14,753 research outputs found
Biaxial order parameter in the homologous series of orthogonal bent-core smectic liquid crystals
The fundamental parameter of the uniaxial liquid crystalline state that governs nearly all of its physical properties is the primary orientational order parameter (S) for the long axes of molecules with respect to the director. The biaxial liquid crystals (LCs) possess biaxial order parameters depending on the phase symmetry of the system. In this paper we show that in the first approximation a biaxial orthogonal smectic phase can be described by two primary order parameters: S for the long axes and C for the ordering of the short axes of molecules. The temperature dependencies of S and C are obtained by the Haller's extrapolation technique through measurements of the optical birefringence and biaxiality on a nontilted polar antiferroelectric (Sm-APA) phase of a homologous series of LCs built from the bent-core achiral molecules. For such a biaxial smectic phase both S and C, particularly the temperature dependency of the latter, are being experimentally determined. Results show that S in the orthogonal smectic phase composed of bent cores is higher than in Sm-A calamatic LCs and C is also significantly large
Current dependence of grain boundary magnetoresistance in La_0.67Ca_0.33MnO_3 films
We prepared epitaxial ferromagnetic manganite films on bicrystal substrates
by pulsed laser ablation. Their low- and high-field magnetoresistance (MR) was
measured as a function of magnetic field, temperature and current. At low
temperatures hysteretic changes in resistivity up to 70% due to switching of
magnetic domains at the coercitive field are observed. The strongly non-ohmic
behavior of the current-voltage leads to a complete suppression of the MR
effect at high bias currents with the identical current dependence at low and
high magnetic fields. We discuss the data in view of tunneling and mesoscale
magnetic transport models and propose an explicit dependence of the spin
polarization on the applied current in the grain boundary region.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in J. Appl. Phy
d-wave Superconductivity in the Hubbard Model
The superconducting instabilities of the doped repulsive 2D Hubbard model are
studied in the intermediate to strong coupling regime with help of the
Dynamical Cluster Approximation (DCA). To solve the effective cluster problem
we employ an extended Non Crossing Approximation (NCA), which allows for a
transition to the broken symmetry state. At sufficiently low temperatures we
find stable d-wave solutions with off-diagonal long range order. The maximal
occurs for a doping and the doping
dependence of the transition temperatures agrees well with the generic
high- phase diagram.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
Cross-Modal Health State Estimation
Individuals create and consume more diverse data about themselves today than
any time in history. Sources of this data include wearable devices, images,
social media, geospatial information and more. A tremendous opportunity rests
within cross-modal data analysis that leverages existing domain knowledge
methods to understand and guide human health. Especially in chronic diseases,
current medical practice uses a combination of sparse hospital based biological
metrics (blood tests, expensive imaging, etc.) to understand the evolving
health status of an individual. Future health systems must integrate data
created at the individual level to better understand health status perpetually,
especially in a cybernetic framework. In this work we fuse multiple user
created and open source data streams along with established biomedical domain
knowledge to give two types of quantitative state estimates of cardiovascular
health. First, we use wearable devices to calculate cardiorespiratory fitness
(CRF), a known quantitative leading predictor of heart disease which is not
routinely collected in clinical settings. Second, we estimate inherent genetic
traits, living environmental risks, circadian rhythm, and biological metrics
from a diverse dataset. Our experimental results on 24 subjects demonstrate how
multi-modal data can provide personalized health insight. Understanding the
dynamic nature of health status will pave the way for better health based
recommendation engines, better clinical decision making and positive lifestyle
changes.Comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2018 Conference - Brave New Ideas, Seoul,
Korea, ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5665-7/18/1
Josephson surface plasmons in spatially confined cuprate superconductors
In this work, we generalize the theory of localized surface plasmons to the
case of high-Tc cuprate superconductors, spatially confined in the form of
small spherical particles. At variance from ordinary metals, cuprate
superconductors are characterized by a low-energy bulk excitation known as the
Josephson plasma wave (JPW), arising from interlayer tunneling of the
condensate along the c-axis. The effect of the JPW is revealed in a
characteristic spectrum of surface excitations, which we call Josephson surface
plasmons. Our results, which apply to any material with a strongly anisotropic
electromagnetic response, are worked out in detail for the case of multilayered
superconductors supporting both low-frequency (acoustic) and transverse-optical
JPW. Spatial confinement of the Josephson plasma waves may represent a new
degree of freedom to engineer their frequencies and to explore the link between
interlayer tunnelling and high-Tc superconductivity
Plasmons and Coulomb drag in Dirac/Schroedinger hybrid electron systems
We show that the plasmon spectrum of an ordinary two-dimensional electron gas
(2DEG) hosted in a GaAs heterostructure is significantly modified when a
graphene sheet is placed on the surface of the semiconductor in close proximity
to the 2DEG. Long-range Coulomb interactions between massive electrons and
massless Dirac fermions lead to a new set of optical and acoustic intra-subband
plasmons. Here we compute the dispersion of these coupled modes within the
Random Phase Approximation, providing analytical expressions in the
long-wavelength limit that shed light on their dependence on the Dirac velocity
and Dirac-fermion density. We also evaluate the resistivity in a Coulomb-drag
transport setup. These Dirac/Schroedinger hybrid electron systems are
experimentally feasible and open new research opportunities for fundamental
studies of electron-electron interaction effects in two spatial dimensions.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure
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