17,010 research outputs found
Integration of visual stimuli by the crayfish central nervous system
For the crayfish, properties of visually reacting interneurone types in the optic nerve are described on the basis of single-unit analysis.
Sustaining fibres show: (a) âsurroundâ inhibition over the whole retina, including the excitatory field; (b) âonâ and âoffâ effects at field boundaries; (c) a dark discharge in deteriorated preparations; (d) an increase in adapted firing rate and response to flashes in an âexcited stateâ of the preparation; (e) increased overall impulse frequency to fast-moving shadows at frequencies of 2-10/sec. which elicit short bursts.
Dimming fibres, having mainly reversed properties, show: (a) bursts followed by adaptation to a lower ferquency level of spikes on light dimming; (b) total inhibition by illumination for times proportional to light intensity; (c) responsiveness to quickly moving shadows.
'Jitteryâ movement fibres lack directional sensitivity. For them: (a) total illumination and contrast have, within a wide range, no effect on discharges to moving targets; (b) large, dark cards moved at constant speed are seen only near their visual field boundary; (c) the less predictable the movement of a small dark object is, the longer its excitatory effect lasts; (d) responsiveness of field parts exposed is decreased for long durations; (e) no firing is caused by active or passive eye motions.
Space-constant fibres show changed location and size of their excitatory fields with eye position. Their potential visual fields below the horizontal plane are unresponsive, due to inhibition caused mainly by statocyst input.
Two eye muscle motor fibres, also under statocyst control, are influenced by light on the limited sensory fields of two pairs of identifiable sustaining fibres. The two motor fibres, which innervate antagonistic muscles, are reversely excited and inhibited by these fields
Non-equilibrium Goldstone phenomenon in tachyonic preheating
The dominance of the direct production of elementary Goldstone waves is
demonstrated in tachyonic preheating by numerically determining the evolution
of the dispersion relation, the equation of state and the kinetic power spectra
for the angular degree of freedom of the complex matter field. The importance
of the domain structure in the order parameter distribution for the
quantitative understanding of the excitation mechanism is emphasized. Evidence
is presented for the very early decoupling of the low-momentum Goldstone modes.Comment: 14 LaTeX pages, 5 figures, version published in Phys. Rev.
New D-term chaotic inflation in supergravity and leptogenesis
We present a new model of D-term dominated chaotic inflation in supergravity.
The F-flat direction present in this model is lifted by the dominant D-term,
which leads to chaotic inflation and subsequent reheating. No cosmic string is
formed after inflation because the U(1) gauge symmetry is broken during
inflation. The leptogenesis scenario via the inflaton decay in our D-term
chaotic inflation scenario is also discussed.Comment: 14 pages, no figure, to appear in Phys. Rev.
Geometric Approach to Lyapunov Analysis in Hamiltonian Dynamics
As is widely recognized in Lyapunov analysis, linearized Hamilton's equations
of motion have two marginal directions for which the Lyapunov exponents vanish.
Those directions are the tangent one to a Hamiltonian flow and the gradient one
of the Hamiltonian function. To separate out these two directions and to apply
Lyapunov analysis effectively in directions for which Lyapunov exponents are
not trivial, a geometric method is proposed for natural Hamiltonian systems, in
particular. In this geometric method, Hamiltonian flows of a natural
Hamiltonian system are regarded as geodesic flows on the cotangent bundle of a
Riemannian manifold with a suitable metric. Stability/instability of the
geodesic flows is then analyzed by linearized equations of motion which are
related to the Jacobi equations on the Riemannian manifold. On some geometric
setting on the cotangent bundle, it is shown that along a geodesic flow in
question, there exist Lyapunov vectors such that two of them are in the two
marginal directions and the others orthogonal to the marginal directions. It is
also pointed out that Lyapunov vectors with such properties can not be obtained
in general by the usual method which uses linearized Hamilton's equations of
motion. Furthermore, it is observed from numerical calculation for a model
system that Lyapunov exponents calculated in both methods, geometric and usual,
coincide with each other, independently of the choice of the methods.Comment: 22 pages, 14 figures, REVTeX
Superconducting Gap Structure of kappa-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu(NCS)2 Probed by Thermal Conductivity Tensor
The thermal conductivity of organic superconductor kappa-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu(NCS)2
(Tc =10.4 K) has been studied in a magnetic field rotating within the 2D
superconducting planes with high alignment precision. At low temperatures (T <
0.5 K), a clear fourfold symmetry in the angular variation, which is
characteristic of a d-wave superconducting gap with nodes along the directions
rotated 45 degrees relative to the b and c axes of the crystal, was resolved.
