A Closed‐Loop Control Strategy for Producing Nitrile Rubber of Uniform Chemical Composition in a Semibatch Reactor: A Simulation Study

To improve the quality of industrial nitrile rubbers, the copolymer chemical composition, p_A(t), should ideally be kept constant along the reaction. This work proposes a closed‐loop control strategy for the semibatch operation of the reactor with the aim of regulating p_A(t) within a reduced range of variability. The proposed strategy is evaluated by simulating a mathematical model of the process. To this effect, a simplified mathematical model of the reaction is first derived and then utilized to obtain a suboptimal control law and a soft‐sensor that estimates the polymerization rates. The suboptimal control law is compensated by adding a term proportional to errors in p_A(t). The simulated example considers the production of the low‐composition AJLT grade, with the copolymerization reaction represented by a detailed mathematical model adjusted to an industrial plant. Due to the high performance of the soft‐sensor, the simulation results suggest that the proposed closed‐loop strategy is efficient to adequately regulate p_A(t) in spite of structural and parametric uncertainties, while other quality variables remained practically unaffected.     

Classifying the ground-state phases of spin–orbit coupled spin-2 Bose–Einstein condensate in momentum space

The ground-state phases of two-dimensional spin-2 Bose–Einstein condensate with Rashba spin–orbit coupling are studied. For the equal strengths of the density-density interaction and the spin-exchange interaction, we classify the ground-state phases into four types of stable phases with spin–orbit coupling and spin singlet-pairing interaction in momentum space, i.e., the ring phase, the stripe phase, the triangular phase and the square phase. With increasing the spin–orbit coupling strength, the system undergoes a sequence phase transitions from the ring phase to the stripe phase, and to the square phase for the attractive spin singlet-pairing interaction ($c_2<0$), and the system undergoes a sequence phase transitions from the ring phase to the stripe phase, to the triangular phase, and to the square phase for the repulsive spin singlet-pairing interaction ($c_2>0$).     

Full counting statistics of transport electrons through a two-level quantum dot with spin–orbit coupling

We study the full counting statistics of transport electrons through a semiconductor two-level quantum dot with Rashba spin–orbit (SO) coupling, which acts as a nonabelian gauge field and thus induces the electron transition between two levels along with the spin flip. By means of the quantum master equation approach, shot noise and skewness are obtained at finite temperature with two-body Coulomb interaction. We particularly demonstrate the crucial effect of SO coupling on the super-Poissonian fluctuation of transport electrons, in terms of which the SO coupling can be probed by the zero-frequency cumulants. While the charge currents are not sensitive to the SO coupling.     

Sufficient Conditions for a Digraph to be Supereulerian

A (di)graph is supereulerian if it contains a spanning eulerian sub(di)graph. This property is a relaxation of hamiltonicity. Inspired by this analogy with hamiltonian cycles and by similar results in supereulerian graph theory, we analyze a number of sufficient Ore type conditions for a digraph to be supereulerian. Furthermore, we study the following conjecture due to Thomassé and the first author: if the arc‐connectivity of a digraph is not smaller than its independence number, then the digraph is supereulerian. As a support for this conjecture we prove it for digraphs that are semicomplete multipartite or quasitransitive and verify the analogous statement for undirected graphs.     

Carlsson's rank conjecture and a conjecture on square-zero upper triangular matrices

Let k be an algebraically closed field and A the polynomial algebra in r variables with coefficients in k. In case the characteristic of k is 2, Carlsson [9] conjectured that for any DG-A-module M of dimension N as a free A-module, if the homology of M is nontrivial and finite dimensional as a k-vector space, then $2^r\le N$. Here we state a stronger conjecture about varieties of square-zero upper triangular $N\times N$ matrices with entries in A. Using stratifications of these varieties via Borel orbits, we show that the stronger conjecture holds when $N<8$ or $r<3$ without any restriction on the characteristic of k. As a consequence, we obtain a new proof for many of the known cases of Carlsson's conjecture and give new results when $N>4$ and $r=2$.     

Brake Orbits of First Order Convex Hamiltonian Systems with Particular Anisotropic Growth

Combining the dual least action principle with Mountain-pass lemma,we obtain the existence of brake orbits for first-order convex Hamiltonian systems with particular anisotropic growth.