6,162 research outputs found
Fluids of platelike particles near a hard wall
Fluids consisting of hard platelike particles near a hard wall are
investigated using density functional theory. The density and orientational
profiles as well as the surface tension and the excess coverage are determined
and compared with those of a fluid of rodlike particles. Even for low densities
slight orientational packing effects are found for the platelet fluid due to
larger intermolecular interactions between platelets as compared with those
between rods. A net depletion of platelets near the wall is exhibited by the
excess coverage, whereas a change of sign of the excess coverage of hard-rod
fluids is found upon increasing the bulk density.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figure
VIMOS-VLT spectroscopy of the giant Ly-alpha nebulae associated with three z~2.5 radio galaxies
The morphological and spectroscopic properties of the giant (>60 kpc)
Ly-alpha nebulae associated with three radio galaxies at z~2.5 (MRC 1558-003,
MRC 2025-218 and MRC 0140-257) have been investigated using integral field
spectroscopic data obtained with VIMOS on VLT.
The morphologies are varied. The nebula of one source has a centrally peaked,
rounded appearance. In the other two objects, it consists of two spatial
components. The three nebulae are aligned with the radio axis within <30 deg.
The total Ly-alpha luminosities are in the range (0.3-3.4) x 1e44 erg s-1. The
Ly-alpha spectral profile shows strong variation through the nebulae, with FWHM
values in the range ~400-1500 km s-1 and velocity shifts V~120-600 km s-1.
We present an infall model which can explain successfully most Ly-alpha
morphological and spectroscopic properties of the nebula associated with MRC
1558-003. This adds further support to our previous conclusion that the
_quiescent_ giant nebulae associated with this and other high redshift powerful
radio galaxies are in infall. A problem for this model is the difficulty to
reproduce the large Ly-alpha FWHM values.
We have discovered a giant (~85 kpc) Ly-alpha nebula associated with the
radio galaxy MRC 0140-257 at z=2.64. It shows strikingly relaxed kinematics
(FWHM2) radio galaxies.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA
Age of second language acquisition affects nonverbal conflict processing in children : an fMRI study
Background: In their daily communication, bilinguals switch between two languages, a process that involves the selection of a target language and minimization of interference from a nontarget language. Previous studies have uncovered the neural structure in bilinguals and the activation patterns associated with performing verbal conflict tasks. One question that remains, however is whether this extra verbal switching affects brain function during nonverbal conflict tasks.
Methods: In this study, we have used fMRI to investigate the impact of bilingualism in children performing two nonverbal tasks involving stimulus-stimulus and stimulus-response conflicts. Three groups of 8-11-year-old children - bilinguals from birth (2L1), second language learners (L2L), and a control group of monolinguals (1L1) - were scanned while performing a color Simon and a numerical Stroop task. Reaction times and accuracy were logged.
Results: Compared to monolingual controls, bilingual children showed higher behavioral congruency effect of these tasks, which is matched by the recruitment of brain regions that are generally used in general cognitive control, language processing or to solve language conflict situations in bilinguals (caudate nucleus, posterior cingulate gyrus, STG, precuneus). Further, the activation of these areas was found to be higher in 2L1 compared to L2L.
Conclusion: The coupling of longer reaction times to the recruitment of extra language-related brain areas supports the hypothesis that when dealing with language conflicts the specialization of bilinguals hampers the way they can process with nonverbal conflicts, at least at early stages in life
Phase behaviour of charged colloidal sphere dispersions with added polymer chains
We study the stability of mixtures of highly screened repulsive charged
spheres and non-adsorbing ideal polymer chains in a common solvent using free
volume theory. The effective interaction between charged colloids in an aqueous
salt solution is described by a screened-Coulomb pair potential, which
supplements the pure hard-sphere interaction. The ideal polymer chains are
treated as spheres that are excluded from the colloids by a hard-core
interaction, whereas the interaction between two ideal chains is set to zero.
In addition, we investigate the phase behaviour of charged colloid-polymer
mixtures in computer simulations, using the two-body (Asakura-Oosawa pair
potential) approximation to the effective one-component Hamiltonian of the
charged colloids. Both our results obtained from simulations and from free
volume theory show similar trends. We find that the screened-Coulomb repulsion
counteracts the effect of the effective polymer-mediated attraction. For
mixtures of small polymers and relatively large charged colloidal spheres, the
fluid-crystal transition shifts to significantly larger polymer concentrations
with increasing range of the screened-Coulomb repulsion. For relatively large
polymers, the effect of the screened-Coulomb repulsion is weaker. The resulting
fluid-fluid binodal is only slightly shifted towards larger polymer
concentrations upon increasing the range of the screened-Coulomb repulsion. In
conclusion, our results show that the miscibility of dispersions containing
charged colloids and neutral non-adsorbing polymers increases, upon increasing
the range of the screened-Coulomb repulsion, or upon lowering the salt
concentration, especially when the polymers are small compared to the colloids.Comment: 25 pages,13 figures, accepted for publication on J.Phys.:Condens.
