5,830 research outputs found
Effects of Defects on Friction for a Xe Film Sliding on Ag(111)
The effects of a step defect and a random array of point defects (such as
vacancies or substitutional impurities) on the force of friction acting on a
xenon monolayer film as it slides on a silver (111) substrate are studied by
molecular dynamic simulations and compared with the results of lowest order
perturbation theory in the substrate corrugation potential. For the case of a
step, the magnitude and velocity dependence of the friction force are strongly
dependent on the direction of sliding respect to the step and the corrugation
strength. When the applied force F is perpendicular to the step, the film is
pinned forF less than a critical force Fc. Motion of the film along the step,
however, is not pinned. Fluctuations in the sliding velocity in time provide
evidence of both stick-slip motion and thermally activated creep. Simulations
done with a substrate containing a 5 percent concentration of random point
defects for various directions of the applied force show that the film is
pinned for the force below a critical value. The critical force, however, is
still much lower than the effective inertial force exerted on the film by the
oscillations of the substrate in experiments done with a quartz crystal
microbalance (QCM). Lowest order perturbation theory in the substrate potential
is shown to give results consistent with the simulations, and it is used to
give a physical picture of what could be expected for real surfaces which
contain many defects.Comment: 13 pages, 17 figures, latex plus postscript files for figure
Blogging in the physics classroom: A research-based approach to shaping students' attitudes towards physics
Even though there has been a tremendous amount of research done in how to
help students learn physics, students are still coming away missing a crucial
piece of the puzzle: why bother with physics? Students learn fundamental laws
and how to calculate, but come out of a general physics course without a deep
understanding of how physics has transformed the world around them. In other
words, they get the "how" but not the "why". Studies have shown that students
leave introductory physics courses almost universally with decreased
expectations and with a more negative attitude. This paper will detail an
experiment to address this problem: a course weblog or "blog" which discusses
real-world applications of physics and engages students in discussion and
thinking outside of class. Specifically, students' attitudes towards the value
of physics and its applicability to the real-world were probed using a
26-question Likert scale survey over the course of four semesters in an
introductory physics course at a comprehensive Jesuit university. We found that
students who did not participate in the blog study generally exhibited a
deterioration in attitude towards physics as seen previously. However, students
who read, commented, and were involved with the blog maintained their initially
positive attitudes towards physics. Student response to the blog was
overwhelmingly positive, with students claiming that the blog made the things
we studied in the classroom come alive for them and seem much more relevant.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figure
Anomalous pinning behavior in an incommensurate two-chain model of friction
Pinning phenomena in an incommensurate two-chain model of friction are
studied numerically. The pinning effect due to the breaking of analyticity
exists in the present model. The pinning behavior is, however, quite different
from that for the breaking of analyticity state of the Frenkel-Kontorova model.
When the elasticity of chains or the strength of interchain interaction is
changed, pinning force and maximum static frictional force show anomalously
complicated behavior accompanied by a successive phase transition and they
vanish completely under certain conditions.Comment: RevTex, 9 pages, 19 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. B58 No.23(1998
Strongly Temperature Dependent Sliding Friction for a Superconducting Interface
A sudden drop in mechanical friction, between an adsorbed nitrogen monolayer
and a lead substrate, occurs when the lead passes through the superconducting
transition temperature. We attribute this effect to a sudden drop at the
superconducting transition temperature of the substrate Ohmic heating. The
Ohmic heating is due to the electronic screening current that results from the
sliding adsorbed film.Comment: Revte
Negative Refraction and Left-handed electromagnetism in Microwave Photonic Crystals
We demonstrate negative refraction of microwaves in metallic photonic
crystals. The spectral response of the photonic crystal, which manifests both
positive and negative refraction, is in complete agreement with band-structure
calculations and numerical simulations. The negative refraction observed
corresponds to left-handed electromagnetism and arises due to the dispersion
characteristics of waves in a periodic medium. This mechanism for negative
refraction is different from that in metamaterials.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure
Static Friction between Elastic Solids due to Random Asperities
Several workers have established that the Larkin domains for two three
dimensional nonmetallic elastic solids in contact with each other at a
disordered interface are enormously large. This implies that there should be
negligible static friction per unit area in the macroscopic solid limit.
The present work argues that the fluctuations in the heights of the random
asperities at the interface that occur in the Greenwood-Williamson model can
account for static friction.Comment: Contains some improvements in the treatment of the subjec
Static and Dry Friction due to Multiscale Surface Roughness
It is shown on the basis of scaling arguments that a disordered interface
between two elastic solids will quite generally exhibit static and "dry
friction" (i.e., kinetic friction which does not vanish as the sliding velocity
approaches zero), because of Tomlinson model instabilities that occur for small
length scale asperities. This provides a possible explanation for why static
and "dry" friction are virtually always observed, and superlubricity almost
never occurs
Self-Similarity and Localization
The localized eigenstates of the Harper equation exhibit universal
self-similar fluctuations once the exponentially decaying part of a wave
function is factorized out. For a fixed quantum state, we show that the whole
localized phase is characterized by a single strong coupling fixed point of the
renormalization equations. This fixed point also describes the generalized
Harper model with next nearest neighbor interaction below a certain threshold.
Above the threshold, the fluctuations in the generalized Harper model are
described by a strange invariant set of the renormalization equations.Comment: 4 pages, RevTeX, 2 figures include
Collision and symmetry-breaking in the transition to strange nonchaotic attractors
Strange nonchaotic attractors (SNAs) can be created due to the collision of
an invariant curve with itself. This novel ``homoclinic'' transition to SNAs
occurs in quasiperiodically driven maps which derive from the discrete
Schr\"odinger equation for a particle in a quasiperiodic potential. In the
classical dynamics, there is a transition from torus attractors to SNAs, which,
in the quantum system is manifest as the localization transition. This
equivalence provides new insights into a variety of properties of SNAs,
including its fractal measure. Further, there is a {\it symmetry breaking}
associated with the creation of SNAs which rigorously shows that the Lyapunov
exponent is nonpositive. By considering other related driven iterative
mappings, we show that these characteristics associated with the the appearance
of SNA are robust and occur in a large class of systems.Comment: To be appear in Physical Review Letter
Probing magnetic fields with multi-frequency polarized synchrotron emission
We investigate the problem of probing the local spatial structure of the
magnetic field of the interstellar medium using multi-frequency polarized maps
of the synchrotron emission at radio wavelengths. We focus in this paper on the
three-dimensional reconstruction of the largest scales of the magnetic field,
relying on the internal depolarization (due to differential Faraday rotation)
of the emitting medium as a function of electromagnetic frequency. We argue
that multi-band spectroscopy in the radio wavelengths, developed in the context
of high-redshift extragalactic HI lines, can be a very useful probe of the 3D
magnetic field structure of our Galaxy when combined with a Maximum A
Posteriori reconstruction technique. When starting from a fair approximation of
the magnetic field, we are able to recover the true one by using a linearized
version of the corresponding inverse problem. The spectral analysis of this
problem allows us to specify the best sampling strategy in electromagnetic
frequency and predicts a spatially anisotropic distribution of posterior
errors. The reconstruction method is illustrated for reference fields extracted
from realistic magneto-hydrodynamical simulations
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