7,786 research outputs found
Method of carbonizing polyacrylonitrile fibers
This invention relates to a method of carbonizing polyacrylonitrile fibers by exposing the fibers at an elevated temperature to an oxidizing atmosphere; then exposing the oxidized fibers to an atmosphere of an inert gas such as nitrogen containing a carbonaceous material such as acetylene. The fibers are preferably treated with an organic compound, for example benzoic acid, before the exposure to an oxidizing atmosphere. The invention also relates to the resulting fibers. The treated fibers have enhanced tensile strength
Superfluidity of "dirty" indirect excitons and magnetoexcitons in two-dimensional trap
The superfluid phase transition of bosons in a two-dimensional (2D) system
with disorder and an external parabolic potential is studied. The theory is
applied to experiments on indirect excitons in coupled quantum wells. The
random field is allowed to be large compared to the dipole-dipole repulsion
between excitons. The slope of the external parabolic trap is assumed to change
slowly enough to apply the local density approximation (LDA) for the superfluid
density, which allows us to calculate the Kosterlitz-Thouless temperature
at each local point of the trap. The superfluid phase occurs
around the center of the trap () with the normal phase outside
this area. As temperature increases, the superfluid area shrinks and disappears
at temperature . Disorder acts to deplete the condensate; the
minimal total number of excitons for which superfluidity exists increases with
disorder at fixed temperature. If the disorder is large enough, it can destroy
the superfluid entirely. The effect of magnetic field is also calculated for
the case of indirect excitons. In a strong magnetic field , the superfluid
component decreases, primarily due to the change of the exciton effective mass.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure
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Energy-Based Segmentation of Very Sparse Range Surfaces
This paper describes a new segmentation technique for very sparse surfaces which is based on minimizing the energy of the surfaces in the scene. While it could be used in almost any system as part of surface reconstruction/model recovery, the algorithm is designed to be usable when the depth information is scattered and very sparse, as is generally the case with depth generated by stereo algorithms. We show results from a sequential algorithm that processes laser range-finder data or synthetic data. We then discuss a parallel implementation running on the parallel Connection Machine. The idea of segmentation by energy minimization is not new. However, prior techniques have relied on discrete regularization or Markov random fields to model the surfaces to build smooth surfaces and detect depth edges. Both of the aforementioned techniques are ineffective at energy minimization for very sparse data. In addition, this method does not require edge detection and is thus also applicable when edge information is unreliable or unavailable. Our model is extremely general; it does not depend on a model of the surface shape but only on the energy for bending a surface. Thus the surfaces can grow in a more data-directed manner. The technique presented herein models the surfaces with reproducing kernel-based splines, which can be shown to solve a regularized surface reconstruction problem. From the functional form of these splines we derive computable bounds on the energy of a surface over a given finite region. The computation of the spline, and the corresponding surface representation are quite efficient for very sparse data. An interesting property of the algorithm is that it makes no attempt to determine segmentation boundaries; the algorithm can be viewed as a classification scheme which segments the data into collections of points which are "from" the same surface. Among the significant advantages of the method is the capacity to process overlapping transparent surfaces, as well as surfaces with large occluded areas
Impurity Scattering in Luttinger Liquid with Electron-Phonon Coupling
We study the influence of electron-phonon coupling on electron transport
through a Luttinger liquid with an embedded weak scatterer or weak link. We
derive the renormalization group (RG) equations which indicate that the
directions of RG flows can change upon varying either the relative strength of
the electron-electron and electron-phonon coupling or the ratio of Fermi to
sound velocities. This results in the rich phase diagram with up to three fixed
points: an unstable one with a finite value of conductance and two stable ones,
corresponding to an ideal metal or insulator.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
Do Athermal Amorphous Solids Exist?
We study the elastic theory of amorphous solids made of particles with finite
range interactions in the thermodynamic limit. For the elastic theory to exist
one requires all the elastic coefficients, linear and nonlinear, to attain a
finite thermodynamic limit. We show that for such systems the existence of
non-affine mechanical responses results in anomalous fluctuations of all the
nonlinear coefficients of the elastic theory. While the shear modulus exists,
the first nonlinear coefficient B_2 has anomalous fluctuations and the second
nonlinear coefficient B_3 and all the higher order coefficients (which are
non-zero by symmetry) diverge in the thermodynamic limit. These results put a
question mark on the existence of elasticity (or solidity) of amorphous solids
at finite strains, even at zero temperature. We discuss the physical meaning of
these results and propose that in these systems elasticity can never be
decoupled from plasticity: the nonlinear response must be very substantially
plastic.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figure
Complex line bundles in relativity
This is the published version, also available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.523750.We exhibit the complexified spin and conformally weighted functions as sections of holomorphic line bundles over P 1(C) ×P 1(C). As an example of a nontrivial bundle, we discuss the complex null cone in some detail
Boundedness of Pseudodifferential Operators on Banach Function Spaces
We show that if the Hardy-Littlewood maximal operator is bounded on a
separable Banach function space and on its associate space
, then a pseudodifferential operator
is bounded on whenever the symbol belongs to the
H\"ormander class with ,
or to the the Miyachi class
with ,
. This result is applied to the case of
variable Lebesgue spaces .Comment: To appear in a special volume of Operator Theory: Advances and
Applications dedicated to Ant\'onio Ferreira dos Santo
Kinetics of Fast Changing Intramolecular Distance Distributions Obtained by Combined Analysis of FRET Efficiency Kinetics and Time-Resolved FRET Equilibrium Measurements
AbstractDetailed studies of the mechanisms of macromolecular conformational transitions such as protein folding are enhanced by analysis of changes of distributions for intramolecular distances during the transitions. Time-resolved Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) measurements yield such data, but the more readily available kinetics of mean FRET efficiency changes cannot be analyzed in terms of changes in distances because of the sixth-power dependence on the mean distance. To enhance the information obtained from mean FRET efficiency kinetics, we combined the analyses of FRET efficiency kinetics and equilibrium trFRET experiments. The joint analysis enabled determination of transient distance distributions along the folding reaction both in cases where a two-state transition is valid and in some cases consisting of a three-state scenario. The procedure and its limits were tested by simulations. Experimental data obtained from stopped-flow measurements of the refolding of Escherichia coli adenylate kinase were analyzed. The distance distributions between three double-labeled mutants, in the collapsed transient state, were determined and compared to those obtained experimentally using the double-kinetics technique. The proposed method effectively provides information on distance distributions of kinetically accessed intermediates of fast conformational transitions induced by common relaxation methods
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