8,389 research outputs found
Simultaneous Brownian Motion of N Particles in a Temperature Gradient
A system of N Brownian particles suspended in a nonuniform heat bath is
treated as a thermodynamic system whith internal degrees of freedom, in this
case their velocities and coordinates. Applying the scheme of non-equilibrium
thermodynamics, one then easily obtains the Fokker-Planck equation for
simultaneous Brownian motion of N particles in a temperature gradient. This
equation accounts for couplings in the motion as a result of hydrodynamic
interactions between particles.Comment: 9 pages, RevTe
The two-body problem of ultra-cold atoms in a harmonic trap
We consider two bosonic atoms interacting with a short-range potential and
trapped in a spherically symmetric harmonic oscillator. The problem is exactly
solvable and is relevant for the study of ultra-cold atoms. We show that the
energy spectrum is universal, irrespective of the shape of the interaction
potential, provided its range is much smaller than the oscillator length.Comment: Final version accepted for publication in Am. Journ. Phy
Multiscaling for Classical Nanosystems: Derivation of Smoluchowski and Fokker-Planck Equations
Using multiscale analysis and methods of statistical physics, we show that a
solution to the N-atom Liouville Equation can be decomposed via an expansion in
terms of a smallness parameter epsilon, wherein the long scale time behavior
depends upon a reduced probability density that is a function of slow-evolving
order parameters. This reduced probability density is shown to satisfy the
Smoluchowski equation up to order epsilon squared for a given range of initial
conditions. Furthermore, under the additional assumption that the nanoparticle
momentum evolves on a slow time scale, we show that this reduced probability
density satisfies a Fokker-Planck equation up to the same order in epsilon.
This approach applies to a broad range of problems in the nanosciences.Comment: 23 page
Exact results for a charged, harmonically trapped quantum gas at arbitrary temperature and magnetic field strength
An analytical expression for the first-order density matrix of a charged,
two-dimensional, harmonically confined quantum gas, in the presence of a
constant magnetic field is derived. In contrast to previous results available
in the literature, our expressions are exact for any temperature and magnetic
field strength. We also present a novel factorization of the Bloch density
matrix in the form of a simple product with a clean separation of the
zero-field and field-dependent parts. This factorization provides an
alternative way of analytically investigating the effects of the magnetic field
on the system, and also permits the extension of our analysis to other
dimensions, and/or anisotropic confinement.Comment: To appear in Phys. Rev.
The methods café: An innovative idea for methods teaching at conference meetings
Interpretive research methods of various sorts have long been used to study "the political," but the full range of such methods is not widely known, and many are curious about what they entail. Others, who begin to use one or another of them, have questions about how to proceed. For those just learning about these methods, questions may be as basic as: "What does ethnomethodology mean?" "What is semiotic analysis?" "Are these approaches recognized as legitimate in political science?" Scholars engaging, or perhaps teaching, these methods might ask, e.g., "How do ethnographers overcome problems of accessing their field site, talking to strangers, and turning a year's worth of observational and interview notes into concise text?"
Taking Care of Business in a Flash: Constraining the Timescale for Low-Mass Satellite Quenching with ELVIS
The vast majority of dwarf satellites orbiting the Milky Way and M31 are
quenched, while comparable galaxies in the field are gas-rich and star-forming.
Assuming that this dichotomy is driven by environmental quenching, we use the
ELVIS suite of N-body simulations to constrain the characteristic timescale
upon which satellites must quench following infall into the virial volumes of
their hosts. The high satellite quenched fraction observed in the Local Group
demands an extremely short quenching timescale (~ 2 Gyr) for dwarf satellites
in the mass range Mstar ~ 10^6-10^8 Msun. This quenching timescale is
significantly shorter than that required to explain the quenched fraction of
more massive satellites (~ 8 Gyr), both in the Local Group and in more massive
host halos, suggesting a dramatic change in the dominant satellite quenching
mechanism at Mstar < 10^8 Msun. Combining our work with the results of
complementary analyses in the literature, we conclude that the suppression of
star formation in massive satellites (Mstar ~ 10^8 - 10^11 Msun) is broadly
consistent with being driven by starvation, such that the satellite quenching
timescale corresponds to the cold gas depletion time. Below a critical stellar
mass scale of ~ 10^8 Msun, however, the required quenching times are much
shorter than the expected cold gas depletion times. Instead, quenching must act
on a timescale comparable to the dynamical time of the host halo. We posit that
ram-pressure stripping can naturally explain this behavior, with the critical
mass (of Mstar ~ 10^8 Msun) corresponding to halos with gravitational restoring
forces that are too weak to overcome the drag force encountered when moving
through an extended, hot circumgalactic medium.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures; resubmitted to MNRAS after referee report
(August 25, 2015
Under Pressure: Quenching Star Formation in Low-Mass Satellite Galaxies via Stripping
Recent studies of galaxies in the local Universe, including those in the
Local Group, find that the efficiency of environmental (or satellite) quenching
increases dramatically at satellite stellar masses below ~ . This suggests a physical scale where quenching transitions from a
slow "starvation" mode to a rapid "stripping" mode at low masses. We
investigate the plausibility of this scenario using observed HI surface density
profiles for a sample of 66 nearby galaxies as inputs to analytic calculations
of ram-pressure and viscous stripping. Across a broad range of host properties,
we find that stripping becomes increasingly effective at $M_{*} < 10^{8-9}\
{\rm M}_{\odot}n_{\rm halo} <
10^{-3.5}{\rm cm}^{-3}$), we find that stripping is not fully effective;
infalling satellites are, on average, stripped of < 40 - 70% of their cold gas
reservoir, which is insufficient to match observations. By including a host
halo gas distribution that is clumpy and therefore contains regions of higher
density, we are able to reproduce the observed HI gas fractions (and thus the
high quenched fraction and short quenching timescale) of Local Group
satellites, suggesting that a host halo with clumpy gas may be crucial for
quenching low-mass systems in Local Group-like (and more massive) host halos.Comment: updated version after review, now accepted to MNRAS; Accepted 2016
August 22. Received 2016 August 18; in original form 2016 June 2
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