Force indeterminacy in the jammed state of hard disks

Granular packings of hard discs are investigated by means of contact dynamics which is an appropriate technique to explore the allowed force-realizations in the space of contact forces. Configurations are generated for given values of the friction coefficient, and then an ensemble of equilibrium forces is found for fixed contacts. We study the force fluctuations within this ensemble. In the limit of zero friction the fluctuations vanish in accordance with the isostaticity of the packing. The magnitude of the fluctuations has a non-monotonous friction dependence. The increase for small friction can be attributed to the opening of the angle of the Coulomb cone, while the decrease as friction increases is due to the reduction of connectivity of the contact-network, leading to local, independent clusters of indeterminacy. We discuss the relevance of indeterminacy to packings of deformable particles and to the mechanical response properties.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. Minor changes, journal reference adde

On the magnetic equation of state in (2+1)-flavor QCD

A first study of critical behavior in the vicinity of the chiral phase transition of (2+1)-flavor QCD is presented. We analyze the quark mass and volume dependence of the chiral condensate and chiral susceptibilities in QCD with two degenerate light quark masses and a strange quark. The strange quark mass (m_s) is chosen close to its physical value; the two degenerate light quark masses (m_l) are varied in a wide range 1/80 \le m_l/m_s \le 2/5, where the smallest light quark mass value corresponds to a pseudo-scalar Goldstone mass of about 75 MeV. All calculations are performed with staggered fermions on lattices with temporal extent Nt=4. We show that numerical results are consistent with O(N) scaling in the chiral limit. We find that in the region of physical light quark mass values, m_l/m_s \simeq 1/20, the temperature and quark mass dependence of the chiral condensate is already dominated by universal properties of QCD that are encoded in the scaling function for the chiral order parameter, the magnetic equation of state. We also provide evidence for the influence of thermal fluctuations of Goldstone modes on the chiral condensate at finite temperature. At temperatures below, but close to the chiral phase transition at vanishing quark mass, this leads to a characteristic dependence of the light quark chiral condensate on the square root of the light quark mass.Comment: 18 pages, 18 EPS-file

Frictional coupling between sliding and spinning motion

We show that the friction force and torque, acting at a dry contact of two objects moving and rotating relative to each other, are inherently coupled. As a simple test system, a sliding and spinning disk on a horizontal flat surface is considered. We calculate, and also measure, how the disk is slowing down, and find that it always stops its sliding and spinning motion at the same moment. We discuss the impact of this coupling between friction force and torque on the physics of granular materials.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures; submitte

Resonant continuum in the Hartree-Fock+BCS approximation

A method for incorporating the effect of the resonant continuum into Hartree-Fock+BCS equations is proposed. The method is applied for the case of a neutron-rich nucleus calculated with a Skyrme-type force plus a zero-range pairing interaction and the results are compared with Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov calculations. It is shown that the widths of resonant states have an important effect on the pairing properties of nuclei close to the drip line.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, comparison with HFB adde