7,234 research outputs found
Growing dust grains in protoplanetary discs - I. Radial drift with toy growth models
In a series of papers, we present a comprehensive analytic study of the
global motion of growing dust grains in protoplanetary discs, addressing both
the radial drift and the vertical settling of the particles. Here we study how
the radial drift of dust particles is affected by grain growth. In a first
step, toy models in which grain growth can either be constant, accelerate or
decelerate are introduced. The equations of motion are analytically integrable
and therefore the grains dynamics is easy to understand.
The radial motion of growing grains is governed by the relative efficiency of
the growth and migration processes which is expressed by the dimensionless
parameter Lambda, as well as the exponents for the gas surface density and
temperature profiles, denoted p and q respectively. When Lambda is of order
unity, growth and migration are strongly coupled, providing the most efficient
radial drift. For the toy models considered, grains pile up when -p+q+1/2<0.
Importantly, we show the existence of a second process which can help discs to
retain their solid materials. For accelerating growth, grains end up their
migration at a finite radius, thus avoiding being accreted onto the central
star.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. v2: typos
correcte
An apertureless near-field microscope for fluorescence imaging
We describe an apertureless near field microscope for imaging fluorescent samples. Optical contrast is generated by exploiting fluorescent quenching near a metallized atomic force microscope tip. This microscope has been used to image fluorescent latex beads with subdiffraction limit resolution. The use of fluorescence allows us to prove that the contrast mechanism is indeed spectroscopic in origin
Boltzmann and hydrodynamic description for self-propelled particles
We study analytically the emergence of spontaneous collective motion within
large bidimensional groups of self-propelled particles with noisy local
interactions, a schematic model for assemblies of biological organisms. As a
central result, we derive from the individual dynamics the hydrodynamic
equations for the density and velocity fields, thus giving a microscopic
foundation to the phenomenological equations used in previous approaches. A
homogeneous spontaneous motion emerges below a transition line in the
noise-density plane. Yet, this state is shown to be unstable against spatial
perturbations, suggesting that more complicated structures should eventually
appear.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, final versio
Thermalization, Error-Correction, and Memory Lifetime for Ising Anyon Systems
We consider two-dimensional lattice models that support Ising anyonic
excitations and are coupled to a thermal bath. We propose a phenomenological
model for the resulting short-time dynamics that includes pair-creation,
hopping, braiding, and fusion of anyons. By explicitly constructing topological
quantum error-correcting codes for this class of system, we use our
thermalization model to estimate the lifetime of the quantum information stored
in the encoded spaces. To decode and correct errors in these codes, we adapt
several existing topological decoders to the non-Abelian setting. We perform
large-scale numerical simulations of these two-dimensional Ising anyon systems
and find that the thresholds of these models range between 13% to 25%. To our
knowledge, these are the first numerical threshold estimates for quantum codes
without explicit additive structure.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figures; v2 matches the journal version and corrects a
misstatement about the detailed balance condition of our Metropolis
simulations. All conclusions from v1 are unaffected by this correctio
Effective action approach to higher-order relativistic tidal interactions in binary systems and their effective one body description
The gravitational-wave signal from inspiralling neutron-star--neutron-star
(or black-hole--neutron-star) binaries will be influenced by tidal coupling in
the system. An important science goal in the gravitational-wave detection of
these systems is to obtain information about the equation of state of neutron
star matter via the measurement of the tidal polarizability parameters of
neutron stars. To extract this piece of information will require to have
accurate analytical descriptions of both the motion and the radiation of
tidally interacting binaries. We improve the analytical description of the late
inspiral dynamics by computing the next-to-next-to-leading order relativistic
correction to the tidal interaction energy. Our calculation is based on an
effective-action approach to tidal interactions, and on its transcription
within the effective-one-body formalism. We find that second-order relativistic
effects (quadratic in the relativistic gravitational potential ) significantly increase the effective tidal polarizability of
neutron stars by a distance-dependent amplification factor of the form where, say for an equal-mass binary,
(as previously known) and (as
determined here for the first time). We argue that higher-order relativistic
effects will lead to further amplification, and we suggest a Pad\'e-type way of
resumming them. We recommend to test our results by comparing
resolution-extrapolated numerical simulations of inspiralling-binary neutron
stars to their effective one body description.Comment: 29 pages, Physical Review D, to appea
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