TRANSLATING THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE: A Chinese Garden In East Tennessee

Cultural landscapes are valuable representations of humans’ interaction with nature. These world heritage sites should be protected since they are illustrations of the evolution of human society and settlement over time. However, many of the traditional ones are losing their impact under current physical constraints that are presented by their natural environments, or social, economic, and cultural forces. Based on today’s modern context of efficiency and simplicity, the vanishing legacy of these sites should be interpreted by extracting the essence rooted in the culture and translating it into distinctive but concise characteristics that can be used in modern landscape design. The Chinese garden referred to in this paper is an example for analyzing the essence accumulated throughout history. At the The University of Tennessee’s International House, by designing a simplified Chinese garden with translated features base on the identities that are elaborated in this thesis, a place is created for the preservation and spread of culture, as well as benefit and appreciation for all visitors. In this way, these translated cultural landscapes will not only stand as a symbol on their own, but also serve people from all backgrounds and therefore add valuable benefits and diversities to the existing landscape

Off-axis MgB2 films using an in situ annealing pulsed laser deposition method

Highly smooth and c-axis oriented superconducting MgB2 thin films were prepared by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) with off-axis geometry. The films were deposited on Al2O3-C substrates perpendicularly aligned to a stoichiometric MgB2 target in a 120 mTorr high purity Ar background gas. An in situ annealing was carried out at 650C for 1 min in a 760 Torr Ar atmosphere. Despite the short annealing time, an x-ray theta-2 theta scan shows fairly good crystallization, according to the clear c-axis oriented peaks for the films. Both atomic force microscopy and the x-ray diffraction results indicate that the crystallite size is less than 50nm. The root mean square roughness of our off-axis film is ~4 nm in a 5x5 square micron area. The Tc onset value of the best off-axis film reaches 33.1 K with a narrow transition width of 0.9 K. The films showed no anisotropy in Hc2-T curves when parallel and perpendicular fields were applied. The slope of Hc2-T curves in low field regime is 1 T/K, which is among the highest reported values.Comment: 7 pages 7 figure

Lifshitz Scaling Effects on Holographic Superconductors

Via numerical and analytical methods, the effects of the Lifshitz dynamical exponent $z$ on holographic superconductors are studied in some detail, including $s$ wave and $p$ wave models. Working in the probe limit, we find that the behaviors of holographic models indeed depend on concrete value of $z$. We obtain the condensation and conductivity in both Lifshitz black hole and soliton backgrounds with general $z$. For both $s$ wave and $p$ wave models in the black hole backgrounds, as $z$ increases, the phase transition becomes more difficult and the growth of conductivity is suppressed. For the Lifshitz soliton backgrounds, when $z$ increases ($z=1,~2,~3$), the critical chemical potential decreases in the $s$ wave cases but increases in the $p$ wave cases. For $p$ wave models in both Lifshitz black hole and soliton backgrounds, the anisotropy between the AC conductivity in different spatial directions is suppressed when $z$ increases. The analytical results uphold the numerical results.Comment: Typos corrected; Footnote added; References added; To be published in Nuclear Physics

Three-body interactions on a triangular lattice

We analyze the hard-core Bose-Hubbard model with both the three-body and nearest neighbor repulsions on the triangular lattice. The phase diagram is achieved by means of the semi-classical approximation and the quantum Monte Carlo simulation. For a system with only the three-body interactions, both the supersolid phase and one third solid disappear while the two thirds solid stably exists. As the thermal behavior of the bosons with nearest neighbor repulsion, the solid and the superfluid undergo the 3-state Potts and the Kosterlitz-Thouless type phase transitions, respectively. In a system with both the frustrated nearest neighbor two-body and three-body interactions, the supersolid and one third solid revive. By tuning the strength of the three-body interactions, the phase diagram is distorted, because the one-third solid and the supersolid are suppressed.Comment: 6 pages, 11 figure

Five-dimensional generalized f(R)f(R) gravity with curvature-matter coupling

The generalized $f(R)$ gravity with curvature-matter coupling in five-dimensional (5D) spacetime can be established by assuming a hypersurface-orthogonal spacelike Killing vector field of 5D spacetime, and it can be reduced to the 4D formulism of FRW universe. This theory is quite general and can give the corresponding results to the Einstein gravity, $f(R)$ gravity with both no-coupling and non-minimal coupling in 5D spacetime as special cases, that is, we would give the some new results besides previous ones given by Ref.\cite{60}. Furthermore, in order to get some insight into the effects of this theory on the 4D spacetime, by considering a specific type of models with $f_{1}(R)=f_{2}(R)=\alpha R^{m}$ and $B(L_{m})=L_{m}=-\rho$, we not only discuss the constraints on the model parameters $m$, $n$, but also illustrate the evolutionary trajectories of the scale factor $a(t)$, the deceleration parameter $q(t)$ and the scalar field $\epsilon(t)$, $\phi(t)$ in the reduced 4D spacetime. The research results show that this type of $f(R)$ gravity models given by us could explain the current accelerated expansion of our universe without introducing dark energy.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0912.4581, arXiv:gr-qc/0411066 by other author