The structural instabilities in ferronematic based on liquid crystal with negative diamagnetic susceptibility anisotropy

The studied ferronematic is a nematic liquid crystal (ZLI1695) of low negative anisotropy of the diamagnetic susceptibility (χ_a<0) doped with the magnetic particles Fe₃O₄. Structural instabilities are interpreted within Burylov and Raikher's theory. The high magnetic fields were oriented perpendicular (Freedericksz transition) or parallel to the initial director. Using capacitance measurements the Freedericksz threshold magnetic field of the ferronematic B_FN, and the critical magnetic field B_max, at which the initial parallel orientation between the director and the magnetic moment of magnetic particles breaks down, have been determined. The values of these quantities have been used to estimate the surface density of the anchoring energy W of liquid crystal molecules on the surface of the magnetic particles. The obtained values indicate a soft anchoring of the liquid crystal on the magnetic particles with a preferred parallel orientation of the magnetic moment of magnetic particles and the director.     

Generalized clausius inequality for nonequilibrium quantum processes

We show that the nonequilibrium entropy production for a driven quantum system is larger than the Bures length, the geometric distance between its actual state and the corresponding equilibrium state. This universal lower bound generalizes the Clausius inequality to arbitrary nonequilibrium processes beyond linear response. We further derive a fundamental upper bound for the quantum entropy production rate and discuss its connection to the Bremermann-Bekenstein bound.     

Thermodynamics of photons on fractals

A thermodynamical treatment of a massless scalar field (a photon) confined to a fractal spatial manifold leads to an equation of state relating pressure to internal energy, PV(s) = U/d(s), where d(s) is the spectral dimension and V(s) defines the "spectral volume." For regular manifolds, V(s) coincides with the usual geometric spatial volume, but on a fractal this is not necessarily the case. This is further evidence that on a fractal, momentum space can have a different dimension than position space. Our analysis also provides a natural definition of the vacuum (Casimir) energy of a fractal. We suggest ways that these unusual properties might be probed experimentally.     

High-energy femtosecond photonic crystal fiber laser

We report the generation of high-energy high-peak power pulses in an all-normal dispersion fiber laser featuring large-mode-area photonic crystal fibers. The self-starting chirped-pulse fiber oscillator delivers 11 W of average power at 15.5 MHz repetition rate, resulting in 710 nJ of pulse energy. The output pulses are dechirped outside the cavity from 7 ps to nearly transform-limited duration of 300 fs, leading to pulse peak powers as high as 1.9 MW. Numerical simulations reveal that pulse shaping is dominated by the amplitude modulation and spectral filtering provided by a resonant semiconductor saturable absorber.     

COMPUTATIONAL MULTISCALE METHODS FOR LINEAR HETEROGENEOUS POROELASTICITY

We consider a strongly heterogeneous medium saturated by an incompressible viscous fluid as it appears in geomechanical modeling.This poroelasticity problem suffers from rapidly oscillating material parameters,which calls for a thorough numerical treatment.In this paper,we propose a method based on the local orthogonal decomposition technique and motivated by a similar approach used for linear thermoelasticity.Therein,local corrector problems are constructed in line with the static equations,whereas we propose to consider the full system.This allows to benefit from the given saddle point structure and results in two decoupled corrector problems for the displacement and the pressure.We prove the optimal first-order convergence of this method and verify the result by numerical experiments.     

Congruences modulo 11 for broken 5-diamond partitions

The notion of broken k-diamond partitions was introduced by Andrews and Paule in 2007. For a fixed positive integer k, let \(\Delta _k(n)\) denote the number of broken k-diamond partitions of n. Recently, Paule and Radu conjectured two relations on \(\Delta _5(n)\) which were proved by Xiong and Jameson, respectively. In this paper, employing these relations, we prove that, for any prime p with \(p\equiv 1\ (\mathrm{mod}\ 4)\), there exists an integer \(\lambda (p)\in \{2,\ 3,\ 5,\ 6,\ 11\}\) such that, for \(n, \alpha \ge 0\), if \(p\not \mid (2n+1)\), then

$$\begin{aligned} \Delta _5\left( 11p^{\lambda (p)(\alpha +1)-1} n+\frac{11p^{\lambda (p)(\alpha +1)-1}+1}{2}\right) \equiv 0\ (\mathrm{mod}\ 11). \end{aligned}$$

Moreover, some non-standard congruences modulo 11 for \(\Delta _5(n)\) are deduced. For example, we prove that, for \(\alpha \ge 0\), \(\Delta _5\left( \frac{11\times 5^{5\alpha }+1}{2}\right) \equiv 7\ (\mathrm{mod}\ 11)\).

     

Formation of Amphiphilic Molecules from the Most Common Marine Polysaccharides,toward a Sustainable Alternative?

Marine polysaccharides are part of the huge seaweeds resources and present many applications for several industries. In order to widen their potential as additives or bioactive compounds, some structural modifications have been studied. Among them, simple hydrophobization reactions have been developed in order to yield to grafted polysaccharides bearing acyl-, aryl-, alkyl-, and alkenyl-groups or fatty acid chains. The resulting polymers are able to present modified physicochemical and/or biological properties of interest in the current pharmaceutical, cosmetics, or food fields. This review covers the chemical structures of the main marine polysaccharides, and then focuses on their structural modifications, and especially on hydrophobization reactions mainly esterification, acylation, alkylation, amidation, or even cross-linking reaction on native hydroxyl-, amine, or carboxylic acid functions. Finally, the question of the necessary requirement for more sustainable processes around these structural modulations of marine polysaccharides is addressed, considering the development of greener technologies applied to traditional polysaccharides.