Interplay between elastic fields due to gravity and a partial dislocation for a hard-sphere crystal coherently grown under gravity: driving force for defect disappearance

We previously observed that an intrinsic staking fault shrunk through a glide of a Shockley partial dislocation terminating its lower end in a hard-sphere crystal under gravity coherently grown in by Monte Carlo simulations [Mori et al., Molec. Phys. 105, 1377 (2007)]; it was an answer to a one-decade long standing question why the stacking disorder in colloidal crystals reduced under gravity [Zhu et al., Nature 387, 883 (1997)]. Here, we present an elastic energy calculation; in addition to the self-energy of the partial dislocation [Mori et al., Prog. Theor. Phys. Suppl. 178, 33 (2009)] we calculate the cross-coupling term between elastic field due to gravity and that due to a Shockley partial dislocation. The cross term is a increasing function of the linear dimension R over which the elastic field expands, showing that a driving force arises for the partial dislocation moving toward the upper boundary of a grain.Comment: 8pages, 4figures, to be published in Molecular Physic

Multi-Orbital Molecular Compound (TTM-TTP)I_3: Effective Model and Fragment Decomposition

The electronic structure of the molecular compound (TTM-TTP)I_3, which exhibits a peculiar intra-molecular charge ordering, has been studied using multi-configuration ab initio calculations. First we derive an effective Hubbard-type model based on the molecular orbitals (MOs) of TTM-TTP; we set up a two-orbital Hamiltonian for the two MOs near the Fermi energy and determine its full parameters: the transfer integrals, the Coulomb and exchange interactions. The tight-binding band structure obtained from these transfer integrals is consistent with the result of the direct band calculation based on density functional theory. Then, by decomposing the frontier MOs into two parts, i.e., fragments, we find that the stacked TTM-TTP molecules can be described by a two-leg ladder model, while the inter-fragment Coulomb energies are scaled to the inverse of their distances. This result indicates that the fragment picture that we proposed earlier [M.-L. Bonnet et al.: J. Chem. Phys. 132 (2010) 214705] successfully describes the low-energy properties of this compound.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, published versio

Transverse self-modulation of ultra-relativistic lepton beams in the plasma wakefield accelerator

The transverse self-modulation of ultra-relativistic, long lepton bunches in high-density plasmas is explored through full-scale particle-in-cell simulations. We demonstrate that long SLAC-type electron and positron bunches can become strongly self-modulated over centimeter distances, leading to wake excitation in the blowout regime with accelerating fields in excess of 20 GV/m. We show that particles energy variations exceeding 10 GeV can occur in meter-long plasmas. We find that the self-modulation of positively and negatively charged bunches differ when the blowout is reached. Seeding the self-modulation instability suppresses the competing hosing instability. This work reveals that a proof-of-principle experiment to test the physics of bunch self-modulation can be performed with available lepton bunches and with existing experimental apparatus and diagnostics.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Physics of Plasma

Filosofia con i bambini attraverso gli esperimenti mentali

This article presents an approach in doing philosophy with children through thought experiments, by focusing on that one about founding an utopia. Describing the group work practice and the role of philosophers in the dialogic learning process provided by the mental simulation concerning utopia, the author presents some elementary observations on the central role played by thought experiments both in philosophy and in the natural sciences, and stresses a variety of interesting implications in doing philosophy with children through thought experiments. Finally, the author argues that mental simulation can be an engaging introduction to doing philosophy with children, which are enabled in this way to envision conflicting possibilities and face with something like Wittgenstein’s “puzzle pictures

Ion motion in the wake driven by long particle bunches in plasmas

We explore the role of the background plasma ion motion in self-modulated plasma wakefield accelerators. We employ J. Dawson's plasma sheet model to derive expressions for the transverse plasma electric field and ponderomotive force in the narrow bunch limit. We use these results to determine the on-set of the ion dynamics, and demonstrate that the ion motion could occur in self-modulated plasma wakefield accelerators. Simulations show the motion of the plasma ions can lead to the early suppression of the self-modulation instability and of the accelerating fields. The background plasma ion motion can nevertheless be fully mitigated by using plasmas with heavier plasmas.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure

Spectral and Rotational Changes in the Isolated Neutron Star RX J0720.4-3125

RX J0720.4-3125 is an isolated neutron star that, uniquely in its class, has shown changes in its thermal X-ray spectrum. We use new spectra taken with Chandra's Low Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer, as well as archival observations, to try to understand the timescale and nature of these changes. We construct lightcurves, which show both small, slow variations on a timescale of years, and a larger event that occurred more quickly, within half a year. From timing, we find evidence for a `glitch' coincident with this larger event, with a fractional increase in spin frequency of 5x10^{-8}. We compare the `before' and `after' spectra with those from RX J1308.6+2127, an isolated neutron star with similar temperature and magnetic field strength, but with a much stronger absorption feature in its spectrum. We find that the `after' spectrum can be represented remarkably well by the superposition of the `before' spectrum, scaled by two thirds, and the spectrum of RX J1308.6+2127, thus suggesting that the event affected approximately one third of the surface. We speculate the event reflects a change in surface composition caused by, e.g., an accretion episode.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, emulateapj format. ApJL, accepte

Localizations in coupled electronic chains

We studied effects of random potentials and roles of electron-electron interactions in the gapless phase of coupled Hubbard chains, using a renormalization group technique. For non-interacting electrons, we obtained the localization length proportional to the number of chains, as already shown in the other approaches. For interacting electrons, the localization length is longer for stronger interactions, that is, the interactions counteract the random potentials. Accordingly, the localization length is not a simple linear function of the number of chains. This interaction effect is strongest when there is only a single chain. We also calculate the effects of interactions and random potentials on charge stiffness.Comment: no figure, to appear in Phys. Rev.

DRINet for medical image segmentation

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have revolutionized medical image analysis over the past few years. The UNet architecture is one of the most well-known CNN architectures for semantic segmentation and has achieved remarkable successes in many different medical image segmentation applications. The U-Net architecture consists of standard convolution layers, pooling layers, and upsampling layers. These convolution layers learn representative features of input images and construct segmentations based on the features. However, the features learned by standard convolution layers are not distinctive when the differences among different categories are subtle in terms of intensity, location, shape, and size. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN architecture, called Dense-Res-Inception Net (DRINet), which addresses this challenging problem. The proposed DRINet consists of three blocks, namely a convolutional block with dense connections, a deconvolutional block with residual Inception modules, and an unpooling block. Our proposed architecture outperforms the U-Net in three different challenging applications, namely multi-class segmentation of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) on brain CT images, multi-organ segmentation on abdominal CT images, multi-class brain tumour segmentation on MR images

Scaling of the magnetic response in doped antiferromagnets

A theory of the anomalous $\omega/T$ scaling of the dynamic magnetic response in cuprates at low doping is presented. It is based on the memory function representation of the dynamical spin suceptibility in a doped antiferromagnet where the damping of the collective mode is constant and large, whereas the equal-time spin correlations saturate at low $T$. Exact diagonalization results within the t-J model are shown to support assumptions. Consequences, both for the scaling function and the normalization amplitude, are well in agreement with neutron scattering results.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure