3,462 research outputs found
Effect of uniaxial strain on plasmon excitations in graphene
Uniaxial strain is known to modify significantly the electronic properties of
graphene, a carbon single layer of atomic width. Here, we study the effect of
applied strain on the composite excitations arising from the coupling of charge
carriers and plasmons in graphene, i.e. the plasmarons. Specifically, we
predict that the plasmaron energy dispersion, which has been recently observed
experimentally in unstrained graphene, is shifted and broadened by applied
uniaxial strain. Thus, strain constitutes an additional parameter which may be
useful to tune graphene properties in plasmaronic devices.Comment: Invited oral lecture at the 23rd AIRAPT International Conference on
"High Pressure Science and Technology", Mumbai (India), September 25-30,
2011. To be published in J. Phys.: Conf. Series (2012
Axisymmetric circumstellar interaction in supernovae
Multiwavelength observations of Type II supernovae have shown evidence for
the interaction of supernovae with the dense slow winds from the red supergiant
progenitor stars. Observations of planetary nebulae and the nebula around SN
1987A show that the slow winds from extended stars frequently have an axisymme-
tric structure with a high density in the equatorial plane. We have carried out
numerical calculations of the interaction of a supernova with such an axisymme-
tric density distribution. For small values of the angular density gradient at
the pole, the asymmetry in the interaction shell is greater than, but close to,
that expected from purely radial motion. If the angular density gradient is
above a moderate value, the flow qualitatively changes and a protrusion emerges
along the axis. For a power-law supernova density profile, the flow approaches
a self-similar state in which the protrusion length is times the radius
of the main shell. The critical density gradient is larger for steeper density
profiles of the ejecta. Most of our calculations are axisymmetric, but we have
carried out a 3-dimensional calculation to show that the protrusion is not a
numerical artifact along the symmetry axis. For typical supernova parameters,
the protrusions take several years to develop. The appearance of the
shell with protrusions is similar to that observed in VLBI radio images of the
remnant 41.9 +58 in M82 and, possibly, of SN 1986J. We also considered the
possibility of asymmetric ejecta and found that it had a relatively small
effect on the asymmetry of the interaction region.Comment: 22 page postscript file (gzipped and uuencoded), 10 gzipped
postscript figures may be retrieved from
ftp://www.astro.su.se/pub/supernova/blc96_asym/ Submitted to Ap
Wigner crystallization in quantum electron bilayers
The phase diagram of quantum electron bilayers in zero magnetic field is
obtained using density functional theory. For large electron densities the
system is in the liquid phase, while for smaller densities the liquid may
freeze (Wigner crystallization) into four different crystalline phases; the
lattice symmetry and the critical density depend on the the inter-layer
distance. The phase boundaries between different Wigner crystals consist of
both first and second order transitions, depending on the phases involved, and
join the freezing curve at three different triple points.Comment: To appear in Europhys. Lett. (11 pages in REVTEX + 2 figures in
postscript
No trace of a single-degenerate companion in late spectra of SNe 2011fe and 2014J
Left-over, ablated material from a possible non-degenerate companion can
reveal itself after about one year in spectra of Type Ia SNe (SNe Ia). We have
searched for such material in spectra of SN 2011fe (at 294 days after the
explosion) and for SN 2014J (315 days past explosion). The observations are
compared with numerical models simulating the expected line emission. The
spectral lines sought for are H-alpha, [O I] 6300 and [Ca II] 7291,7324, and
the expected width of these lines is about 1000 km/s. No signs of these lines
can be traced in any of the two supernovae. When systematic uncertainties are
included, the limits on hydrogen-rich ablated gas in SNe 2011fe and 2014J are
0.003 M_sun and 0.0085 M_sun, respectively, where the limit for SN 2014J is the
second lowest ever, and the limit for SN 2011fe is a revision of a previous
limit. Limits are also put on helium-rich ablated gas. These limits are used,
in conjunction with other data, to argue that these supernovae can stem from
double-degenerate systems, or from single-degenerate systems with a spun
up/spun down super-Chandrasekhar white dwarf. For SN 2011fe, other types of
hydrogen-rich donors can likely be ruled out, whereas for SN 2014J a
main-sequence donor system with large intrinsic separation is still possible.
Helium-rich donor systems cannot be ruled out for any of the two supernovae,
but the expected short delay time for such progenitors makes this possibility
less likely, especially for SN 2011fe. The broad [Ni II] 7378 emission in SN
2014J is redshifted by about +1300 km/s, as opposed to the known blueshift of
roughly -1100 km/s for SN 2011fe. [Fe II] 7155 is also redshifted in SN 2014J.
SN 2014J belongs to a minority of SNe Ia that both have a nebular redshift of
[Fe II] 7155 and [Ni II] 7378, and a slow decline of the Si II 6355 absorption
trough just after B-band maximum.Comment: 13 pages, submitted to A&
Van der Waals Density Functional for General Geometries
A scheme within density functional theory is proposed that provides a
practical way to generalize to unrestricted geometries the method applied with
some success to layered geometries [H. Rydberg, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 91,
126402 (2003)]. It includes van der Waals forces in a seamless fashion. By
expansion to second order in a carefully chosen quantity contained in the long
range part of the correlation functional, the nonlocal correlations are
expressed in terms of a density-density interaction formula. It contains a
relatively simple parametrized kernel, with parameters determined by the local
density and its gradient. The proposed functional is applied to rare gas and
benzene dimers, where it is shown to give a realistic description.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Influence of van der Waals forces on the adsorption structure of benzene on silicon studied using density functional theory
Two different adsorption configurations of benzene on the Si(001)-(2 x 1) surface, the tight-bridge and butterfly structures, were studied using density functional theory. Several exchange and correlation functionals were used, including the recently developed van der Waals density functional (vdW-DF), which accounts for the effect of van der Waals forces. In contrast to the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE), revPBE, and other generalized-gradient approximation functionals, the vdW-DF finds that, for most coverages, the adsorption energy of the butterfly structure is greater than that of the tight-bridge structure
Novel online Recommendation algorithm for Massive Open Online Courses (NoR-MOOCs)
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained in popularity over the last few years. The space of online learning resources has been increasing exponentially and has created a problem of information overload. To overcome this problem, recommender systems that can recommend learning resources to users according to their interests have been proposed. MOOCs contain a huge amount of data with the quantity of data increasing as new learners register. Traditional recommendation techniques suffer from scalability, sparsity and cold start problems resulting in poor quality recommendations. Furthermore, they cannot accommodate the incremental update of the model with the arrival of new data making them unsuitable for MOOCs dynamic environment. From this line of research, we propose a novel online recommender system, namely NoR-MOOCs, that is accurate, scales well with the data and moreover overcomes previously recorded problems with recommender systems. Through extensive experiments conducted over the COCO data-set, we have shown empirically that NoR-MOOCs significantly outperforms traditional KMeans and Collaborative Filtering algorithms in terms of predictive and classification accuracy metrics
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