26,042 research outputs found
Identifying Functional Thermodynamics in Autonomous Maxwellian Ratchets
We introduce a family of Maxwellian Demons for which correlations among
information bearing degrees of freedom can be calculated exactly and in compact
analytical form. This allows one to precisely determine Demon functional
thermodynamic operating regimes, when previous methods either misclassify or
simply fail due to approximations they invoke. This reveals that these Demons
are more functional than previous candidates. They too behave either as
engines, lifting a mass against gravity by extracting energy from a single heat
reservoir, or as Landauer erasers, consuming external work to remove
information from a sequence of binary symbols by decreasing their individual
uncertainty. Going beyond these, our Demon exhibits a new functionality that
erases bits not by simply decreasing individual-symbol uncertainty, but by
increasing inter-bit correlations (that is, by adding temporal order) while
increasing single-symbol uncertainty. In all cases, but especially in the new
erasure regime, exactly accounting for informational correlations leads to
tight bounds on Demon performance, expressed as a refined Second Law of
Thermodynamics that relies on the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy for dynamical
processes and not on changes purely in system configurational entropy, as
previously employed. We rigorously derive the refined Second Law under minimal
assumptions and so it applies quite broadly---for Demons with and without
memory and input sequences that are correlated or not. We note that general
Maxwellian Demons readily violate previously proposed, alternative such bounds,
while the current bound still holds.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures,
http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/mrd.ht
Time-domain modelling of Extreme-Mass-Ratio Inspirals for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna
When a stellar-mass compact object is captured by a supermassive black hole
located in a galactic centre, the system losses energy and angular momentum by
the emission of gravitational waves. Subsequently, the stellar compact object
evolves inspiraling until plunging onto the massive black hole. These EMRI
systems are expected to be one of the main sources of gravitational waves for
the future space-based Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). However, the
detection of EMRI signals will require of very accurate theoretical templates
taking into account the gravitational self-force, which is the responsible of
the stellar-compact object inspiral. Due to its potential applicability on
EMRIs, the obtention of an efficient method to compute the scalar self-force
acting on a point-like particle orbiting around a massive black hole is being
object of increasing interest. We present here a review of our time-domain
numerical technique to compute the self-force acting on a point-like particle
and we show its suitability to deal with both circular and eccentric orbits.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, JPCS latex style. Submitted to JPCS (special
issue for the proceedings of the Spanish Relativity Meeting (ERE2010)
Shortcuts to Thermodynamic Computing: The Cost of Fast and Faithful Erasure
Landauer's Principle states that the energy cost of information processing
must exceed the product of the temperature and the change in Shannon entropy of
the information-bearing degrees of freedom. However, this lower bound is
achievable only for quasistatic, near-equilibrium computations -- that is, only
over infinite time. In practice, information processing takes place in finite
time, resulting in dissipation and potentially unreliable logical outcomes. For
overdamped Langevin dynamics, we show that counterdiabatic potentials can be
crafted to guide systems rapidly and accurately along desired computational
paths, providing shortcuts that allows for the precise design of finite-time
computations. Such shortcuts require additional work, beyond Landauer's bound,
that is irretrievably dissipated into the environment. We show that this
dissipated work is proportional to the computation rate as well as the square
of the information-storing system's length scale. As a paradigmatic example, we
design shortcuts to erase a bit of information metastably stored in a
double-well potential. Though dissipated work generally increases with erasure
fidelity, we show that it is possible perform perfect erasure in finite time
with finite work. We also show that the robustness of information storage
affects the energetic cost of erasure---specifically, the dissipated work
scales as the information lifetime of the bistable system. Our analysis exposes
a rich and nuanced relationship between work, speed, size of the
information-bearing degrees of freedom, storage robustness, and the difference
between initial and final informational statistics.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures;
http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/scte.ht
The effect of non-uniform damping on flutter in axial flow and energy harvesting strategies
The problem of energy harvesting from flutter instabilities in flexible
slender structures in axial flows is considered. In a recent study, we used a
reduced order theoretical model of such a system to demonstrate the feasibility
for harvesting energy from these structures. Following this preliminary study,
we now consider a continuous fluid-structure system. Energy harvesting is
modelled as strain-based damping and the slender structure under investigation
lies in a moderate fluid loading range, for which {the flexible structure} may
be destabilised by damping. The key goal of this work is to {analyse the effect
of damping distribution and intensity on the amount of energy harvested by the
system}. The numerical results {indeed} suggest that non-uniform damping
distributions may significantly improve the power harvesting capacity of the
system. For low damping levels, clustered dampers at the position of peak
curvature are shown to be optimal. Conversely for higher damping, harvesters
distributed over the whole structure are more effective.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, to appear in Proc. R. Soc.
Bubble Growth in Superfluid 3-He: The Dynamics of the Curved A-B Interface
We study the hydrodynamics of the A-B interface with finite curvature. The
interface tension is shown to enhance both the transition velocity and the
amplitudes of second sound. In addition, the magnetic signals emitted by the
growing bubble are calculated, and the interaction between many growing bubbles
is considered.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures, LaTeX, ITP-UH 11/9
Phase Variation in the Pulse Profile of SMC X-1
We present the results of timing and spectral analysis of X-ray high state
observations of the high-mass X-ray pulsar SMC X-1 with Chandra, XMM-Newton,
and ROSAT, taken between 1991 and 2001. The source has L_X ~ 3-5 x 10^38
ergs/s, and the spectra can be modeled as a power law plus blackbody with kT_BB
\~ 0.18 keV and reprocessed emission radius R_BB ~ 2 x 10^8 cm, assuming a
distance of 60 kpc to the source. Energy-resolved pulse profiles show several
distinct forms, more than half of which include a second pulse in the soft
profile, previously documented only in hard energies. We also detect
significant variation in the phase shift between hard and soft pulses, as has
recently been reported in Her X-1. We suggest an explanation for the observed
characteristics of the soft pulses in terms of precession of the accretion
disk.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in ApJL; v2 minor
corrections, as will appear in ApJ
Stability of Magneto-optical Traps with Large Field Gradients: Limits on the Tight Confinement of Single Atoms
We report measurements of the stability of magneto-optical traps (MOTs) for neutral atoms in the limit of tight confinement of a single atom. For quadrupole magnetic field gradients at the trap center greater than ∼1 kG/cm, we find that stochastic diffusion of atoms out of the trapping volume becomes the dominant particle loss mechanism, ultimately limiting the MOT size to greater than ∼5 μm. We measured and modeled the diffusive loss rate as a function of laser power, detuning, and field gradient for trapped cesium atoms. In addition, for as few as two atoms, the collisional loss rates become very high for tightly confined traps, allowing the direct observation of isolated two-body atomic collisions in a MOT
Simulations of Extreme-Mass-Ratio Inspirals Using Pseudospectral Methods
Extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs), stellar-mass compact objects (SCOs)
inspiralling into a massive black hole, are one of the main sources of
gravitational waves expected for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA).
To extract the EMRI signals from the expected LISA data stream, which will also
contain the instrumental noise as well as other signals, we need very accurate
theoretical templates of the gravitational waves that they produce. In order to
construct those templates we need to account for the gravitational
backreaction, that is, how the gravitational field of the SCO affects its own
trajectory. In general relativity, the backreaction can be described in terms
of a local self-force, and the foundations to compute it have been laid
recently. Due to its complexity, some parts of the calculation of the
self-force have to be performed numerically. Here, we report on an ongoing
effort towards the computation of the self-force based on time-domain
multi-grid pseudospectral methods.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, JPCS latex style. Submitted to JPCS (special
issue for the proceedings of the 7th International LISA Symposium
- …