Vesicularity, bubble formation and noble gas fractionation during MORB degassing

The objective of this study is to use molecular dynamics simulation (MD) to evaluate the vesicularity and noble gas fractionation, and to shed light on bubble formation during MORB degassing. A previous simulation study (Guillot and Sator (2011) GCA 75, 1829-1857) has shown that the solubility of CO2 in basaltic melts increases steadily with the pressure and deviates significantly from Henry's law at high pressures (e.g. 9.5 wt% CO2 at 50 kbar as compared with 2.5 wt% from Henry's law). From the CO2 solubility curve and the equations of state of the two coexisting phases (silicate melt and supercritical CO2), deduced from the MD simulation, we have evaluated the evolution of the vesicularity of a MORB melt at depth as function of its initial CO2 contents. An excellent agreement is obtained between calculations and data on MORB samples collected at oceanic ridges. Moreover, by implementing the test particle method (Guillot and Sator (2012) GCA 80, 51-69), the solubility of noble gases in the two coexisting phases (supercritical CO2 and CO2-saturated melt), the partitioning and the fractionation of noble gases between melt and vesicles have been evaluated as function of the pressure. We show that the melt/CO2 partition coefficients of noble gases increase significantly with the pressure whereas the large distribution of the 4He/40Ar* ratio reported in the literature is explained if the magma experiences a suite of vesiculation and vesicle loss during ascent. By applying a pressure drop to a volatile bearing melt, the MD simulation reveals the main steps of bubble formation and noble gas transfer at the nanometric scale. A key result is that the transfer of noble gases is found to be driven by CO2 bubble nucleation, a finding which suggests that the diffusivity difference between He and Ar in the degassing melt has virtually no effect on the 4He/40Ar* ratio measured in the vesicles.Comment: 42 pages, 8 figures. To be published in Chemical Geolog

A low dimensional dynamical system for the wall layer

Low dimensional dynamical systems which model a fully developed turbulent wall layer were derived.The model is based on the optimally fast convergent proper orthogonal decomposition, or Karhunen-Loeve expansion. This decomposition provides a set of eigenfunctions which are derived from the autocorrelation tensor at zero time lag. Via Galerkin projection, low dimensional sets of ordinary differential equations in time, for the coefficients of the expansion, were derived from the Navier-Stokes equations. The energy loss to the unresolved modes was modeled by an eddy viscosity representation, analogous to Heisenberg's spectral model. A set of eigenfunctions and eigenvalues were obtained from direct numerical simulation of a plane channel at a Reynolds number of 6600, based on the mean centerline velocity and the channel width flow and compared with previous work done by Herzog. Using the new eigenvalues and eigenfunctions, a new ten dimensional set of ordinary differential equations were derived using five non-zero cross-stream Fourier modes with a periodic length of 377 wall units. The dynamical system was integrated for a range of the eddy viscosity prameter alpha. This work is encouraging

Controlling Mixing Inside a Droplet by Time Dependent Rigid-body Rotation

The use of microscopic discrete fluid volumes (i.e., droplets) as microreactors for digital microfluidic applications often requires mixing enhancement and control within droplets. In this work, we consider a translating spherical liquid droplet to which we impose a time periodic rigid-body rotation which we model using the superposition of a Hill vortex and an unsteady rigid body rotation. This perturbation in the form of a rotation not only creates a three-dimensional chaotic mixing region, which operates through the stretching and folding of material lines, but also offers the possibility of controlling both the size and the location of the mixing. Such a control is achieved by judiciously adjusting the three parameters that characterize the rotation, i.e., the rotation amplitude, frequency and orientation of the rotation. As the size of the mixing region is increased, complete mixing within the drop is obtained.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Lubricated friction between incommensurate substrates

This paper is part of a study of the frictional dynamics of a confined solid lubricant film - modelled as a one-dimensional chain of interacting particles confined between two ideally incommensurate substrates, one of which is driven relative to the other through an attached spring moving at constant velocity. This model system is characterized by three inherent length scales; depending on the precise choice of incommensurability among them it displays a strikingly different tribological behavior. Contrary to two length-scale systems such as the standard Frenkel-Kontorova (FK) model, for large chain stiffness one finds that here the most favorable (lowest friction) sliding regime is achieved by chain-substrate incommensurabilities belonging to the class of non-quadratic irrational numbers (e.g., the spiral mean). The well-known golden mean (quadratic) incommensurability which slides best in the standard FK model shows instead higher kinetic-friction values. The underlying reason lies in the pinning properties of the lattice of solitons formed by the chain with the substrate having the closest periodicity, with the other slider.Comment: 14 pagine latex - elsart, including 4 figures, submitted to Tribology Internationa

Oscillatory Instabilities of Standing Waves in One-Dimensional Nonlinear Lattices

In one-dimensional anharmonic lattices, we construct nonlinear standing waves (SWs) reducing to harmonic SWs at small amplitude. For SWs with spatial periodicity incommensurate with the lattice period, a transition by breaking of analyticity versus wave amplitude is observed. As a consequence of the discreteness, oscillatory linear instabilities, persisting for arbitrarily small amplitude in infinite lattices, appear for all wave numbers Q not equal to zero or \pi. Incommensurate analytic SWs with |Q|>\pi/2 may however appear as 'quasi-stable', as their instability growth rate is of higher order.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

The Exact Ground State of the Frenkel-Kontorova Model with Repeated Parabolic Potential: I. Basic Results

The problem of finding the exact energies and configurations for the Frenkel-Kontorova model consisting of particles in one dimension connected to their nearest-neighbors by springs and placed in a periodic potential consisting of segments from parabolas of identical (positive) curvature but arbitrary height and spacing, is reduced to that of minimizing a certain convex function defined on a finite simplex.Comment: 12 RevTeX pages, using AMS-Fonts (amssym.tex,amssym.def), 6 Postscript figures, accepted by Phys. Rev.

Phases of Josephson Junction Ladders

We study a Josephson junction ladder in a magnetic field in the absence of charging effects via a transfer matrix formalism. The eigenvalues of the transfer matrix are found numerically, giving a determination of the different phases of the ladder. The spatial periodicity of the ground state exhibits a devil's staircase as a function of the magnetic flux filling factor $f$. If the transverse Josephson coupling is varied a continuous superconducting-normal transition in the transverse direction is observed, analogous to the breakdown of the KAM trajectories in dynamical systems.Comment: 12 pages with 3 figures, REVTE

Controlled engineering of extended states in disordered systems

We describe how to engineer wavefunction delocalization in disordered systems modelled by tight-binding Hamiltonians in d>1 dimensions. We show analytically that a simple product structure for the random onsite potential energies, together with suitably chosen hopping strengths, allows a resonant scattering process leading to ballistic transport along one direction, and a controlled coexistence of extended Bloch states and anisotropically localized states in the spectrum. We demonstrate that these features persist in the thermodynamic limit for a continuous range of the system parameters. Numerical results support these findings and highlight the robustness of the extended regime with respect to deviations from the exact resonance condition for finite systems. The localization and transport properties of the system can be engineered almost at will and independently in each direction. This study gives rise to the possibility of designing disordered potentials that work as switching devices and band-pass filters for quantum waves, such as matter waves in optical lattices.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Localization by bichromatic potentials versus Anderson localization

The one-dimensional propagation of waves in a bichromatic potential may be modeled by the Aubry-Andr\'e Hamiltonian. The latter presents a delocalization-localization transition, which has been observed in recent experiments using ultracold atoms or light. It is shown here that, in contrast to Anderson localization, this transition has a classical origin, namely the localization mechanism is not due to a quantum suppression of a classically allowed transport process. Explicit comparisons with the Anderson model, as well as with experiments, are done.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure