2,157 research outputs found
The Atmosphere Explorer power subsystem
The design and operation of the power subsystem for the Atmospheric Explorer spacecraft are discussed. The additional functional redundancy which was added in several component areas to improve the overall subsystem reliability is analyzed. The battery charging technique has been modified to include third electrode overcharge control. The automatic removal of all battery charge is provided to correct abnormally high battery voltages. An undervoltage detector has been added which removes all nonessential spacecraft loads when the battery voltage falls below a given level. All automatic functions can be over-ridden by ground command
Rheology of Granular Materials: Dynamics in a Stress Landscape
We present a framework for analyzing the rheology of dense driven granular
materials, based on a recent proposal of a stress-based ensemble. In this
ensemble fluctuations in a granular system near jamming are controlled by a
temperature-like parameter, the angoricity, which is conjugate to the stress of
the system. In this paper, we develop a model for slowly driven granular
materials based on the stress ensemble and the idea of a landscape in stress
space. The idea of an activated process driven by the angoricity has been shown
by Behringer et al (2008) to describe the logarithmic strengthening of granular
materials. Just as in the Soft Glassy Rheology (SGR) picture, our model
represents the evolution of a small patch of granular material (a mesoscopic
region) in a stress-based trap landscape. The angoricity plays the role of the
fluctuation temperature in SGR. We determine (a) the constitutive equation, (b)
the yield stress, and (c) the distribution of stress dissipated during granular
shearing experiments, and compare these predictions to experiments of Hartley &
Behringer (2003).Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure
Optimal energy quanta to current conversion
We present a microscopic discussion of a nano-sized structure which uses the
quantization of energy levels and the physics of single charge Coulomb
interaction to achieve an optimal conversion of heat flow to directed current.
In our structure the quantization of energy levels and the Coulomb blockade
lead to the transfer of quantized packets of energy from a hot source into an
electric conductor to which it is capacitively coupled. The fluctuation
generated transfer of a single energy quantum translates into the directed
motion of a single electron. Thus in our structure the ratio of the charge
current to the heat current is determined by the ratio of the charge quantum to
the energy quantum. An important novel aspect of our approach is that the
direction of energy flow and the direction of electron motion are decoupled.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure
Instability of human societies as a result of conformity
We introduce a new model that mimics the strong and sudden effects induced by
conformity in tightly interacting human societies. Such effects range from mere
crowd phenomena to dramatic political turmoil. The model is a modified version
of the Ising Hamiltonian. We have studied the properties of this Hamiltonian
using both a Metropolis simulation and analytical derivations. Our study shows
that increasing the value of the conformity parameter, results in a first order
phase transition. As a result a majority of people begin honestly to support
the idea that may contradict the moral principles of a normal human beings
though each individual would support the moral principle without tight
interaction with the society. Thus, above some critical level of conformity our
society occurs to be instable with respect to ideas that might be doubtful. Our
model includes, in a simplified way, human diversity with respect to loyalty to
the moral principles.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, accepted in Int. journ of modern physics section
Nonequilibrium work distribution of a quantum harmonic oscillator
We analytically calculate the work distribution of a quantum harmonic
oscillator with arbitrary time-dependent angular frequency. We provide detailed
expressions for the work probability density for adiabatic and nonadiabatic
processes, in the limit of low and high temperature. We further verify the
validity of the quantum Jarzynski equalityComment: 6 pages, 3 figure
Coherence properties of the microcavity polariton condensate
A theoretical model is presented which explains the dominant decoherence
process in a microcavity polariton condensate. The mechanism which is invoked
is the effect of self-phase modulation, whereby interactions transform
polariton number fluctuations into random energy variations. The model shows
that the phase coherence decay, g1(t), has a Kubo form, which can be Gaussian
or exponential, depending on whether the number fluctuations are slow or fast.
This fluctuation rate also determines the decay time of the intensity
correlation function, g2(t), so it can be directly determined experimentally.
The model explains recent experimental measurements of a relatively fast
Gaussian decay for g1(t), but also predicts a regime, further above threshold,
where the decay is much slower.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur
Equilibrium and nonequilibrium thermodynamics of particle-stabilized thin liquid films
Our recent quasi-two-dimensional thermodynamic description of thin-liquid
films stabilized by colloidal particles is generalized to describe nonuniform
equilibrium states of films in external potentials and nonequilibrium transport
processes produced in the film by gradients of thermodynamic forces. Using a
Monte--Carlo simulation method, we have determined equilibrium equations of
state for a film stabilized by a suspension of hard spheres. Employing a
multipolar-expansion method combined with a flow-reflection technique, we have
also evaluated the short-time film-viscosity coefficients and collective
particle mobility.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure
Molecular kinetic analysis of a finite-time Carnot cycle
We study the efficiency at the maximal power of a
finite-time Carnot cycle of a weakly interacting gas which we can reagard as a
nearly ideal gas. In several systems interacting with the hot and cold
reservoirs of the temperatures and , respectively,
it is known that which
is often called the Curzon-Ahlborn (CA) efficiency . For the
first time numerical experiments to verify the validity of
are performed by means of molecular dynamics simulations and reveal that our
does not always agree with , but
approaches in the limit of .
Our molecular kinetic analysis explains the above facts theoretically by using
only elementary arithmetic.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
Emergence of robustness against noise: A structural phase transition in evolved models of gene regulatory networks
We investigate the evolution of Boolean networks subject to a selective
pressure which favors robustness against noise, as a model of evolved genetic
regulatory systems. By mapping the evolutionary process into a statistical
ensemble and minimizing its associated free energy, we find the structural
properties which emerge as the selective pressure is increased and identify a
phase transition from a random topology to a "segregated core" structure, where
a smaller and more densely connected subset of the nodes is responsible for
most of the regulation in the network. This segregated structure is very
similar qualitatively to what is found in gene regulatory networks, where only
a much smaller subset of genes --- those responsible for transcription factors
--- is responsible for global regulation. We obtain the full phase diagram of
the evolutionary process as a function of selective pressure and the average
number of inputs per node. We compare the theoretical predictions with Monte
Carlo simulations of evolved networks and with empirical data for Saccharomyces
cerevisiae and Escherichia coli.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure
Numerical renormalization group calculation of impurity internal energy and specific heat of quantum impurity models
We introduce a method to obtain the specific heat of quantum impurity models
via a direct calculation of the impurity internal energy requiring only the
evaluation of local quantities within a single numerical renormalization group
(NRG) calculation for the total system. For the Anderson impurity model, we
show that the impurity internal energy can be expressed as a sum of purely
local static correlation functions and a term that involves also the impurity
Green function. The temperature dependence of the latter can be neglected in
many cases, thereby allowing the impurity specific heat, , to be
calculated accurately from local static correlation functions; specifically via
, where and are the
energies of the (embedded) impurity and the hybridization energy, respectively.
The term involving the Green function can also be evaluated in cases where its
temperature dependence is non-negligible, adding an extra term to . For the non-degenerate Anderson impurity model, we show by comparison
with exact Bethe ansatz calculations that the results recover accurately both
the Kondo induced peak in the specific heat at low temperatures as well as the
high temperature peak due to the resonant level. The approach applies to
multiorbital and multichannel Anderson impurity models with arbitrary local
Coulomb interactions. An application to the Ohmic two state system and the
anisotropic Kondo model is also given, with comparisons to Bethe ansatz
calculations. The new approach could also be of interest within other impurity
solvers, e.g., within quantum Monte Carlo techniques.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figures, published versio
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