Generalized Second-Order Thomas-Fermi Method for Superfluid Fermi Systems

Using the $\hbar$-expansion of the Green's function of the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov equation, we extend the second-order Thomas-Fermi approximation to generalized superfluid Fermi systems by including the density-dependent effective mass and the spin-orbit potential. We first implement and examine the full correction terms over different energy intervals of the quasiparticle spectra in calculations of finite nuclei. Final applications of this generalized Thomas-Fermi method are intended for various inhomogeneous superfluid Fermi systems.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, PR

Diagnosing numerical Cherenkov instabilities in relativistic plasma simulations based on general meshes

Numerical Cherenkov radiation (NCR) or instability is a detrimental effect frequently found in electromagnetic particle-in-cell (EM-PIC) simulations involving relativistic plasma beams. NCR is caused by spurious coupling between electromagnetic-field modes and multiple beam resonances. This coupling may result from the slow down of poorly-resolved waves due to numerical (grid) dispersion and from aliasing mechanisms. NCR has been studied in the past for finite-difference-based EM-PIC algorithms on regular (structured) meshes with rectangular elements. In this work, we extend the analysis of NCR to finite-element-based EM-PIC algorithms implemented on unstructured meshes. The influence of different mesh element shapes and mesh layouts on NCR is studied. Analytic predictions are compared against results from finite-element-based EM-PIC simulations of relativistic plasma beams on various mesh types.Comment: 31 pages, 20 figure

Hurst parameter analysis of radio pulsar timing noise

We present an analysis of timing residual (noise) of 54 pulsars obtained from 25-m radio telescope at Urumqi Observatory with a time span of 5~8 years, dealing with statistics of the Hurst parameter. The majority of these pulsars were selected to have timing noise that look like white noise rather than smooth curves. The results are compared with artificial series of different constant pairwise covariances. Despite the noise like appearance, many timing residual series showed Hurst parameters significantly deviated from that of independent series. We concluded that Hurst parameter may be capable of detecting dependence in timing residual and of distinguishing chaotic behavior from random processes.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, Submitted to MNRA

Molecular mechanisms underlying anti-tumor promoting activities of heat-processed Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer.

Recently, there have been considerable efforts to search for naturally occurring substances that can inhibit, reverse, or retard the multi-stage carcinogenesis. A wide array of phenolic substances derived from edible and medicinal plants have been reported to possess anticarcinogenic and antimutagenic activities and in many cases, the chemopreventive activities of phytochemicals are associated with their anti-inflammatory and/or antioxidative properties. Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer cultivated in Korea has been widely used in traditional herbal medicine for the treatment of various diseases. Certain fractions or purified ingredients of ginseng have been shown to exert anticarcinogenic and antimutagenic activities. Our previous studies have revealed that the methanol extract of heat-processed Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer attenuates the lipid peroxidation in rat brain homogenates and is also capable of scavenging superoxide generated by xanthine- xanthine oxidase or by 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate (TPA) in differentiated human promyelocytic leukemia (HL-60) cells. Topical application of the same extract onto shaven backs of female ICR mice also suppressed TPA-induced skin tumor promotion. Likewise, topical application of ginsenoside Rg3, one of the constituents of heat-treated ginseng, significantly inhibited TPA-induced mouse epidermal ornithine decarboxylase activity and skin tumor promotion. Expression of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) in TPA-stimulated mouse skin was markedly suppressed by Rg3 pretreatment. In addition, Rg3 inhibited TPA-stimulated activation of NF-kappaB and extracellular-regulated protein kinase (ERK), one of the mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase in mouse skin and also in cultured human breast epithelial cells (MCF-10A)

Verifying Policy Enforcers

Policy enforcers are sophisticated runtime components that can prevent failures by enforcing the correct behavior of the software. While a single enforcer can be easily designed focusing only on the behavior of the application that must be monitored, the effect of multiple enforcers that enforce different policies might be hard to predict. So far, mechanisms to resolve interferences between enforcers have been based on priority mechanisms and heuristics. Although these methods provide a mechanism to take decisions when multiple enforcers try to affect the execution at a same time, they do not guarantee the lack of interference on the global behavior of the system. In this paper we present a verification strategy that can be exploited to discover interferences between sets of enforcers and thus safely identify a-priori the enforcers that can co-exist at run-time. In our evaluation, we experimented our verification method with several policy enforcers for Android and discovered some incompatibilities.Comment: Oliviero Riganelli, Daniela Micucci, Leonardo Mariani, and Yli\`es Falcone. Verifying Policy Enforcers. Proceedings of 17th International Conference on Runtime Verification (RV), 2017. (to appear

