2,681 research outputs found
Synthesis and characteristics of polyarylene ether sulfones
A method utilizing potassium carbonate/dimethyl acetamide, as base and solvent respectively, was used for the synthesis of several homopolymers and copolymers derived from various bisphenols. It is demonstrated that this method deviates from simple second order kinetics; this deviation being due to the heterogeneous nature of the reaction. Also, it is shown that a liquid induced crystallization process can improve the solvent resistance of these polymers. Finally, a Monte Carlo simulation of the triad distribution of monomers in nonequilibrium copolycondensation is discussed
Spin-Hall effect and circular birefringence of a uniaxial crystal plate
The linear birefringence of uniaxial crystal plates is known since the 17th
century, and it is widely used in numerous optical setups and devices. Here we
demonstrate, both theoretically and experimentally, a fine lateral circular
birefringence of such crystal plates. This effect is a novel example of the
spin-Hall effect of light, i.e., a transverse spin-dependent shift of the
paraxial light beam transmitted through the plate. The well-known linear
birefringence and the new circular birefringence form an interesting analogy
with the Goos-H\"anchen and Imbert-Fedorov beam shifts that appear in the light
reflection at a dielectric interface. We report the experimental observation of
the effect in a remarkably simple system of a tilted half-wave plate and
polarizers using polarimetric and quantum-weak-measurement techniques for the
beam-shift measurements. In view of great recent interest in spin-orbit
interaction phenomena, our results could find applications in modern
polarization optics and nano-photonics.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, to appear in Optic
Conformal Field Theory Correlators from Classical Field Theory on Anti-de Sitter Space II. Vector and Spinor Fields
We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to calculate CFT correlation functions of
vector and spinor fields. The connection between the AdS and boundary fields is
properly treated via a Dirichlet boundary value problem.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX2e with amsmath,amsfonts packages; v2:interactions
section corrected, reference adde
Kinetics of thermal decomposition of some metal oxalates
The thermal decomposition kinetics of oxalates of ZnII, NiII and ThIV have been studied in air by isothermal and non-isothermal thermogravimetry. The isothermal kinetic results suggest that the mechanism of decomposition of the zinc compound involves rapid nucleation followed by two dimensional growth in the acceleratory region, while in the case of thorium oxalate, the initial nucleation occurs by a chain mechanism on the surface of the reactant followed by the growth of the product from the surface towards the interior. The results on nickel oxalate could not be interpreted in an unambiguous manner. The activation energy and the frequency factor obtained from TG curves compare well with those obtained from the isothermal method. The activation energies for the dehydration of these oxalates have also been evaluated from the thermogravimetric curves
Adaptive Lévy processes and area-restricted search in human foraging
A considerable amount of research has claimed that animals’ foraging behaviors display movement lengths with power-law distributed tails, characteristic of Lévy flights and Lévy walks. Though these claims have recently come into question, the proposal that many animals forage using Lévy processes nonetheless remains. A Lévy process does not consider when or where resources are encountered, and samples movement lengths independently of past experience. However, Lévy processes too have come into question based on the observation that in patchy resource environments resource-sensitive foraging strategies, like area-restricted search, perform better than Lévy flights yet can still generate heavy-tailed distributions of movement lengths. To investigate these questions further, we tracked humans as they searched for hidden resources in an open-field virtual environment, with either patchy or dispersed resource distributions. Supporting previous research, for both conditions logarithmic binning methods were consistent with Lévy flights and rank-frequency methods–comparing alternative distributions using maximum likelihood methods–showed the strongest support for bounded power-law distributions (truncated Lévy flights). However, goodness-of-fit tests found that even bounded power-law distributions only accurately characterized movement behavior for 4 (out of 32) participants. Moreover, paths in the patchy environment (but not the dispersed environment) showed a transition to intensive search following resource encounters, characteristic of area-restricted search. Transferring paths between environments revealed that paths generated in the patchy environment were adapted to that environment. Our results suggest that though power-law distributions do not accurately reflect human search, Lévy processes may still describe movement in dispersed environments, but not in patchy environments–where search was area-restricted. Furthermore, our results indicate that search strategies cannot be inferred without knowing how organisms respond to resources–as both patched and dispersed conditions led to similar Lévy-like movement distributions
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