Use of scrap tires in civil engineering applications

Using scrap tires as construction materials in civil engineering is of growing interest. Whole scrap tires have been used as culverts, retaining walls, and for slope and beach stabilization. Shredded tires have been used as horizontal drains, ravine crossings, highway embankments, lightweight backfill, and road bed support. The practice of these applications needs the engineering properties of scrap tires. This dissertation involves the quantification of the structural and hydraulic properties of whole truck tires as underground culverts, the derivation of a new stress-strain relationship for low-stiffness flexible pipes and its application to a truck tire culvert, and the investigation and integration of the mechanical properties of shredded tire material. The design guidelines for truck tire culverts developed in this research are also included

High-Order Harmonic Generation and Molecular Orbital Tomography: Characteristics of Molecular Recollision Electronic Wave Packets

We investigate the orientation dependence of molecular high-order harmonic generation (HHG) both numerically and analytically. We show that the molecular recollision electronic wave packets (REWPs) in the HHG are closely related to the ionization potential as well as the particular orbital from which it ionized. As a result, the spectral amplitude of the molecular REWP can be significantly different from its reference atom (i.e., with the same ionization potential as the molecule under study) in some energy regions due to the interference between the atomic cores of the molecules. This finding is important for molecular orbital tomography using HHG[Nature \textbf{432}, 867(2004)].Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Stable knots in the trapped Bose-Einstein condensates

The knot of spin texture is studied within the two-component Bose-Einstein condensates which are described by the nonlinear Gross-Pitaevskii equations. We start from the non-interacting equations including an axisymmetric harmonic trap to obtain an exact solution, which exhibits a non-trivial topological structure. The spin-texture is a knot with an integral Hopf invariant. The stability of the knot is verified by numerically evolving the nonlinear Gross-Pitaevskii equations along imaginary time.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Thermodynamical properties of a trapped interacting Bose gas

The thermodynamical properties of interacting Bose atoms in a harmonic potential are studied within the mean-field approximation. For weak interactions, the quantum statistics is equivalent to an ideal gas in an effective mean-field potential. The eigenvalue of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation is identified as the chemical potential of the ideal gas. The condensation temperature and density profile of atoms are calculated. It is found that the critical temperature $T_c$ decreases as the interactions increase. Below the critical point, the condensation fraction exhibits a universal relation of $N_0/N=1-(T/T_c)^{\gamma}$, with the index $\gamma\approx 2.3$ independent of the interaction strength, the chemical potential, as well as the frequency of the confining potential.Comment: 5 figures, Accepted by Mod. Phys. Lett. B. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:cond-mat/0001079 by other author

Disorder effects on the quantum coherence of a many-boson system

The effects of disorders on the quantum coherence for many-bosons are studied in a double well model. For the ground state, the disorder enhances the quantum coherence. In the deep Mott regime, dynamical evolution reveals periodical collapses and revivals of the quantum coherence which is robust against the disorder. The average over variations in both the on-site energy and the interaction reveals a beat phenomenon of the coherence-decoherence oscillation in the temporal evolution.Comment: 4 figure