Effects of TIG Welding Parameters on Morphology and Mechanical Properties of Welded Joint of Ni-base Superalloy

AbstractThe influences of parameters of tungsten inert gas arc welding on the morphology, microstructure, tensile property and fracture of welded joints of Ni-base superalloy have been studied. Results show that the increase of welding current and the decrease of welding speed bring about the large amount of heat input in the welding pool and the enlargement of width and deepness of the welding pool. The increase of impulse frequency has the same effect on the microstructure compared with the increase of welding current. The effect of welding parameters on the tensile strength and fracture was analyzed. It is found that the root of welding joint is unwelded when the welding current is lower, so that the strength and elongation of welded joint are inferior. And the more welding defects in the welding zone and the more hard and brittle phase precipitates in the overheated zone when the welding current is too high. Consequently, the strength and plasticity go up first and then go down, i.e. they have a peak value with welding current increasing. In addition, the decrease of impulse frequency is beneficial to the strength of the welded joint

Visualizing the emergence of the pseudogap state and the evolution to superconductivity in a lightly hole-doped Mott insulator

Superconductivity emerges from the cuprate antiferromagnetic Mott state with hole doping. The resulting electronic structure is not understood, although changes in the state of oxygen atoms appear paramount. Hole doping first destroys the Mott state yielding a weak insulator where electrons localize only at low temperatures without a full energy gap. At higher doping, the 'pseudogap', a weakly conducting state with an anisotropic energy gap and intra-unit-cell breaking of 90\degree-rotational (C4v) symmetry appears. However, a direct visualization of the emergence of these phenomena with increasing hole density has never been achieved. Here we report atomic-scale imaging of electronic structure evolution from the weak-insulator through the emergence of the pseudogap to the superconducting state in Ca2-xNaxCuO2Cl2. The spectral signature of the pseudogap emerges at lowest doping from a weakly insulating but C4v-symmetric matrix exhibiting a distinct spectral shape. At slightly higher hole-density, nanoscale regions exhibiting pseudogap spectra and 180\degree-rotational (C2v) symmetry form unidirectional clusters within the C4v-symmetric matrix. Thus, hole-doping proceeds by the appearance of nanoscale clusters of localized holes within which the broken-symmetry pseudogap state is stabilized. A fundamentally two-component electronic structure11 then exists in Ca2-xNaxCuO2Cl2 until the C2v-symmetric clusters touch at higher doping, and the long-range superconductivity appears.Comment: See the Nature Physics website for the published version available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/Nphys232

Flow behaviors driven by a rotating spiral permanent magnetic field

International audienceA rotating spiral magnetic field, constructed by a series of permanent magnets, is presented in this study, which is used to drive liquid metal flow. The rotation of such magnetic stirrer can then exert spatial- and tempo- electromagnetic force and drive three dimensional turbulent flow within the liquid metal bulk. Its velocity field was measured via the ultrasonic Doppler velocimetry. Two typical toroidal vortices flow patterns: the secondary flow and the globally axial flow in the meridian plane have been validated, which depends on the several structural and operating parameters, i.e., radius of the liquid metal bulk. The critical transition conditions between these two flow patterns have been discussed according to the experimental results

A Prediction of the B*_c mass in full lattice QCD

By using the Highly Improved Staggered Quark formalism to handle charm, strange and light valence quarks in full lattice QCD, and NRQCD to handle bottom valence quarks we are able to determine accurately ratios of the B meson vector-pseudoscalar mass splittings, in particular, (m(B*_c)-m(B_c))/(m(B*_s)-m(B_s)). We find this ratio to be 1.15(15), showing the `light' quark mass dependence of this splitting to be very small. Hence we predict m(B_c*) = 6.330(7)(2)(6) GeV where the first two errors are from the lattice calculation and the third from existing experiment. This is the most accurate prediction of a gold-plated hadron mass from lattice QCD to date.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure