4,448 research outputs found
Meissner response of a bulk superconductor with an embedded sheet of reduced penetration depth
We calculate the change in susceptibility resulting from a thin sheet with
reduced penetration depth embedded perpendicular to the surface of an isotropic
superconductor, in a geometry applicable to scanning Superconducting QUantum
Interference Device (SQUID) microscopy, by numerically solving Maxwell's and
London's equations using the finite element method. The predicted stripes in
susceptibility agree well in shape with the observations of Kalisky et al. of
enhanced susceptibility above twin planes in the underdoped pnictide
superconductor Ba(Fe1-xCox)2As2 (Ba-122). By comparing the predicted stripe
amplitudes with experiment and using the London relation between penetration
depth and superfluid density, we estimate the enhanced Cooper pair density on
the twin planes, and the barrier force for a vortex to cross a twin plane. Fits
to the observed temperature dependence of the stripe amplitude suggest that the
twin planes have a higher critical temperature than the bulk, although stripes
are not observed above the bulk critical temperature.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure
Assessment of different urban traffic control strategy impacts on vehicle emissions
This paper investigates the influence of traffic signal control strategy on vehicle emissions, vehicle journey time and total throughput flow within a single isolated four-armed junction. Two pre-timed signal plans are considered, one with two-stages involving permissive-only opposing turns and the other with four-stages which has no conflicting traffic. Additionally, the increase in efficiency by utilising actuated signal timing where green time is re-optimised as flow values vary is investigated. A microscopic traffic simulation model is used to model flows and AIRE (Analysis of Instantaneous Road Emissions) microscopic emissions model is utilised to out- put emission levels from the flow data. A simple junction model shows that the two-stage signal plan is more efficient in both emis- sions and journey time. However, as the level of opposed turning vehicles and conflicting movement increases, the two-stage model moves to being the inferior signal plan choice and the four-stage plan outputs fewer emissions than the two-stage plan. A real-world example of a four-armed junction has been used in this study and from the traffic survey data and existing junction layout; it is rec- ommended that a two-stage plan is used as it produces lower amounts of emissions and shorter journey times compared to a four-stage plan. The results also show that nitrogen oxides (NOx) are the most sensitive to changes in flow followed by carbon dioxide (CO2), Black Carbon and then particulate matter (PM10)
Contact of Single Asperities with Varying Adhesion: Comparing Continuum Mechanics to Atomistic Simulations
Atomistic simulations are used to test the equations of continuum contact
mechanics in nanometer scale contacts. Nominally spherical tips, made by
bending crystals or cutting crystalline or amorphous solids, are pressed into a
flat, elastic substrate. The normal displacement, contact radius, stress
distribution, friction and lateral stiffness are examined as a function of load
and adhesion. The atomic scale roughness present on any tip made of discrete
atoms is shown to have profound effects on the results. Contact areas, local
stresses, and the work of adhesion change by factors of two to four, and the
friction and lateral stiffness vary by orders of magnitude. The microscopic
factors responsible for these changes are discussed. The results are also used
to test methods for analyzing experimental data with continuum theory to
determine information, such as contact area, that can not be measured directly
in nanometer scale contacts. Even when the data appear to be fit by continuum
theory, extracted quantities can differ substantially from their true values
QCD Matter Thermalization at RHIC and LHC
Employing the perturbative QCD inspired parton cascade, we investigate
kinetic and chemical equilibration of the partonic matter created in central
heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies. Two types of initial conditions
are chosen. One is generated by the model of wounded nucleons using the PYTHIA
event generator and Glauber geometry. Another is considered as a color glass
condensate. We show that kinetic equilibration is almost independent on the
chosen initial conditions, whereas there is a sensitive dependence for chemical
equilibration. The time scale of thermalization lies between 1 and 1.5 fm/c.
The final parton transverse energy obtained from BAMPS calculations is compared
with the RHIC data and is estimated for the LHC energy.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, plenary talk at International Conference on
Strangeness in Quark Matter 2008, Beijing, China, October 6-10, 200
Optimal Energy Dissipation in Sliding Friction Simulations
Non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations, of crucial importance in
sliding friction, are hampered by arbitrariness and uncertainties in the
removal of the frictionally generated Joule heat. Building upon general
pre-existing formulation, we implement a fully microscopic dissipation approach
which, based on a parameter-free, non-Markovian, stochastic dynamics, absorbs
Joule heat equivalently to a semi-infinite solid and harmonic substrate. As a
test case, we investigate the stick-slip friction of a slider over a
two-dimensional Lennard-Jones solid, comparing our virtually exact frictional
results with approximate ones from commonly adopted dissipation schemes.
Remarkably, the exact results can be closely reproduced by a standard Langevin
dissipation scheme, once its parameters are determined according to a general
and self-standing variational procedure
Towards low-latency real-time detection of gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences in the era of advanced detectors
Electromagnetic (EM) follow-up observations of gravitational wave (GW) events
will help shed light on the nature of the sources, and more can be learned if
the EM follow-ups can start as soon as the GW event becomes observable. In this
paper, we propose a computationally efficient time-domain algorithm capable of
detecting gravitational waves (GWs) from coalescing binaries of compact objects
with nearly zero time delay. In case when the signal is strong enough, our
algorithm also has the flexibility to trigger EM observation before the merger.
The key to the efficiency of our algorithm arises from the use of chains of
so-called Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filters, which filter time-series
data recursively. Computational cost is further reduced by a template
interpolation technique that requires filtering to be done only for a much
coarser template bank than otherwise required to sufficiently recover optimal
signal-to-noise ratio. Towards future detectors with sensitivity extending to
lower frequencies, our algorithm's computational cost is shown to increase
rather insignificantly compared to the conventional time-domain correlation
method. Moreover, at latencies of less than hundreds to thousands of seconds,
this method is expected to be computationally more efficient than the
straightforward frequency-domain method.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures, for PR
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