Metastable phase in the quantum Hall ferromagnet

Time-dependent capacitance measurements reveal an unstable phase of electrons in gallium arsenide quantum well that occurs when two Landau levels with opposite-spin are brought close to degeneracy by applying a gate voltage. This phase emerges below a critical temperature and displays a peculiar non-equilibrium dynamical evolution. The relaxation dynamics is found to follow a stretched-exponential behaviour and correlates with hysteresis loops observed by sweeping the magnetic field. These experiments indicate that metastable randomly distributed magnetic domains with peculiar excitations are involved in the relaxation process in a way that is equivalently tunable by a change in gate voltage or temperature.     

Surface bodies and p-affine surface area

The surface body is a generalization of the floating body. Its relation to p-affine surface area is studied.     

Perforation of steel and polycarbonate plates by tumbling projectiles

An experimental investigation to assess the effect of tumbling by hard-steel, blunt-faced cylindrical projectiles on the impact response of thin 4130 steel and polycarbonate target plates was performed. Deformation and failure phenomena were observed and discussed; comparisons of the results with analytical models and numerical stimulation, described in a previous paper, were also performed for the steel targets. The final velocity of the projectile and the crater length in the target were correlated with the striker impact angle (or yaw angle with a zero oblique angle); reasonable agreement was attained among the experimental, analytical and numerical results. It was found that an increase of the impact angle can increase the velocity drop and the crater length markedly. The increase tends to be stabilized after the impact angle exceeds 50° and the consequences in such a case are almost the same as in side-on impact.     

Least-Squares Fitting of Algebraic Spline Surfaces

We present an algorithm for fitting implicitly defined algebraic spline surfaces to given scattered data. By simultaneously approximating points and associated normal vectors, we obtain a method which is computationally simple, as the result is obtained by solving a system of linear equations. In addition, the result is geometrically invariant, as no artificial normalization is introduced. The potential applications of the algorithm include the reconstruction of free-form surfaces in reverse engineering. The paper also addresses the generation of exact error bounds, directly from the coefficients of the implicit representation.