42,020 research outputs found
Ion specificity and the theory of stability of colloidal suspensions
A theory is presented which allow us to accurately calculate the critical
coagulation concentration (CCC) of hydrophobic colloidal suspensions. For
positively charged particles the CCC's follow the Hofmeister (lyotropic)
series. For negatively charged particles the series is reversed. We find that
strongly polarizable chaotropic anions are driven towards the colloidal surface
by electrostatic and hydrophobic forces. Within approximately one ionic radius
from the surface, the chaotropic anions loose part of their hydration sheath
and become strongly adsorbed. The kosmotropic anions, on the other hand, are
repelled from the hydrophobic surface. The theory is quantitatively accurate
without any adjustable parameters. We speculate that the same mechanism is
responsible for the Hofmeister series that governs stability of protein
solutions.Comment: Phys. Rev. Lett. (in press
Interfacial Tension of Electrolyte Solutions
A theory is presented to account for the increase in surface tension of water
in the presence of electrolyte. Unlike the original ``grand-canonical''
calculation of Onsager and Samaras, which relied on the Gibbs adsorption
isotherm and lead to a result which could only be expressed as an infinite
series, our approach is ``canonical'' and produces an analytic formula for the
excess surface tension. For small concentrations of electrolyte, our result
reduces to the Onsager-Samaras limiting law.Comment: contains two figures. Journal of Chemical Physics, in pres
Acoustically evoked potentials in two cephalopods inferred using the auditory brainstem response (ABR) approach
It is still a matter of debate whether cephalopods can detect sound frequencies above 400 Hz. So far there is no proof for the detection of underwater sound above 400 Hz via a physiological approach. The controversy of whether cephalopods have a sound detection ability above 400 Hz was tested using the auditory brainstem response (ABR) approach, which has been successfully applied in fish, crustaceans, amphibians, reptiles and birds. Using ABR we found that auditory evoked potentials can be obtained in the frequency range 400 to 1500 Hz (Sepiotheutis lessoniana) and 400 to 1000 Hz (Octopus vulgaris), respectively. The thresholds of S. lessoniana were generally lower than those of O. vulgaris
Soft Spin Wave Near nu=1: Evidence for a Magnetic Instability in Skyrmion Systems
The ground state of the two dimensional electron gas near =1 is
investigated by inelastic light scattering measurements carried down to very
low temperatures. Away from =1, the ferromagnetic spin wave collapses and
a new low-energy spin wave emerges below the Zeeman gap. The emergent spin wave
shows soft behavior as its energy increases with temperature and reaches the
Zeeman energy for temperatures above 2 K. The observed softening indicates an
instability of the two dimensional electron gas towards a magnetic order that
breaks spin rotational symmetry. We discuss our findings in light of the
possible existence of a Skyrme crystal.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let
Validation of purdue engineering shape benchmark clusters by crowdsourcing
The effective organization of CAD data archives is central to PLM and consequently content based retrieval of 2D drawings and 3D models is often seen as a "holy grail" for the industry. Given this context, it is not surprising that the vision of a "Google for shape", which enables engineers to search databases of 3D models for components similar in shape to a query part, has motivated numerous researchers to investigate algorithms for computing geometric similarity. Measuring the effectiveness of the many approaches proposed has in turn lead to the creation of benchmark datasets against which researchers can compare the performance of their search engines. However to be useful the datasets used to measure the effectiveness of 3D retrieval algorithms must not only define a collection of models, but also provide a canonical specification of their relative similarity. Because the objective of shape retrieval algorithms is (typically) to retrieve groups of objects that humans perceive as "similar" these benchmark similarity relationships have (by definition) to be manually determined through inspection
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