10,836 research outputs found
Surface Phase Diagrams for Wetting on Heterogenous Substrates
We propose a simplified description of fluid adsorption on heterogenenous
micropatterned substrates. Using this approach, we are able to rederive results
obtained earlier using effective interfacial Hamiltonian methods and predict a
number of new examples of surface phase behaviour for both singly and
periodically striped substrates. In particular, we show that, for a singly
striped system, the manner in which the locus of surface unbending phase
transitions approaches the pre-wetting line of the infinite pure system, in the
limit of large stripe widths, is non-trivial and sensitive to several
characteristic lengthscales and competing free-energies. For periodic
substrates, we investigate finite-size deviations from Cassie's law for the
wetting temperature of the heterogeneous system when the domain sizes are
mesoscopic.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figure
Annual league tables of mortality in neonatal intensive care units: longitudinal study. International Neonatal Network and the Scottish Neonatal Consultants and Nurses Collaborative Study Group.[see comment]
OBJECTIVE: To assess whether crude league tables of mortality and league tables of risk adjusted mortality accurately reflect the performance of hospitals.
DESIGN: Longitudinal study of mortality occurring in hospital.
SETTING: 9 neonatal intensive care units in the United Kingdom.
SUBJECTS: 2671 very low birth weight or preterm infants admitted to neonatal intensive care units between 1988 and 1994.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Crude hospital mortality and hospital mortality adjusted using the clinical risk index for babies (CRIB) score.
RESULTS: Hospitals had wide and overlapping confidence intervals when ranked by mortality in annual league tables; this made it impossible to discriminate between hospitals reliably. In most years there was no significant difference between hospitals, only random variation. The apparent performance of individual hospitals fluctuated substantially from year to year.
CONCLUSIONS: Annual league tables are not reliable indicators of performance or best practice; they do not reflect consistent differences between hospitals. Any action prompted by the annual league tables would have been equally likely to have been beneficial, detrimental, or irrelevant. Mortality should be compared between groups of hospitals using specific criteria-such as differences in the volume of patients, staffing policy, training of staff, or aspects of clinical practice-after adjusting for risk. This will produce more reliable estimates with narrower confidence intervals, and more reliable and rapid conclusions
Nuclear data and angular biasing aspects of Monte Carlo shielding calculations for fusion reactors
Imperial Users onl
Droplet shapes on structured substrates and conformal invariance
We consider the finite-size scaling of equilibrium droplet shapes for fluid
adsorption (at bulk two-phase co-existence) on heterogeneous substrates and
also in wedge geometries in which only a finite domain of the
substrate is completely wet. For three-dimensional systems with short-ranged
forces we use renormalization group ideas to establish that both the shape of
the droplet height and the height-height correlations can be understood from
the conformal invariance of an appropriate operator. This allows us to predict
the explicit scaling form of the droplet height for a number of different
domain shapes. For systems with long-ranged forces, conformal invariance is not
obeyed but the droplet shape is still shown to exhibit strong scaling
behaviour. We argue that droplet formation in heterogeneous wedge geometries
also shows a number of different scaling regimes depending on the range of the
forces. The conformal invariance of the wedge droplet shape for short-ranged
forces is shown explicitly.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures. (Submitted to J.Phys.:Cond.Mat.
Interfacial Structural Changes and Singularities in Non-Planar Geometries
We consider phase coexistence and criticality in a thin-film Ising magnet
with opposing surface fields and non-planar (corrugated) walls. We show that
the loss of translational invariance has a strong and unexpected non-linear
influence on the interface structure and phase diagram. We identify 4
non-thermodynamic singularities where there is a qualitative change in the
interface shape. In addition, we establish that at the finite-size critical
point, the singularity in the interface shape is characterized by two distint
critical exponents in contrast to the planar case (which is characterised by
one). Similar effects should be observed for prewetting at a corrugated
substrate. Analogy is made with the behaviour of a non-linear forced oscillator
showing chaotic dynamics.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure
A comparison of the growth kinetics of six marine heterotrophic nanoflagellates fed with one bacterial species.
Coupled Fluctuations near Critical Wetting
Recent work on the complete wetting transition has emphasized the role played
by the coupling of fluctuations of the order parameter at the wall and at the
depinning fluid interface. Extending this approach to the wetting transition
itself we predict a novel crossover effect associated with the decoupling of
fluctuations as the temperature is lowered towards the transition temperature
T_W. Using this we are able to reanalyse recent Monte-Carlo simulation studies
and extract a value \omega(T_W)=0.8 at T_W=0.9T_C in very good agreement with
long standing theoretical predictions.Comment: 4 pages, LaTex, 1 postscript figur
Monte Carlo simulation of a two-field effective Hamiltonian of complete wetting
Recent work on the complete wetting transition for three dimensional systems
with short-ranged forces has emphasized the role played by the coupling of
order-parameter fluctuations near the wall and depinning interface. It has been
proposed that an effective two-field Hamiltonian, which predicts a
renormalisation of the wetting parameter, could explain the controversy between
RG analysis of the capillary-wave model and Monte Carlo simulations on the
Ising model. In this letter results of extensive Monte Carlo simulations of the
two-field model are presented. The results are in agreement with prediction of
a renormalized wetting parameter .Comment: To appear in Europhysics Letters. Latex file, 6 pages, 2 figure
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