The determined nodal structure is inconsistent with recent theoretical
predictions of superconductivity induced by the antiferromagnetic spin
fluctuation.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev. Let
Site-site memory equation approach in study of density/pressure dependence of translational diffusion coefficient and rotational relaxation time of polar molecular solutions: acetonitrile in water, methanol in water, and methanol in acetonitrile
We present results of theoretical study and numerical calculation of the
dynamics of molecular liquids based on combination of the memory equation
formalism and the reference interaction site model - RISM. Memory equations for
the site-site intermediate scattering functions are studied in the
mode-coupling approximation for the first order memory kernels, while
equilibrium properties such as site-site static structure factors are deduced
from RISM. The results include the temperature-density(pressure) dependence of
translational diffusion coefficients D and orientational relaxation times t for
acetonitrile in water, methanol in water and methanol in acetonitrile, all in
the limit of infinite dilution. Calculations are performed over the range of
temperatures and densities employing the SPC/E model for water and optimized
site-site potentials for acetonitrile and methanol. The theory is able to
reproduce qualitatively all main features of temperature and density
dependences of D and t observed in real and computer experiments. In
particular, anomalous behavior, i.e. the increase in mobility with density, is
observed for D and t of methanol in water, while acetonitrile in water and
methanol in acetonitrile do not show deviations from the ordinary behavior. The
variety exhibited by the different solute-solvent systems in the density
dependence of the mobility is interpreted in terms of the two competing origins
of friction, which interplay with each other as density increases: the
collisional and dielectric frictions which, respectively, increase and decrease
with increasing density.Comment: 13 pages, 8 eps-figures, 3 tables, RevTeX4-forma
Cloud droplet growth in shallow cumulus clouds considering 1-D and 3-D thermal radiative effects
The effect of 1-D and 3-D thermal radiation on cloud droplet growth in
shallow cumulus clouds is investigated using large eddy simulations
with size-resolved cloud microphysics. A two-step approach is used
for separating microphysical effects from dynamical feedbacks.
In step one, an offline parcel
model is used to describe the onset of rain. The growth of cloud droplets to raindrops is
simulated with bin-resolved microphysics
along previously recorded Lagrangian trajectories. It is shown that thermal
heating and cooling rates can enhance droplet growth and raindrop
production. Droplets grow to larger size bins in the 10â30 ”m radius
range. The main effect in terms of raindrop production arises from recirculating parcels,
where a small number of droplets are
exposed to strong thermal cooling at cloud edge. These recirculating
parcels, comprising about 6 %â7 % of all parcels investigated, make up
45 % of the rain for the no-radiation simulation and up to 60 % when 3-D
radiative effects are considered. The effect of 3-D thermal radiation
on rain production is stronger than that of 1-D thermal
radiation. Three-dimensional thermal radiation can enhance the rain amount up to 40 %
compared to standard droplet growth without radiative effects in this
idealized framework.
In the second stage, fully coupled large eddy simulations show that
dynamical effects are stronger than microphysical effects, as far as the
production of rain is concerned. Three-dimensional thermal radiative effects again exceed
one-dimensional thermal radiative effects. Small amounts of rain are
produced in more clouds (over a larger area of the domain) when thermal
radiation is applied to microphysics. The dynamical feedback is shown to be an
enhanced cloud circulation with stronger subsiding shells at the cloud
edges due to thermal cooling and stronger updraft velocities in the
cloud center. It is shown that an evaporationâcirculation feedback reduces the amount of rain
produced in simulations where 3-D thermal radiation is applied to
microphysics and dynamics, in comparison to where 3-D thermal radiation
is only applied to dynamics.</p
Evidence for orbital ordering in LaCoO3
We present powder and single crystal X-ray diffraction data as evidence for a
monoclinic distortion in the low spin (S=0) and intermediate spin state (S=1)
of LaCoO3. The alternation of short and long bonds in the ab plane indicates
the presence of eg orbital ordering induced by a cooperative Jahn-Teller
distortion. We observe an increase of the Jahn-Teller distortion with
temperature in agreement with a thermally activated behavior of the Co3+ ions
from a low-spin ground state to an intermediate-spin excited state.Comment: Accepted to Phys. Rev.
