5,323 research outputs found
Interfacial friction between semiflexible polymers and crystalline surfaces
The results obtained from molecular dynamics simulations of the friction at
an interface between polymer melts and weakly attractive crystalline surfaces
are reported. We consider a coarse-grained bead-spring model of linear chains
with adjustable intrinsic stiffness. The structure and relaxation dynamics of
polymer chains near interfaces are quantified by the radius of gyration and
decay of the time autocorrelation function of the first normal mode. We found
that the friction coefficient at small slip velocities exhibits a distinct
maximum which appears due to shear-induced alignment of semiflexible chain
segments in contact with solid walls. At large slip velocities the decay of the
friction coefficient is independent of the chain stiffness. The data for the
friction coefficient and shear viscosity are used to elucidate main trends in
the nonlinear shear rate dependence of the slip length. The influence of chain
stiffness on the relationship between the friction coefficient and the
structure factor in the first fluid layer is discussed.Comment: 31 pages, 12 figure
Non-monotonous crossover between capillary condensation and interface localisation/delocalisation transition in binary polymer blends
Within self-consistent field theory we study the phase behaviour of a
symmetric binary AB polymer blend confined into a thin film. The film surfaces
interact with the monomers via short range potentials. One surface attracts the
A component and the corresponding semi-infinite system exhibits a first order
wetting transition. The surface interaction of the opposite surface is varied
as to study the crossover from capillary condensation for symmetric surface
fields to the interface localisation/delocalisation transition for
antisymmetric surface fields. In the former case the phase diagram has a single
critical point close to the bulk critical point. In the latter case the phase
diagram exhibits two critical points which correspond to the prewetting
critical points of the semi-infinite system. The crossover between these
qualitatively different limiting behaviours occurs gradually, however, the
critical temperature and the critical composition exhibit a non-monotonic
dependence on the surface field.Comment: to appear in Europhys.Let
A two dimensional model for ferromagnetic martensites
We consider a recently introduced 2-D square-to-rectangle martensite model
that explains several unusual features of martensites to study ferromagnetic
martensites. The strain order parameter is coupled to the magnetic order
parameter through a 4-state clock model. Studies are carried out for several
combinations of the ordering of the Curie temperatures of the austenite and
martensite phases and, the martensite transformation temperature. We find that
the orientation of the magnetic order which generally points along the short
axis of the rectangular variant, changes as one crosses the twin or the
martensite-austenite interface. The model shows the possibility of a subtle
interplay between the growth of strain and magnetic order parameters as the
temperature is decreased. In some cases, this leads to qualitatively different
magnetization curves from those predicted by earlier mean field models.
Further, we find that strain morphology can be substantially altered by the
magnetic order. We have also studied the dynamic hysteresis behavior.
The corresponding dissipation during the forward and reverse cycles has
features similar to the Barkhausen's noise.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figure
Are critical finite-size scaling functions calculable from knowledge of an appropriate critical exponent?
Critical finite-size scaling functions for the order parameter distribution
of the two and three dimensional Ising model are investigated. Within a
recently introduced classification theory of phase transitions, the universal
part of the critical finite-size scaling functions has been derived by
employing a scaling limit that differs from the traditional finite-size scaling
limit. In this paper the analytical predictions are compared with Monte Carlo
simulations. We find good agreement between the analytical expression and the
simulation results. The agreement is consistent with the possibility that the
functional form of the critical finite-size scaling function for the order
parameter distribution is determined uniquely by only a few universal
parameters, most notably the equation of state exponent.Comment: 11 pages postscript, plus 2 separate postscript figures, all as
uuencoded gzipped tar file. To appear in J. Phys. A
Darwinian Data Structure Selection
Data structure selection and tuning is laborious but can vastly improve an
application's performance and memory footprint. Some data structures share a
common interface and enjoy multiple implementations. We call them Darwinian
Data Structures (DDS), since we can subject their implementations to survival
of the fittest. We introduce ARTEMIS a multi-objective, cloud-based
search-based optimisation framework that automatically finds optimal, tuned DDS
modulo a test suite, then changes an application to use that DDS. ARTEMIS
achieves substantial performance improvements for \emph{every} project in
Java projects from DaCapo benchmark, popular projects and uniformly
sampled projects from GitHub. For execution time, CPU usage, and memory
consumption, ARTEMIS finds at least one solution that improves \emph{all}
measures for () of the projects. The median improvement across
the best solutions is , , for runtime, memory and CPU
usage.