Matte
Rosenfeld functional for non-additive hard spheres
The fundamental measure density functional theory for hard spheres is
generalized to binary mixtures of arbitrary positive and moderate negative
non-additivity between unlike components. In bulk the theory predicts
fluid-fluid phase separation into phases with different chemical compositions.
The location of the accompanying critical point agrees well with previous
results from simulations over a broad range of non-additivities and both for
symmetric and highly asymmetric size ratios. Results for partial pair
correlation functions show good agreement with simulation data.Comment: 8 pages with 4 figure
Separation of Circulating Tokens
Self-stabilizing distributed control is often modeled by token abstractions.
A system with a single token may implement mutual exclusion; a system with
multiple tokens may ensure that immediate neighbors do not simultaneously enjoy
a privilege. For a cyber-physical system, tokens may represent physical objects
whose movement is controlled. The problem studied in this paper is to ensure
that a synchronous system with m circulating tokens has at least d distance
between tokens. This problem is first considered in a ring where d is given
whilst m and the ring size n are unknown. The protocol solving this problem can
be uniform, with all processes running the same program, or it can be
non-uniform, with some processes acting only as token relays. The protocol for
this first problem is simple, and can be expressed with Petri net formalism. A
second problem is to maximize d when m is given, and n is unknown. For the
second problem, the paper presents a non-uniform protocol with a single
corrective process.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, epsf and pstricks in LaTe
Symbiotic Ocean Modeling Using Physics-Controlled Echo State Networks
We introduce a “symbiotic” ocean modeling strategy that leverages data-driven and machine learning methods to allow high- and low-resolution dynamical models to mutually benefit from each other. In this work we mainly focus on how a low-resolution model can be enhanced within a symbiotic model configuration. The broader aim is to enhance the representation of unresolved processes in low-resolution models, while simultaneously improving the efficiency of high-resolution models. To achieve this, we use a grid-switching approach together with hybrid modeling techniques that combine linear regression-based methods with nonlinear echo state networks. The approach is applied to both the Kuramoto–Sivashinsky equation and a single-layer quasi-geostrophic ocean model, and shown to simulate short-term and long-term behavior better than either purely data-based methods or low-resolution models. By maintaining key flow characteristics, the hybrid modeling techniques are also able to provide higher quality initial conditions for high-resolution models, thereby improving their efficiency.</p
Effects of polymer polydispersity on the phase behaviour of colloid-polymer mixtures
We study the equilibrium behaviour of a mixture of monodisperse hard sphere
colloids and polydisperse non-adsorbing polymers at their -point, using
the Asakura-Oosawa model treated within the free-volume approximation. Our
focus is the experimentally relevant scenario where the distribution of polymer
chain lengths across the system is fixed. Phase diagrams are calculated using
the moment free energy method, and we show that the mean polymer size at which gas-liquid phase separation first occurs decreases with increasing
polymer polydispersity . Correspondingly, at fixed mean polymer size,
polydispersity favours gas-liquid coexistence but delays the onset of
fluid-solid separation. On the other hand, we find that systems with different
but the same {\em mass-averaged} polymer chain length have nearly
polydispersity-independent phase diagrams. We conclude with a comparison to
previous calculations for a semi-grandcanonical scenario, where the polymer
chemical potentials are imposed, which predicted that fluid-solid coexistence
was over gas-liquid in some areas of the phase diagram. Our results show that
this somewhat counter-intuitive result arose because the actual polymer size
distribution in the system is shifted to smaller sizes relative to the polymer
reservoir distribution.Comment: Changes in v2: sketch in Figure 1 corrected, other figures improved;
added references to experimental work and discussion of mapping from polymer
chain length to effective radiu
Symbiotic Ocean Modeling Using Physics-Controlled Echo State Networks
We introduce a “symbiotic” ocean modeling strategy that leverages data-driven and machine learning methods to allow high- and low-resolution dynamical models to mutually benefit from each other. In this work we mainly focus on how a low-resolution model can be enhanced within a symbiotic model configuration. The broader aim is to enhance the representation of unresolved processes in low-resolution models, while simultaneously improving the efficiency of high-resolution models. To achieve this, we use a grid-switching approach together with hybrid modeling techniques that combine linear regression-based methods with nonlinear echo state networks. The approach is applied to both the Kuramoto–Sivashinsky equation and a single-layer quasi-geostrophic ocean model, and shown to simulate short-term and long-term behavior better than either purely data-based methods or low-resolution models. By maintaining key flow characteristics, the hybrid modeling techniques are also able to provide higher quality initial conditions for high-resolution models, thereby improving their efficiency.</p
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