Guardians Ad Litem as Surrogate Parents: Implication for Role Definition and Confidentiality
SALMON (Scalable Ab-initio LightâMattersimulator for Optics and Nanoscience, http://salmon-tddft.jp) is a software package for the simulation of electron dynamics and optical properties of molecules, nanostructures, and crystalline solids based on first-principles time-dependent density functional theory. The core part of the software is the real-time, real-space calculation of the electron dynamics induced in molecules and solids by an external electric field solving the time-dependent KohnâSham equation. Using a weak instantaneous perturbing field, linear response properties such as polarizabilities and photoabsorptions in isolated systems and dielectric functions in periodic systems are determined. Using an optical laser pulse, the ultrafast electronic response that may be highly nonlinear in the field strength is investigated in time domain. The propagation of the laser pulse in bulk solids and thin films can also be included in the simulation via coupling the electron dynamics in many microscopic unit cells using Maxwellâs equations describing the time evolution of the electromagnetic fields. The code is efficiently parallelized so that it may describe the electron dynamics in large systems including up to a few thousand atoms. The present paper provides an overview of the capabilities of the software package showing several sample calculations. Program summary Program Title: SALMON: Scalable Ab-initio LightâMatter simulator for Optics and Nanoscience Program Files doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/8pm5znxtsb.1 Licensing provisions: Apache-2.0 Programming language: Fortran 2003 Nature of problem: Electron dynamics in molecules, nanostructures, and crystalline solids induced by an external electric field is calculated based on first-principles time-dependent density functional theory. Using a weak impulsive field, linear optical properties such as polarizabilities, photoabsorptions, and dielectric functions are extracted. Using an optical laser pulse, the ultrafast electronic response that may be highly nonlinear with respect to the exciting field strength is described as well. The propagation of the laser pulse in bulk solids and thin films is considered by coupling the electron dynamics in many microscopic unit cells using Maxwellâs equations describing the time evolution of the electromagnetic field. Solution method: Electron dynamics is calculated by solving the time-dependent KohnâSham equation in real time and real space. For this, the electronic orbitals are discretized on a uniform Cartesian grid in three dimensions. Norm-conserving pseudopotentials are used to account for the interactions between the valence electrons and the ionic cores. Grid spacings in real space and time, typically 0.02 nm and 1 as respectively, determine the spatial and temporal resolutions of the simulation results. In most calculations, the ground state is first calculated by solving the static KohnâSham equation, in order to prepare the initial conditions. The orbitals are evolved in time with an explicit integration algorithm such as a truncated Taylor expansion of the evolution operator, together with a predictorâcorrector step when necessary. For the propagation of the laser pulse in a bulk solid, Maxwellâs equations are solved using a finite-difference scheme. By this, the electric field of the laser pulse and the electron dynamics in many microscopic unit cells of the crystalline solid are coupled in a multiscale framework
Boundary effects in the stepwise structure of the Lyapunov spectra for quasi-one-dimensional systems
Boundary effects in the stepwise structure of the Lyapunov spectra and the
corresponding wavelike structure of the Lyapunov vectors are discussed
numerically in quasi-one-dimensional systems consisting of many hard-disks.
Four kinds of boundary conditions constructed by combinations of periodic
boundary conditions and hard-wall boundary conditions are considered, and lead
to different stepwise structures of the Lyapunov spectra in each case. We show
that a spatial wavelike structure with a time-oscillation appears in the
spatial part of the Lyapunov vectors divided by momenta in some steps of the
Lyapunov spectra, while a rather stationary wavelike structure appears in the
purely spatial part of the Lyapunov vectors corresponding to the other steps.
Using these two kinds of wavelike structure we categorize the sequence and the
kinds of steps of the Lyapunov spectra in the four different boundary condition
cases.Comment: 33 pages, 25 figures including 10 color figures. Manuscript including
the figures of better quality is available from
http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/~gary/step.pd
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