43,597 research outputs found
How often do you wash your hair? design as disordering: everyday routines, human object theories, probes and sustainablity
New objects can create disorder in our lives particularly when we try to appropriate and make sense of newly developed products that do not fit our routines. Ultimately, through exploring objects' affordances, our relationship to them develops into a routinised practice we no longer reflect on them. Hair care is universal and (often) an âordinaryâ part of our daily routines. Our cleanliness routines consume resources and therefore are implicated in the issue of environmental sustainability. However, routines are complex and
difficult to change when they are set in a culture of individual consumer choice. The disorder inherent in the process of appropriation raises the possibility that design might deliberately create a useful âdisorderâ in routinised practices to facilitate sustainable strategies in everyday life.
The paper proposes an approach of investigating routinised practices in relation to deliberately creating disorder in everyday routines and practice theory. Further, it outlines a pilot study that uses the designled method of 'probes' and considers its potentials in generating disorder. It identifies creative disorder in the process of designers developing the probes, participants interacting with them to finally designers receiving the results. Thinking about the process in terms of disorder is seen to be valuable in facilitating, applying and
developing probes, not only to inspire the designer but also to sensitise the designer to private and intimate areas of everyday life such as hair care.</p
Stability of Elastic Glass Phases in Random Field XY Magnets and Vortex Lattices in Type II Superconductors
A description of a dislocation-free elastic glass phase in terms of domain
walls is developed and used as the basis of a renormalization group analysis of
the energetics of dislocation loops added to the system. It is found that even
after optimizing over possible paths of large dislocation loops, their energy
is still very likely to be positive when the dislocation core energy is large.
This implies the existence of an equilibrium elastic glass phase in three
dimensional random field X-Y magnets, and a dislocation free,
bond-orientationally ordered ``Bragg glass'' phase of vortices in dirty Type II
superconductors.Comment: 12 pages, Revtex, no figures, submitted to Phys Rev Letter
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Coupled plasmon - phonon excitations in extrinsic monolayer graphene
The existence of an acoustic plasmon in extrinsic (doped or gated) monolayer
graphene was found recently in an {\it ab initio} calculation with the frozen
lattice [M. Pisarra {\it et al.}, arXiv:1306.6273, 2013]. By the {\em fully
dynamic} density-functional perturbation theory approach, we demonstrate a
strong coupling of the acoustic plasmonic mode to lattice vibrations. Thereby,
the acoustic plasmon in graphene does not exist as an isolated excitation, but
it is rather bound into a combined plasmon-phonon mode. We show that the
coupling provides a mechanism for the {\em bidirectional} energy exchange
between the electronic and the ionic subsystems with fundamentally, as well as
practically, important implications for the lattice cooling and heating by
electrons in graphene.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
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Numerical Results for the Ground-State Interface in a Random Medium
The problem of determining the ground state of a -dimensional interface
embedded in a -dimensional random medium is treated numerically. Using a
minimum-cut algorithm, the exact ground states can be found for a number of
problems for which other numerical methods are inexact and slow. In particular,
results are presented for the roughness exponents and ground-state energy
fluctuations in a random bond Ising model. It is found that the roughness
exponent , with the related energy
exponent being , in ,
respectively. These results are compared with previous analytical and numerical
estimates.Comment: 10 pages, REVTEX3.0; 3 ps files (separate:tar/gzip/uuencoded) for
figure
Density Matrix Renormalization Group Method for the Random Quantum One-Dimensional Systems - Application to the Random Spin-1/2 Antiferromagnetic Heisenberg Chain -
The density matrix renormalization group method is generalized to one
dimensional random systems. Using this method, the energy gap distribution of
the spin-1/2 random antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain is calculated. The
results are consistent with the predictions of the renormalization group theory
demonstrating the effectiveness of the present method in random systems. The
possible application of the present method to other random systems is
discussed.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures upon reques
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