phase transitions are identified and calculated from the quarteting phase into normal Fermi liquid, trionic states and spin-2 paired states which belong to the universality class of linear field-dependent magnetization in the vicinity of critical points. Moreover, unified exact results for the ground state energy, chemical potentials and complete phase diagrams for isospin $S=1/2, 1, 3/2$ attractive fermions with external fields are presented. Also identified are the magnetization plateaux of $m^z=M_s/3$ and $m^z=2M_s/3$, where $M_s$ is the magnetization saturation value. The universality of finite-size corrections and collective dispersion relations provides a further test ground for low energy effective field theory.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

High speed commercial transport fuels considerations and research needs

NASA is currently evaluating the potential of incorporating High Speed Civil Transport (HSCT) aircraft in the commercial fleet in the beginning of the 21st century. NASA sponsored HSCT enabling studies currently underway with airframers and engine manufacturers, are addressing a broad range of technical, environmental, economic, and related issues. Supersonic cruise speeds for these aircraft were originally focused in the Mach 2 to 5 range. At these flight speeds, both jet fuels and liquid methane were considered potential fuel candidates. For the year 2000 to 2010, cruise Mach numbers of 2 to 3+ are projected for aircraft fuel with thermally stable liquid jet fuels. For 2015 and beyond, liquid methane fueled aircraft cruising at Mach numbers of 4+ may be viable candidates. Operation at supersonic speeds will be much more severe than those encountered at subsonic flight. One of the most critical problems is the potential deterioration of the fuel due to the high temperature environment. HSCT fuels will not only be required to provide the energy necessary for flight, but will also be subject to aerodynamic heating and, will be required to serve as the primary heat sink for cooling the engine and airframe. To define fuel problems for high speed flight, a fuels workshop was conducted at NASA Lewis Research Center. The purpose of the workshop was to gather experts on aviation fuels, airframe fuel systems, airport infrastructure, and combustion systems to discuss high speed fuel alternatives, fuel supply scenarios, increased thermal stability approaches and measurements, safety considerations, and to provide directional guidance for future R and D efforts. Subsequent follow-up studies defined airport infrastructure impacts of high speed fuel candidates. The results of these activities are summarized. In addition, an initial case study using modified in-house refinery simulation model Gordian code (1) is briefly discussed. This code can be used to simulate different types of refineries, emphasizing jet fuel production and relative cost factors

Evaluating foam heterogeneity

New analytical tool is available to calculate the degree of foam heterogeneity based on the measurement of gas diffusivity values. Diffusion characteristics of plastic foam are described by a system of differential equations based on conventional diffusion theory. This approach saves research and computation time in studying mass or heat diffusion problems

Universal pulse sequence to minimize spin dephasing in the central spin decoherence problem

We present a remarkable finding that a recently discovered [G. S. Uhrig, Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 100504 (2007)] series of pulse sequences, designed to optimally restore coherence to a qubit in the spin-boson model of decoherence, is in fact completely model-independent and generically valid for arbitrary dephasing Hamiltonians given sufficiently short delay times between pulses. The series maximizes qubit fidelity versus number of applied pulses for sufficiently short delay times because the series, with each additional pulse, cancels successive orders of a time expansion for the fidelity decay. The "magical" universality of this property, which was not appreciated earlier, requires that a linearly growing set of "unknowns" (the delay times) must simultaneously satisfy an exponentially growing set of nonlinear equations that involve arbitrary dephasing Hamiltonian operators.Comment: Published in PRL, revise