5,099 research outputs found
High-resolution pore-water sampling with a gel sampler
Sediment pore-water profiles were sampled at high resolution (millimeter scale) with a polyacrylamide gel probe. This simple procedure involves inserting a 1-mm-thick gel held in a plastic probe into sediment. The gel reaches diffusive equilibrium in <1-2 h. For anions, the gel was sectioned, back-equilibrated into distilled-deionized water, and anions determined by high-performance liquid chromatography. Laboratory trials showed recovery of 104+/-4% Cl, 102+/-2% NO3, 101+/-1% SO4, and 102+/-2% NH4. For Fe and Mn, the gel was fixed in 0.01 M NaOH for similar to 3 h, subsectioned, extracted with 1 M HNO3, and analyzed by atomic absorption spectrometry. Field trials were undertaken in Esthwaite Water, a seasonally anoxic lake in the English Lake District. Gel probe data compared well with conventional pore-water extractions
Glassy behaviour in a simple topological model
In this article we study a simple, purely topological, cellular model which
is allowed to evolve through a Glauber-Kawasaki process. We find a
non-thermodynamic transition to a glassy phase in which the energy (defined as
the square of the local cell topological charge) fails to reach the equilibrium
value below a characteristic temperature which is dependent on the cooling
rate. We investigate a correlation function which exhibits aging behaviour, and
follows a master curve in the stationary regime when time is rescaled by a
factor of the relaxation time t_r. This master curve can be fitted by a von
Schweidler law in the late beta-relaxation regime. The relaxation times can be
well-fitted at all temperatures by an offset Arrhenius law. A power law can be
fitted to an intermediate temperature regime; the exponent of the power law and
the von Schweidler law roughly agree with the relationship predicted by
Mode-coupling Theory. By defining a suitable response function, we find that
the fluctuation-dissipation ratio is held until sometime later than the
appearance of the plateaux; non-monotonicity of the response is observed after
this ratio is broken, a feature which has been observed in other models with
dynamics involving activated processes.Comment: 11 pages LaTeX; minor textual corrcetions, minor corrections to figs
4 & 7
Jet substructure as a new Higgs search channel at the LHC
It is widely considered that, for Higgs boson searches at the Large Hadron
Collider, WH and ZH production where the Higgs boson decays to b anti-b are
poor search channels due to large backgrounds. We show that at high transverse
momenta, employing state-of-the-art jet reconstruction and decomposition
techniques, these processes can be recovered as promising search channels for
the standard model Higgs boson around 120 GeV in mass.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Towards More Accurate Molecular Dynamics Calculation of Thermal Conductivity. Case Study: GaN Bulk Crystals
Significant differences exist among literature for thermal conductivity of
various systems computed using molecular dynamics simulation. In some cases,
unphysical results, for example, negative thermal conductivity, have been
found. Using GaN as an example case and the direct non-equilibrium method,
extensive molecular dynamics simulations and Monte Carlo analysis of the
results have been carried out to quantify the uncertainty level of the
molecular dynamics methods and to identify the conditions that can yield
sufficiently accurate calculations of thermal conductivity. We found that the
errors of the calculations are mainly due to the statistical thermal
fluctuations. Extrapolating results to the limit of an infinite-size system
tend to magnify the errors and occasionally lead to unphysical results. The
error in bulk estimates can be reduced by performing longer time averages using
properly selected systems over a range of sample lengths. If the errors in the
conductivity estimates associated with each of the sample lengths are kept
below a certain threshold, the likelihood of obtaining unphysical bulk values
becomes insignificant. Using a Monte-Carlo approach developed here, we have
determined the probability distributions for the bulk thermal conductivities
obtained using the direct method. We also have observed a nonlinear effect that
can become a source of significant errors. For the extremely accurate results
presented here, we predict a [0001] GaN thermal conductivity of 185 at 300 K, 102 at 500 K, and 74
at 800 K. Using the insights obtained in the work, we have achieved a
corresponding error level (standard deviation) for the bulk (infinite sample
