Search results for "Continuum"
showing 10 items of 477 documents
Free Energy, Enthalpy and Entropy from Implicit Solvent End-Point Simulations
2018
Free energy is the key quantity to describe the thermodynamics of biological systems. In this perspective we consider the calculation of free energy, enthalpy and entropy from end-point molecular dynamics simulations. Since the enthalpy may be calculated as the ensemble average over equilibrated simulation snapshots the difficulties related to free energy calculation are ultimately related to the calculation of the entropy of the system and in particular of the solvent entropy. In the last two decades implicit solvent models have been used to circumvent the problem and to take into account solvent entropy implicitly in the solvation terms. More recently outstanding advancement in both impli…
A microplane model for plane-stress masonry structures
2003
Publisher Summary For a refined nonlinear finite element analysis of masonry structures, an accurate constitutive model that is able to reproduce the desired phenomenological material features is required. Constitutive models for quasi-brittle materials, as plain concrete, have been proposed in the chapter, which allow to reproduce the very complex response in the two- or three-dimensional state of stress. Usually, the constitutive relations proposed are based on some appropriate extensions of elastic-plastic continuum models and more recently on continuum damage models. It has been observed that for these tensorial-based constitutive relations to be effective often require a large number o…
Bending test for capturing the fractional visco-elastic parameters: theoretical and experimental investigation on giant reeds
2014
In this paper attention is devoted on searching a proper model for characterizing the behavior of giant reeds. To aim at this, firstly, meticulous experimental tests have been performed in the Laboratory of structural materials of University of Palermo. Further, the novel aspect of this paper is that of using an advanced Euler-Bernoulli model to fit experimental data of bending tests. Such a model of continuum beam takes into account different constitutive laws of visco-elasticity, being real materials visco-elastic.
Journeys from quantum optics to quantum technology
2017
Sir Peter Knight is a pioneer in quantum optics which has now grown to an important branch of modern physics to study the foundations and applications of quantum physics. He is leading an effort to develop new technologies from quantum mechanics. In this collection of essays, we recall the time we were working with him as a postdoc or a PhD student and look at how the time with him has influenced our research.
Young, active radio stars in the AB Doradus moving group
2017
Context. Precise determination of stellar masses is necessary to test the validity of pre-main-sequence (PMS) stellar evolutionary models, whose predictions are in disagreement with measurements for masses below 1.2 M. To improve such a test, and based on our previous studies, we selected the AB Doradus moving group (AB Dor-MG) as the best-suited association on which to apply radio-based high-precision astrometric techniques to study binary systems. Aims. We seek to determine precise estimates of the masses of a set of stars belonging to the AB Dor-MG using radio and infrared observations. Methods. We observed in phase-reference mode with the Very Large Array (VLA) at 5 GHz and with the Eur…
Optimizing colormaps with consideration for color vision deficiency to enable accurate interpretation of scientific data
2018
Color vision deficiency (CVD) affects more than 4% of the population and leads to a different visual perception of colors. Though this has been known for decades, colormaps with many colors across the visual spectra are often used to represent data, leading to the potential for misinterpretation or difficulty with interpretation by someone with this deficiency. Until the creation of the module presented here, there were no colormaps mathematically optimized for CVD using modern color appearance models. While there have been some attempts to make aesthetically pleasing or subjectively tolerable colormaps for those with CVD, our goal was to make optimized colormaps for the most accurate perce…
Dirac equation as a quantum walk over the honeycomb and triangular lattices
2018
A discrete-time Quantum Walk (QW) is essentially an operator driving the evolution of a single particle on the lattice, through local unitaries. Some QWs admit a continuum limit, leading to well-known physics partial differential equations, such as the Dirac equation. We show that these simulation results need not rely on the grid: the Dirac equation in $(2+1)$--dimensions can also be simulated, through local unitaries, on the honeycomb or the triangular lattice. The former is of interest in the study of graphene-like materials. The latter, we argue, opens the door for a generalization of the Dirac equation to arbitrary discrete surfaces.
Fabrication of polarizing photonic crystal fibres and photonic crystal fibre tapers: Applications
2007
We report the fabrication of an anisotropic photonic crystal fibre with polarization properties and photonic crystal fibre tapers for supercontinuum generation. The anisotropy of the fibre was created by enlarging four airholes next to the silica core. Different polarization regimes as a function of the geometric parameters, including polarizing behaviour at 1.55 mum, were obtained. In the second part of the paper, we report the fabrication of photonic crystal fibre tapers. We present experimental results on supercontinuum generation in photonic crystal fibre tapers using quasi-continuous pump pulses of 7 ns duration at 532 nm and at 1064 nm.
Supercontinuum generation at 800 nm in all-normal dispersion photonic crystal fiber
2014
We have numerically investigated the supercontinuum generation and pulse compression in a specially designed all-normal dispersion photonic crystal fiber with a flat-top dispersion curve, pumped by typical pulses from state of the art Ti:Sapphire lasers at 800 nm. The optimal combination of pump pulse parameters for a given fiber was found, which provides a wide octave-spanning spectrum with superb spectral flatness (a drop in spectral intensity of ~1.7 dB). With regard to the pulse compression for these spectra, multiple-cycle pulses (~8 fs) can be obtained with the use of a simple quadratic compressor and nearly single-cycle pulses (3.3 fs) can be obtained with the application of full pha…
Effects of fourth-order fiber dispersion on ultrashort parabolic optical pulses in the normal dispersion regime
2011
International audience; We propose a new method for the generation of both triangular-shaped optical pulses and flat-top, coherent supercontinuum spectra using the effect of fourth-order dispersion on parabolic pulses in a passive, normally dispersive highly nonlinear fiber. The pulse re-shaping process is described qualitatively and is compared to numerical simulations.