Noise-assisted Mound Coarsening in Epitaxial Growth

We propose deposition noise to be an important factor in unstable epitaxial growth of thin films. Our analysis yields a geometrical relation H=(RWL)^2 between the typical mound height W, mound size L, and the film thickness H. Simulations of realistic systems show that the parameter R is a characteristic of the growth conditions, and generally lies in the range 0.2-0.7. The constancy of R in late-stage coarsening yields a scaling relation between the coarsening exponent 1/z and the mound height exponent \beta which, in the case of saturated mound slope, gives \beta = 1/z = 1/4.Comment: 4 pages, RevTex Macros, 3 eps figure

Topics in constrained and unconstrained ordination

In this paper, we reflect on a number of aspects of ordination methods: how should absences be treated in ordination and how do model-based methods, including Gaussian ordination and methods using generalized linear models, relate to the usual least-squares (eigenvector) methods based on (log-) transformed data. We defend detrended correspondence analysis by theoretical arguments and by reanalyzing data that previously gave bad results. We show by examples that constrained ordination can yield more informative views on effects of interest compared to unconstrained ordination (where such effects can be invisible) and show how constrained axes can be interpreted. Constrained ordination uses an ANOVA/regression approach to enable the user to focus on particular aspects of species community data, in particular the effects of qualitative and quantitative environmental variables. We close with an analysis examining the interaction effects between two factors, and we demonstrate how principal response curves can help in their visualisation. Example data and Canoco 5 projects are provided as Supplementary Material

Diffusion Boundary Condition at Surface Steps

This Communication reports a geometrical factor that is necessary in the diffusion boundary condition across surface steps. Specifically, this factor relates adatom concentration to its spatial gradient at a surface step, and it describes the fraction of jump attempts that cross the step. In this Communication, the authors show that the factor is 1/\Pi using theoretical formulation and further verify the formulation using numerical simulations for triangular, square, and hexagonal surface lattices

Comparison of H+ and He+ Plasmapause Locations Based on Resurrected and Reevaluated OGO-5 Ion Composition Data Base

Orbiting Geophysical Observatory 5 (OGO 5) magnetospheric ion-composition data (H+, He+ and O+) from an ion spectrometer (Sharp, 1969) have been retrieved from old magnetic tapes archived at the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC). The highly compressed binary format was converted into a user-friendly ASCII format and these data have been made available online. We have inspected reliability and consistency of this data set in state of the art current knowledge. Comparing with the climatological model IRI-2012 and the mathematical model FLIP a shift of absolute and relative ion densities with time was revealed. We have suggested a correction procedure of individual H+, He+ and O+ ion densities. Using the corrected data set, we investigated plasmapause locations based on density gradient in H+, and He+. Correlation coefficient of both locations was determined as approx. 0.886 and the typical difference (Delta)L approx. 0.1. The electron density at the He+ plasmapause location for all cases is >100/cu cm