length) GaN thermal conductivity of less than 10 , 5 , and 15 at 300 K, 500 K, and 800 K respectively
The Neutrino Magnetic Moment Induced by Leptoquarks
Allowing leptoquarks to interact with both right-handed and left-handed
neutrinos (i.e., ``non-chiral'' leptoquarks), we show that a non-zero neutrino
magnetic moment can arise naturally. Although the mass of the non-chiral vector
leptoquark that couples to the first generation fermions is constrained
severely by universality of the leptonic decays and is found to be
greater than 50 TeV, the masses of the second and third generation non-chiral
vector leptoquarks may evade such constraint and may in general be in the range
of TeV. With reasonable input mass and coupling values, we find
that the neutrino magnetic moment due to the second generation leptoquarks is
of the order of while that caused by the
third generation leptoquarks, being enhanced significantly by the large top
quark mass, is in the range of .Comment: 11 pages, 3 eps figures, uses revte
Gauss Sums and Quantum Mechanics
By adapting Feynman's sum over paths method to a quantum mechanical system
whose phase space is a torus, a new proof of the Landsberg-Schaar identity for
quadratic Gauss sums is given. In contrast to existing non-elementary proofs,
which use infinite sums and a limiting process or contour integration, only
finite sums are involved. The toroidal nature of the classical phase space
leads to discrete position and momentum, and hence discrete time. The
corresponding `path integrals' are finite sums whose normalisations are derived
and which are shown to intertwine cyclicity and discreteness to give a finite
version of Kelvin's method of images.Comment: 14 pages, LaTe
Glassy behaviour in an exactly solved spin system with a ferromagnetic transition
We show that applying simple dynamical rules to Baxter's eight-vertex model
leads to a system which resembles a glass-forming liquid. There are analogies
with liquid, supercooled liquid, glassy and crystalline states. The disordered
phases exhibit strong dynamical heterogeneity at low temperatures, which may be
described in terms of an emergent mobility field. Their dynamics are
well-described by a simple model with trivial thermodynamics, but an emergent
kinetic constraint. We show that the (second order) thermodynamic transition to
the ordered phase may be interpreted in terms of confinement of the excitations
in the mobility field. We also describe the aging of disordered states towards
the ordered phase, in terms of simple rate equations.Comment: 11 page
Reliable estimation of prediction uncertainty for physico-chemical property models
The predictions of parameteric property models and their uncertainties are
sensitive to systematic errors such as inconsistent reference data, parametric
model assumptions, or inadequate computational methods. Here, we discuss the
calibration of property models in the light of bootstrapping, a sampling method
akin to Bayesian inference that can be employed for identifying systematic
errors and for reliable estimation of the prediction uncertainty. We apply
bootstrapping to assess a linear property model linking the 57Fe Moessbauer
isomer shift to the contact electron density at the iron nucleus for a diverse
set of 44 molecular iron compounds. The contact electron density is calculated
with twelve density functionals across Jacob's ladder (PWLDA, BP86, BLYP, PW91,
PBE, M06-L, TPSS, B3LYP, B3PW91, PBE0, M06, TPSSh). We provide systematic-error
diagnostics and reliable, locally resolved uncertainties for isomer-shift
predictions. Pure and hybrid density functionals yield average prediction
uncertainties of 0.06-0.08 mm/s and 0.04-0.05 mm/s, respectively, the latter
being close to the average experimental uncertainty of 0.02 mm/s. Furthermore,
we show that both model parameters and prediction uncertainty depend
significantly on the composition and number of reference data points.
Accordingly, we suggest that rankings of density functionals based on
performance measures (e.g., the coefficient of correlation, r2, or the
root-mean-square error, RMSE) should not be inferred from a single data set.
This study presents the first statistically rigorous calibration analysis for
theoretical Moessbauer spectroscopy, which is of general applicability for
physico-chemical property models and not restricted to isomer-shift
predictions. We provide the statistically meaningful reference data set MIS39
and a new calibration of the isomer shift based on the PBE0 functional.Comment: 49 pages, 9 figures, 7 table
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