Creep rupture of materials: insights from a fiber bundle model with relaxation

I adapted a model recently introduced in the context of seismic phenomena, to study creep rupture of materials. It consists of linear elastic fibers that interact in an equal load sharing scheme, complemented with a local viscoelastic relaxation mechanism. The model correctly describes the three stages of the creep process, namely an initial Andrade regime of creep relaxation, an intermediate regime of rather constant creep rate, and a tertiary regime of accelerated creep towards final failure of the sample. In the tertiary regime creep rate follows the experimentally observed one over time-to-failure dependence. The time of minimum strain rate is systematically observed to be about 60-65 % of the time to failure, in accordance with experimental observations. In addition, burst size statistics of breaking events display a -3/2 power law for events close to the time of failure, and a steeper decay for the all-time distribution. Statistics of interevent times shows a tendency of the events to cluster temporarily. This behavior should be observable in acoustic emission experiments

Proton Decay, Fermion Masses and Texture from Extra Dimensions in SUSY GUTs

In supersymmetry, there are gauge invariant dimension 5 proton decay operators which must be suppressed by a mass scale much larger than the Planck mass. It is natural to expect that this suppression should be explained by a mechanism that explains the hierarchical structure of the fermion mass matrices. We apply this argument to the case where wave functions of chiral multiplets are localized under a kink background along an extra spatial dimension and the Yukawa couplings as well as the coefficients of the proton decay operators are determined by the overlap of the relevant wave functions. A configuration is found in the context of SU(5) supersymmetric grand unified theory that yields realistic values of quark masses, mixing angles, CP phase and charged lepton masses and sufficiently small genuine dimension 5 proton decay operators. Inclusion of SU(5) breaking effects is essential in order to obtain non-vanishing CP phase as well as correct lepton masses. The resulting mass matrix has a texture structure in which texture zeros are a consequence of extremely small overlap of the wave functions. Our approach requires explicit breaking of supersymmetry in the extra dimension, which can be realized in (de)constructing extra dimension.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures, comments adde

Separability of a Low-Momentum Effective Nucleon-Nucleon Potential

A realistic nucleon-nucleon potential is transformed into a low-momentum effective one (LMNN) using the Okubo theory. The separable potentials are converted from the LMNN with a universal separable expansion method and a simple Legendre expansion. Through the calculation of the triton binding energies, the separability for the convergence of these ranks is evaluated. It is found that there is a tendency for the lower momentum cutoff parameter $\Lambda$ of LMNN to gain good separability.Comment: 6 pages, 1 tabl

New Universality of Lyapunov Spectra in Hamiltonian Systems

A new universality of Lyapunov spectra {\lambda_i} is shown for Hamiltonian systems. The universality appears in middle energy regime and is different from another universality which can be reproduced by random matrices in the following two points. One is that the new universality appears in a limited range of large i/N rather than the whole range, where N is degrees of freedom. The other is Lyapunov spectra do not behave linearly while random matrices give linear behavior even on 3D lattice. Quadratic terms with smaller nonlinear terms of potential functions play an intrinsic role in the new universality.Comment: 19 pages, 16 Encapsulated Postscript figures, LaTeX (100 kb

Lepton asymmetry in the primordial gravitational wave spectrum

Effects of neutrino free streaming is evaluated on the primordial spectrum of gravitational radiation taking both neutrino chemical potential and masses into account. The former or the lepton asymmetry induces two competitive effects, namely, to increase anisotropic pressure, which damps the gravitational wave more, and to delay the matter-radiation equality time, which reduces the damping. The latter effect is more prominent and a large lepton asymmetry would reduce the damping. We may thereby be able to measure the magnitude of lepton asymmetry from the primordial gravitational wave spectrum.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

Expectation values of chiral primary operators in holographic interface CFT

We consider the expectation values of chiral primary operators in the presence of the interface in the 4 dimensional N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. This interface is derived from D3-D5 system in type IIB string theory. These expectation values are computed classically in the gauge theory side. On the other hand, this interface is a holographic dual to type IIB string theory on AdS_5 x S^5 spacetime with a probe D5-brane. The expectation values are computed by GKPW prescription in the gravity side. We find non-trivial agreement of these two results: the gauge theory side and the gravity side.Comment: 17pages, no figur

Density wave instability in a 2D dipolar Fermi gas

We consider a uniform dipolar Fermi gas in two-dimensions (2D) where the dipole moments of fermions are aligned by an orientable external field. We obtain the ground state of the gas in Hartree-Fock approximation and investigate RPA stability against density fluctuations of finite momentum. It is shown that the density wave instability takes place in a broad region where the system is stable against collapse. We also find that the critical temperature can be a significant fraction of Fermi temperature for a realistic system of polar molecules.Comment: 10 figure

Security devices based on liquid crystals doped with a colour dye

Liquid crystal properties make them useful for the development of security devices in applications of authentication and detection of fakes. Induced orientation of liquid crystal molecules and birefringence are the two main properties used in security devices. Employing liquid crystal and dichroic colorants, we have developed devices that show, with the aid of a polarizer, multiple images on each side of the device. Rubbed polyimide is used as alignment layer on each substrate of the LC cell. By rubbing the polyimide in different directions in each substrate it is possible to create any kind of symbols, drawings or motifs with a greyscale; the more complex the created device is, the more difficult is to fake it. To identify the motifs it is necessary to use polarized light. Depending on whether the polarizer is located in front of the LC cell or behind it, different motifs from one or the other substrate are shown. The effect arises from the dopant colour dye added to the liquid crystal, the induced orientation and the twist structure. In practice, a grazing reflection on a dielectric surface is polarized enough to see the effect. Any LC flat panel display can obviously be used as backlight as well

Chandra Observations of the Northeastern Rim of the Cygnus Loop

We present results from spatially resolved spectral analyses of the northeastern (NE) rim of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant (SNR) based on two Chandra observations. One pointing includes northern outermost abundance-enhanced regions discovered by recent Suzaku observations, while the other pointing is located on regions with "normal" abundances in the NE rim of the Cygnus Loop. The superior spatial resolving power of Chandra allows us to reveal that the abundance-enhanced region is concentrated in an about 200"-thickness region behind the shock front. We confirm absolute metal abundances (i.e., relative to H) as well as abundance ratios between metals are consistent with those of the solar values within a factor of about 2. Also, we find that the emission measure in the region gradually decreases toward the shock front. These features are in contrast with those of the ejecta fragments around the Vela SNR, which leads us to believe that the abundance enhancements are not likely due to metal-rich ejecta. We suggest that the origin of the plasma in this region is the interstellar medium (ISM). In the "normal" abundance regions, we confirm that abundances are depleted to the solar values by a factor of about 5 that is not expected in the ISM around the Cygnus Loop. Introduction of non-thermal emission in our model fitting can not naturally resolve the abundance-depletion problem. The origin of the depletion still remains as an open question.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure