Nonequilibrium phonon mean free paths in anharmonic chains

Harnessing the power of low-dimensional materials in thermal applications calls for a solid understanding of the anomalous thermal properties of such systems. We analyze thermal conduction in one-dimensional systems by determining the frequency-dependent phonon mean free paths (MFPs) for an anharmonic chain, delivering insight into the diverging thermal conductivity observed in computer simulations. In our approach, the MFPs are extracted from the length-dependence of the spectral heat current obtained from nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. At low frequencies, the results reveal a power-law dependence of the MFPs on frequency, in agreement with the diverging conductivity and the recently determined equilibrium MFPs. At higher frequencies, however, the nonequilibrium MFPs consistently exceed the equilibrium MFPs, highlighting the differences between the two quantities. Exerting pressure on the chain is shown to suppress the mean free paths and to generate a weaker divergence of MFPs at low frequencies. The results deliver important insight into anomalous thermal conduction in low-dimensional systems and also reveal differences between the MFPs obtained from equilibrium and nonequilibrium simulations.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, minor changes to v

Role of anharmonic phonon scattering in the spectrally decomposed thermal conductance at planar interfaces

Detailed understanding of vibrational heat transfer mechanisms between solids is essential for the efficient thermal engineering and control of nanomaterials. We investigate the frequency dependence of anharmonic scattering and interfacial thermal conduction between two acoustically mismatched solids in planar contact by calculating the spectral decomposition of the heat current flowing through an interface between two materials. The calculations are based on analyzing the correlations of atomic vibrations using the data extracted from non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. Inelastic effects arising from anharmonic interactions are shown to significantly facilitate heat transfer between two mass-mismatched face-centered cubic lattices even at frequencies exceeding the cut-off frequency of the heavier material due to (i) enhanced dissipation of evanescent vibrational modes and (ii) frequency-doubling and frequency-halving three-phonon energy transfer processes at the interface. The results provide substantial insight into interfacial energy transfer mechanisms especially at high temperatures, where inelastic effects become important and other computational methods are ineffective.Comment: minor changes to v

Keeping it cool: Soil sample cold pack storage and DNA shipment up to 1 month does not impact metabarcoding results

A grant from the One-University Open Access Fund at the University of Kansas was used to defray the author's publication fees in this Open Access journal. The Open Access Fund, administered by librarians from the KU, KU Law, and KUMC libraries, is made possible by contributions from the offices of KU Provost, KU Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Studies, and KUMC Vice Chancellor for Research. For more information about the Open Access Fund, please see http://library.kumc.edu/authors-fund.xml.With the advances of sequencing tools, the fields of environmental microbiology and soil ecology have been transformed. Today, the unculturable majority of soil microbes can be sequenced. Although these tools give us tremendous power and open many doors to answer important questions, we must understand how sample processing may impact our results and interpretations. Here, we test the impacts of four soil storage methods on downstream amplicon metabarcoding and qPCR analyses for fungi and bacteria. We further investigate the impact of thaw time on extracted DNA to determine a safe length of time during which this can occur with minimal impact on study results. Overall, we find that storage using standard cold packs with subsequent storage at −20°C is little different than immediate storage in liquid nitrogen, suggesting that the historical and current method is adequate. We further find evidence that storage at room temperature or with aid of RNAlater can lead to changes in community composition and in the case of RNAlater, lower gene copies. We therefore advise against these storage methods for metabarcoding analyses. Finally, we show that over 1 month, DNA extract thaw time does not impact diversity or qPCR metrics. We hope that this work will help researchers working with soil bacteria and fungi make informed decisions about soil storage and transport to ensure repeatability and accuracy of results and interpretations.National Science Foundation (DEB- 1738041, OIA 1656006)National Geographic Society (WW-036ER-17

Noncommutative gauge theory using covariant star product defined between Lie-valued differential forms

We develop an internal gauge theory using a covariant star product. The space-time is a symplectic manifold endowed only with torsion but no curvature. It is shown that, in order to assure the restrictions imposed by the associativity property of the star product, the torsion of the space-time has to be covariant constant. An illustrative example is given and it is concluded that in this case the conditions necessary to define a covariant star product on a symplectic manifold completely determine its connection.Comment: AMS-LaTeX 19 pages. v2: corrections in language and equations (typos), expanded sections 3-5, added references. v3: minor presentational and grammatical corrections, completed, corrected and reordered some references

Range extension of a bimorph varifocal micromirror through actuation by a Peltier element

A bimorph varifocal micromirror actuated thermoelectrically by a Peltier element is reported. The single crystal silicon micromirror is 1.2 mm in diameter with a centered 1 mm diameter gold coating for broadband reflection. The actuation principle is capable of varying the micromirror temperature above and below the ambient temperature, which contributed to a 57% improvement in the addressable curvature range in comparison to previously reported electrothermal and optothermal actuation techniques for the device. Altering the device temperature from 10 C to 100 C provided a mirror surface radius of curvature variation from 19.2 mm to 30.9 mm respectively. The experimental characterization of the micromirror was used as a basis for accurate finite element modeling of the device and its actuation. Negligible optical aberrations are observed over the operating range, enabling effectively aberration-free imaging. Demonstration in an optical imaging system illustrated sharp imaging of objects over a focal plane variation of 212 mm

Methods for deriving and calibrating privacy-preserving heat maps from mobile sports tracking application data

AbstractUtilization of movement data from mobile sports tracking applications is affected by its inherent biases and sensitivity, which need to be understood when developing value-added services for, e.g., application users and city planners. We have developed a method for generating a privacy-preserving heat map with user diversity (ppDIV), in which the density of trajectories, as well as the diversity of users, is taken into account, thus preventing the bias effects caused by participation inequality. The method is applied to public cycling workouts and compared with privacy-preserving kernel density estimation (ppKDE) focusing only on the density of the recorded trajectories and privacy-preserving user count calculation (ppUCC), which is similar to the quadrat-count of individual application users. An awareness of privacy was introduced to all methods as a data pre-processing step following the principle of k-Anonymity. Calibration results for our heat maps using bicycle counting data gathered by the city of Helsinki are good (R2>0.7) and raise high expectations for utilizing heat maps in a city planning context. This is further supported by the diurnal distribution of the workouts indicating that, in addition to sports-oriented cyclists, many utilitarian cyclists are tracking their commutes. However, sports tracking data can only enrich official in-situ counts with its high spatio-temporal resolution and coverage, not replace them