Survey of experimental results on μCF including hyperfine effects

Complementary to the investigations of the most efficient dt cycle, also the other muon-induced fusion cycles in mixtures of hydrogen isotopes have been studied. The results of these dedicated experiments provide rich information about muon-induced few-body reactions and contribute significantly to a better overall understanding of CF. A summary of the recent progress will be presented. Special emphasis will be put on two characteristic examples, namely a new experimental approach to study the muonic cascade in H-D mixtures and the systematic study of hyperfine effects in muon-induced reactions.     

Some remarks on the boundary regularity for minima of variational problems with obstacles

We minimize the Dirichlet-integral in a class of vector-valued functions u:^N defined by Dirichlet-boundary conditions and a side-condition of the form u()M with M bounded and open in ^N having smooth boundary M. If the boundary values are sufficiently regular we show that the minimizer can only have interior singularities, i.e. the solution is smooth in a neighborhood of .     

Confined supramolecular nanostructures of mesogen-bearing amphiphiles

Stable surface nanostructures with different morphology have been successfully constructed by modifying the chemical structure of synthetic amphiphiles; by introducing mesogenic groups into bolaform amphiphiles, stable spaghetti-like or stripe-like nanostructures can be obtained; it is believed that such a kind of surface structure could be used for templating synthesis and assembly.     

Monte Carlo versus molecular dynamics simulations in heterogeneous systems: an application to the n-pentane liquid-vapor interface

The Monte Carlo (MC) and molecular dynamics (MD) methodologies are now well established for computing equilibrium properties in homogeneous fluids. This is not yet the case for the direct simulation of two-phase systems, which exhibit nonuniformity of the density distribution across the interface. We have performed direct MC and MD simulations of the liquid-gas interface of n-pentane using a standard force-field model. We obtained density and pressure components profiles along the direction normal to the interface that can be very different, depending on the truncation and long range correction strategies. We discuss the influence on predicted properties of different potential truncation schemes implemented in both MC and MD simulations. We show that the MD and MC profiles can be made in agreement by using a Lennard-Jones potential truncated via a polynomial function that makes the first and second derivatives of the potential continuous at the cutoff distance. In this case however, the predicted thermodynamic properties (phase envelope, surface tension) deviate from experiments, because of the changes made in the potential. A further readjustment of the potential parameters is needed if one wants to use this method. We conclude that a straightforward use of bulk phase force fields in MD simulations may lead to some physical inconsistencies when computing interfacial properties.