NMNS publishes European atlas on the impact of global change on biodiversity

Peer reviewe

Climate change and Spatial Conservation Planning

Peer Reviewe

Robust self-trapping of vortex beams in a saturable optical medium

We report the first observation of robust self-trapping of vortex beams propagating in a uniform condensed medium featuring local saturable self-focusing nonlinearity. Optical vortices with topological charge m=1, that remain self-trapped over ~ 5 Rayleigh lengths, are excited in carbon disulfide using a helical light beam at 532 nm and intensities from 8 to 10 GW/cm^2. At larger intensities, the vortex beams lose their stability, spontaneously breaking into two fragments. Numerical simulations based on the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation including the three-photon absorption and nonpolynomial saturation of the refractive nonlinearity demonstrate close agreement with the experimental findings.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figures,to be published in Phys. Rev. A (2016

Effect of particle polydispersity on the irreversible adsorption of fine particles on patterned substrates

We performed extensive Monte Carlo simulations of the irreversible adsorption of polydispersed disks inside the cells of a patterned substrate. The model captures relevant features of the irreversible adsorption of spherical colloidal particles on patterned substrates. The pattern consists of (equal) square cells, where adsorption can take place, centered at the vertices of a square lattice. Two independent, dimensionless parameters are required to control the geometry of the pattern, namely, the cell size and cell-cell distance, measured in terms of the average particle diameter. However, to describe the phase diagram, two additional dimensionless parameters, the minimum and maximum particle radii are also required. We find that the transition between any two adjacent regions of the phase diagram solely depends on the largest and smallest particle sizes, but not on the shape of the distribution function of the radii. We consider size dispersions up-to 20% of the average radius using a physically motivated truncated Gaussian-size distribution, and focus on the regime where adsorbing particles do not interact with those previously adsorbed on neighboring cells to characterize the jammed state structure. The study generalizes previous exact relations on monodisperse particles to account for size dispersion. Due to the presence of the pattern, the coverage shows a non-monotonic dependence on the cell size. The pattern also affects the radius of adsorbed particles, where one observes preferential adsorption of smaller radii particularly at high polydispersity.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Recent advances and open challenges in percolation

Percolation is the paradigm for random connectivity and has been one of the most applied statistical models. With simple geometrical rules a transition is obtained which is related to magnetic models. This transition is, in all dimensions, one of the most robust continuous transitions known. We present a very brief overview of more than 60 years of work in this area and discuss several open questions for a variety of models, including classical, explosive, invasion, bootstrap, and correlated percolation