15,413 research outputs found
Variations of the Energy of Free Particles in the pp-Wave Spacetimes
We consider the action of exact plane gravitational waves, or pp-waves, on
free particles. The analysis is carried out by investigating the variations of
the geodesic trajectories of the particles, before and after the passage of the
wave. The initial velocities of the particles are non-vanishing. We evaluate
numerically the Kinetic energy per unit mass of the free particles, and obtain
interesting, quasi-periodic behaviour of the variations of the Kinetic energy
with respect to the width of the gaussian that represents the wave.
The variation of the energy of the free particle is expected to be exactly
minus the variation of the energy of the gravitational field, and therefore
provides an estimation of the local variation of the gravitational energy. The
investigation is carried out in the context of short bursts of gravitational
waves, and of waves described by normalised gaussians, that yield impulsive
waves in a certain limit.Comment: 20 pages, 18 figures, further arguments supporting the localizability
of the gravitational energy are presented, published in Univers
Gravitational pressure on event horizons and thermodynamics in the teleparallel framework
The concept of gravitational pressure is naturally defined in the context of
the teleparallel equivalent of general relativity. Together with the definition
of gravitational energy, we investigate the thermodynamics of rotating black
holes in the teleparallel framework. We obtain the value of the gravitational
pressure over the external event horizon of the Kerr black hole, and write an
expression for the thermodynamic relation , where the variations
refer to the Penrose process for the Kerr black hole. We employ only the
notions of gravitational energy and pressure that arise in teleparallel
gravity, and do not make any consideration of the area or the variation of the
area of the event horizon. However, our results are qualitatively similar to
the standard expression of the literature.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure
A computationally efficient method for calculating the maximum conductance of disordered networks: Application to 1-dimensional conductors
Random networks of carbon nanotubes and metallic nanowires have shown to be
very useful in the production of transparent, conducting films. The electronic
transport on the film depends considerably on the network properties, and on
the inter-wire coupling. Here we present a simple, computationally efficient
method for the calculation of conductance on random nanostructured networks.
The method is implemented on metallic nanowire networks, which are described
within a single-orbital tight binding Hamiltonian, and the conductance is
calculated with the Kubo formula. We show how the network conductance depends
on the average number of connections per wire, and on the number of wires
connected to the electrodes. We also show the effect of the inter-/intra-wire
hopping ratio on the conductance through the network. Furthermore, we argue
that this type of calculation is easily extendable to account for the upper
conductivity of realistic films spanned by tunneling networks. When compared to
experimental measurements, this quantity provides a clear indication of how
much room is available for improving the film conductivity.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure
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