48,374 research outputs found
Thermal rounding of the depinning transition
We study thermal effects at the depinning transition by numerical simulations
of driven one-dimensional elastic interfaces in a disordered medium. We find
that the velocity of the interface, evaluated at the critical depinning force,
can be correctly described with the power law , where is
the thermal exponent. Using the sample-dependent value of the critical force,
we precisely evaluate the value of directly from the temperature
dependence of the velocity, obtaining the value . By
measuring the structure factor of the interface we show that both the
thermally-rounded and the T=0 depinning, display the same large-scale geometry,
described by an identical divergence of a characteristic length with the
velocity , where and are respectively
the T=0 correlation and depinning exponents. We discuss the comparison of our
results with previous estimates of the thermal exponent and the direct
consequences for recent experiments on magnetic domain wall motion in
ferromagnetic thin films.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure
Nucleation of quark matter in neutron stars cores
We consider the general conditions of quark droplets formation in high
density neutron matter. The growth of the quark bubble (assumed to contain a
sufficiently large number of particles) can be described by means of a
Fokker-Planck equation. The dynamics of the nucleation essentially depends on
the physical properties of the medium it takes place. The conditions for quark
bubble formation are analyzed within the frameworks of both dissipative and
non-dissipative (with zero bulk and shear viscosity coefficients) approaches.
The conversion time of the neutron star to a quark star is obtained as a
function of the equation of state of the neutron matter and of the microscopic
parameters of the quark nuclei. As an application of the obtained formalism we
analyze the first order phase transition from neutron matter to quark matter in
rapidly rotating neutron stars cores, triggered by the gravitational energy
released during the spinning down of the neutron star. The endothermic
conversion process, via gravitational energy absorption, could take place, in a
very short time interval, of the order of few tens seconds, in a class of dense
compact objects, with very high magnetic fields, called magnetars.Comment: 31 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Ap
The Use of Gamma-ray Bursts as Direction and Time Markers in SETI Strategies
When transmitting a signal over a large distance it is more efficient to send
a brief beamed signal than a continuous omni-directional transmission but this
requires that the receiver knows where and when to look for the transmission.
For SETI, the use of various natural phenomena has previously been suggested to
achieve the desired synchronization. Here it is proposed that gamma-ray bursts
may well the best ``synchronizers'' of all currently known phenomena due to
their large intrinsic luminosities, high occurrence rate, isotropic sky
distribution, large distance from the Galaxy, short duration, and easy
detectability. For targeted searches, precise positions for gamma-ray bursts
are required together with precise distance measurements to a target star. The
required burst position determinations are now starting to be obtained, aided
in large part by the discovery of optical afterglows. Good distance
measurements are currently available from Hipparcos and even better
measurements should be provided by spacecraft now being developed. For
non-targeted searches, positional accuracies simply better than a detector's
field of view may suffice but the time delay between the detection of a
gamma-ray burst and the reception of the transmitted signal cannot be predicted
in an obvious way.Comment: 8 pages, accepted for publication in PAS
Comment on ``Nonuniversal Exponents in Interface Growth''
Recently, Newman and Swift[T. J. Newman and M. R. Swift, Phys. Rev. Lett.
{\bf 79}, 2261 (1997)] made an interesting suggestion that the strong-coupling
exponents of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation may not be universal, but
rather depend on the precise form of the noise distribution. We show here that
the decrease of surface roughness exponents they observed can be attributed to
a percolative effect
Disorder Induced Transitions in Layered Coulomb Gases and Superconductors
A 3D layered system of charges with logarithmic interaction parallel to the
layers and random dipoles is studied via a novel variational method and an
energy rationale which reproduce the known phase diagram for a single layer.
Increasing interlayer coupling leads to successive transitions in which charge
rods correlated in N>1 neighboring layers are nucleated by weaker disorder. For
layered superconductors in the limit of only magnetic interlayer coupling, the
method predicts and locates a disorder-induced defect-unbinding transition in
the flux lattice. While N=1 charges dominate there, N>1 disorder induced defect
rods are predicted for multi-layer superconductors.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, RevTe
COCO_TS Dataset: Pixel-level Annotations Based on Weak Supervision for Scene Text Segmentation
The absence of large scale datasets with pixel-level supervisions is a
significant obstacle for the training of deep convolutional networks for scene
text segmentation. For this reason, synthetic data generation is normally
employed to enlarge the training dataset. Nonetheless, synthetic data cannot
reproduce the complexity and variability of natural images. In this paper, a
weakly supervised learning approach is used to reduce the shift between
training on real and synthetic data. Pixel-level supervisions for a text
detection dataset (i.e. where only bounding-box annotations are available) are
generated. In particular, the COCO-Text-Segmentation (COCO_TS) dataset, which
provides pixel-level supervisions for the COCO-Text dataset, is created and
released. The generated annotations are used to train a deep convolutional
neural network for semantic segmentation. Experiments show that the proposed
dataset can be used instead of synthetic data, allowing us to use only a
fraction of the training samples and significantly improving the performances
Simulations of laser-driven strong-field QED with Ptarmigan: Resolving wavelength-scale interference and -ray polarization
Accurate modelling is necessary to support precision experiments
investigating strong-field QED phenomena. This modelling is particularly
challenging in the transition between the perturbative and nonperturbative
regimes, where the normalized laser amplitude is comparable to unity and
wavelength-scale interference is significant. Here we describe how to simulate
nonlinear Compton scattering, Breit-Wheeler pair creation, and trident pair
creation in this regime, using the Monte Carlo particle-tracking code
Ptarmigan. This code simulates collisions between high-intensity lasers and
beams of electrons or rays, primarily in the framework of the locally
monochromatic approximation (LMA). We benchmark our simulation results against
full QED calculations for pulsed plane waves and show that they are accurate at
the level of a few per cent, across the full range of particle energies and
laser intensities. This work extends our previous results to linearly polarized
lasers and arbitrarily polarized rays.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures; additional discussion of validity and updated
figures; to appear in Physics of Plasma
Experimental observation of an enhanced anisotropic magnetoresistance in non-local configuration
We compare non-local magnetoresistance measurements in multi-terminal Ni
nanostructures with corresponding local experiments. In both configurations,
the measured voltages show the characteristic features of anisotropic
magnetoresistance (AMR). However, the magnitude of the non-local AMR signal is
up to one order of magnitude larger than its local counterpart. Moreover, the
non-local AMR increases with increasing degree of non-locality, i.e., with the
separation between the region of the main current flow and the voltage
measurement region. All experimental observations can be consistently modeled
in terms of current spreading in a non-isotropic conductor. Our results show
that current spreading can significantly enhance the magnetoresistance signal
in non-local experiments
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