These aggregate results understate ARTEMIS's potential impact. Some of the
benchmarks it improves are libraries or utility functions. Two examples are
gson, a ubiquitous Java serialization framework, and xalan, Apache's XML
transformation tool. ARTEMIS improves gson by \%, and for
memory, runtime, and CPU; ARTEMIS improves xalan's memory consumption by
\%. \emph{Every} client of these projects will benefit from these
performance improvements.Comment: 11 page
Polymer-Chain Adsorption Transition at a Cylindrical Boundary
In a recent letter, a simple method was proposed to generate solvable models
that predict the critical properties of statistical systems in hyperspherical
geometries. To that end, it was shown how to reduce a random walk in
dimensions to an anisotropic one-dimensional random walk on concentric
hyperspheres. Here, I construct such a random walk to model the
adsorption-desorption transition of polymer chains growing near an attractive
cylindrical boundary such as that of a cell membrane. I find that the fraction
of adsorbed monomers on the boundary vanishes exponentially when the adsorption
energy decreases towards its critical value. When the adsorption energy rises
beyond a certain value above the critical point whose scale is set by the
radius of the cell, the adsorption fraction exhibits a crossover to a linear
increase characteristic to polymers growing near planar boundaries.Comment: latex, 12 pages, 3 ps-figures, uuencode
Finite-size scaling at the dynamical transition of the mean-field 10-state Potts glass
We use Monte Carlo simulations to study the static and dynamical properties
of a Potts glass with infinite range Gaussian distributed exchange interactions
for a broad range of temperature and system size up to N=2560 spins. The
results are compatible with a critical divergence of the relaxation time tau at
the theoretically predicted dynamical transition temperature T_D, tau \propto
(T-T_D)^{-\Delta} with Delta \approx 2. For finite N a further power law at
T=T_D is found, tau(T=T_D) \propto N^{z^\star} with z^\star \approx 1.5 and for
T>T_D dynamical finite-size scaling seems to hold. The order parameter
distribution P(q) is qualitatively compatible with the scenario of a first
order glass transition as predicted from one-step replica symmetry breaking
schemes.Comment: 8 pages of Latex, 4 figure
Explicit Renormalization Group for D=2 random bond Ising model with long-range correlated disorder
We investigate the explicit renormalization group for fermionic field
theoretic representation of two-dimensional random bond Ising model with
long-range correlated disorder. We show that a new fixed point appears by
introducing a long-range correlated disorder. Such as the one has been observed
in previous works for the bosonic () description. We have calculated
the correlation length exponent and the anomalous scaling dimension of
fermionic fields at this fixed point. Our results are in agreement with the
extended Harris criterion derived by Weinrib and Halperin.Comment: 5 page
Phase transitions in nanosystems caused by interface motion: The Ising bi-pyramid with competing surface fields
The phase behavior of a large but finite Ising ferromagnet in the presence of
competing surface magnetic fields +/- H_s is studied by Monte Carlo simulations
and by phenomenological theory. Specifically, the geometry of a double pyramid
of height 2L is considered, such that the surface field is positive on the four
upper triangular surfaces of the bi-pyramid and negative on the lower ones. It
is shown that the total spontaneous magnetization vanishes (for L -> infinity)
at the temperature T_f(H), related to the "filling transition" of a
semi-infinite pyramid, which can be well below the critical temperature of the
bulk. The discontinuous vanishing of the magnetization is accompanied by a
susceptibility that diverges with a Curie-Weiss power law, when the transition
is approached from either side. A Landau theory with size-dependent critical
amplitudes is proposed to explain these observations, and confirmed by finite
size scaling analysis of the simulation results. The extension of these results
to other nanosystems (gas-liquid systems, binary mixtures, etc.) is briefly
discussed
Exact Solution of Semi-Flexible and Super-Flexible Interacting Partially Directed Walks
We provide the exact generating function for semi-flexible and super-flexible
interacting partially directed walks and also analyse the solution in detail.
We demonstrate that while fully flexible walks have a collapse transition that
is second order and obeys tricritical scaling, once positive stiffness is
introduced the collapse transition becomes first order. This confirms a recent
conjecture based on numerical results. We note that the addition of an
horizontal force in either case does not affect the order of the transition. In
the opposite case where stiffness is discouraged by the energy potential
introduced, which we denote the super-flexible case, the transition also
changes, though more subtly, with the crossover exponent remaining unmoved from
the neutral case but the entropic exponents changing
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