Multi-site mean-field theory for cold bosonic atoms in optical lattices

We present a detailed derivation of a multi-site mean-field theory (MSMFT) used to describe the Mott-insulator to superfluid transition of bosonic atoms in optical lattices. The approach is based on partitioning the lattice into small clusters which are decoupled by means of a mean field approximation. This approximation invokes local superfluid order parameters defined for each of the boundary sites of the cluster. The resulting MSMFT grand potential has a non-trivial topology as a function of the various order parameters. An understanding of this topology provides two different criteria for the determination of the Mott insulator superfluid phase boundaries. We apply this formalism to $d$-dimensional hypercubic lattices in one, two and three dimensions, and demonstrate the improvement in the estimation of the phase boundaries when MSMFT is utilized for increasingly larger clusters, with the best quantitative agreement found for $d=3$. The MSMFT is then used to examine a linear dimer chain in which the on-site energies within the dimer have an energy separation of $\Delta$. This system has a complicated phase diagram within the parameter space of the model, with many distinct Mott phases separated by superfluid regions.Comment: 30 pages, 23 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Evaluation of a semi-active gravity gradient system. Volume II - Appendices

Evaluation of semi-active gravity gradient system - appendixe

Transverse Magnetoresistance of GaAs/AlGaAs Heterojunctions in the Presence of Parallel Magnetic Fields

We have calculated the resistivity of a GaAs\slash AlGaAs heterojunction in the presence of both an in--plane magnetic field and a weak perpendicular component using a semiclassical Boltzmann transport theory. These calculations take into account fully the distortion of the Fermi contour which is induced by the parallel magnetic field. The scattering of electrons is assumed to be due to remote ionized impurities. A positive magnetoresistance is found as a function of the perpendicular component, in good qualitative agreement with experimental observations. The main source of this effect is the strong variation of the electronic scattering rate around the Fermi contour which is associated with the variation in the mean distance of the electronic states from the remote impurities. The magnitude of the positive magnetoresistance is strongly correlated with the residual acceptor impurity density in the GaAs layer. The carrier lifetime anisotropy also leads to an observable anisotropy in the resistivity with respect to the angle between the current and the direction of the in--plane magnetic field.Comment: uuencoded file containing a 26 page RevTex file and 14 postscript figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Evaluation of a semi-active gravity gradient system. Volume I - Technical summary

Semi-active gravity gradient system for attitude control of earth oriented spacecraf

Effects of temperature upon the collapse of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a gas with attractive interactions

We present a study of the effects of temperature upon the excitation frequencies of a Bose-Einstein condensate formed within a dilute gas with a weak attractive effective interaction between the atoms. We use the self-consistent Hartree-Fock Bogoliubov treatment within the Popov approximation and compare our results to previous zero temperature and Hartree-Fock calculations The metastability of the condensate is monitored by means of the $l=0$ excitation frequency. As the number of atoms in the condensate is increased, with $T$ held constant, this frequency goes to zero, signalling a phase transition to a dense collapsed state. The critical number for collapse is found to decrease as a function of temperature, the rate of decrease being greater than that obtained in previous Hartree-Fock calculations.Comment: 4 pages LaTeX, 3 eps figures. To appear as a letter in J. Phys.

Two-fluid dynamics for a Bose-Einstein condensate out of local equilibrium with the non-condensate

We extend our recent work on the two-fluid hydrodynamics of a Bose-condensed gas by including collisions involving both condensate and non-condensate atoms. These collisions are essential for establishing a state of local thermodynamic equilibrium between the condensate and non-condensate. Our theory is more general than the usual Landau two-fluid theory, to which it reduces in the appropriate limit, in that it allows one to describe situations in which a state of complete local equilibrium between the two components has not been reached. The exchange of atoms between the condensate and non-condensate is associated with a new relaxational mode of the gas.Comment: 4 pages, revtex, 1 postscript figure, Fig.1 has been correcte

Towards Constructing a Corpus for Studying the Effects of Treatments and Substances Reported in PubMed Abstracts

We present the construction of an annotated corpus of PubMed abstracts reporting about positive, negative or neutral effects of treatments or substances. Our ultimate goal is to annotate one sentence (rationale) for each abstract and to use this resource as a training set for text classification of effects discussed in PubMed abstracts. Currently, the corpus consists of 750 abstracts. We describe the automatic processing that supports the corpus construction, the manual annotation activities and some features of the medical language in the abstracts selected for the annotated corpus. It turns out that recognizing the terminology and the abbreviations is key for determining the rationale sentence. The corpus will be applied to improve our classifier, which currently has accuracy of 78.80% achieved with normalization of the abstract terms based on UMLS concepts from specific semantic groups and an SVM with a linear kernel. Finally, we discuss some other possible applications of this corpus.Comment: medical relation extraction, rationale extraction, effects and treatments, bioNL

Finite-temperature simulations of the scissors mode in Bose-Einstein condensed gases

The dynamics of a trapped Bose-condensed gas at finite temperatures is described by a generalized Gross-Pitaevskii equation for the condensate order parameter and a semi-classical kinetic equation for the thermal cloud, solved using $N$-body simulations. The two components are coupled by mean fields as well as collisional processes that transfer atoms between the two. We use this scheme to investigate scissors modes in anisotropic traps as a function of temperature. Frequency shifts and damping rates of the condensate mode are extracted, and are found to be in good agreement with recent experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Sound Propagation in Elongated Bose-Einstein Condensed Clouds

We consider propagation of sound pulses along the long axis of a Bose-Einstein condensed cloud in a very anisotropic trap. In the linear regime, we demonstrate that the square of the velocity of propagation is given by the square of the local sound velocity, $c^2=nU_0/m$, averaged over the cross section of the cloud. We also carry out calculations in the nonlinear regime, and determine how the speed of the pulse depends on its amplitude.Comment: 4 pages, revtex, 3 eps figure