Capillary instabilities by fluctuation induced forces

The spontaneous break-up of thin films is commonly attributed to the destabilizing effect of van der Waals forces. Dispersion forces can be considered in terms of the confinement of the electromagnetic fluctuation spectrum. The principle of confinement is more general than the usual argument of interacting dipole fluctuations. It includes also disjoining pressures that are caused by thermal fluctuations. In this context, we review recent publications on the dewetting of thin polymer films, and argue that the presence of an acoustic disjoining pressure is necessary to adequately describe some of these experimental results.Received: 1 August 2003PACS: 47.20.Ma Interfacial instability - 68.15. + e Liquid thin films - 43.25.Qp Radiation pressure     

Modules with the Direct Summand Sum Property

The present work gives some characterizations of R-modules with the direct summand sum property (in short DSSP), that is of those R-modules for which the sum of any two direct summands, so the submodule generated by their union, is a direct summand, too. General results and results concerning certain classes of R-modules (injective or projective) with this property, over several rings, are presented.     

Frequency‐dependent NMR relaxation of liquids confined inside porous media containing an increased amount of magnetic impurities

Frequency‐dependent NMR relaxation studies have been carried out on water (polar) and cyclohexane (nonpolar) molecules confined inside porous ceramics containing variable amounts of iron oxide (III). The porous ceramics were prepared by compression of powders mixed with iron oxide followed by thermal treatment. The pore size distribution was estimated using a technique based on diffusion in internal fields that exposed a narrow distribution of macropore sizes with an average pore dimension independent of iron oxide content. The relaxation dispersion curves were obtained at room temperature using a fast field cycling NMR instrument. They display an increase of the relaxation rate proportional to the iron oxide concentration. This behavior is more prominent at low Larmor frequencies and is independent of the polar character of the confined molecules. The results reported here can be fitted well with a relaxation model considering exchange between molecules in the close vicinity of the paramagnetic centers located in the surface and bulk‐like molecules inside the pores. This model allows the extraction of the transverse diffusional correlation time that can be related to the polar character of the confined molecules. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The time dependent Ginzburg-Landau equation in fractal space-time

We use the hydrodynamic formulation of Scale Relativity Theory to analyze the TDGL equation. As a result, London equations come naturally from the system, when equating to zero the real velocity, the imaginary one turns real, the superconducting fluid act as a subquantum medium energy accumulator, the vector potential, the real and the imaginary velocity are all written in terms of the elliptic function. When solving the resulted system by means of WKBJ method, we get tunneling and quantization. In other words, scale transformation laws produce, on the motion equation of particles governed by the TDGL equation, under some peculiar assumptions, effects which are analogous to those of a “macroscopic quantum mechanics”.     

Barbilian’s metrization procedure in the plane yields either Riemannian or Lagrange generalized metrics

In the present paper we answer two questions raised by Barbilian in 1960. First, we study how far can the hypothesis of Barbilian’s metrization procedure can be relaxed. Then, we prove that Barbilian’s metrization procedure in the plane generates either Riemannian metrics or Lagrance generalized metrics not reducible to Finslerian or Langrangian metrics.     

Sequential optimality conditions for composed convex optimization problems

Using a general approach which provides sequential optimality conditions for a general convex optimization problem, we derive necessary and sufficient optimality conditions for composed convex optimization problems. Further, we give sequential characterizations for a subgradient of the precomposition of a K-increasing lower semicontinuous convex function with a K-convex and K-epi-closed (continuous) function, where K is a nonempty convex cone. We prove that several results from the literature dealing with sequential characterizations of subgradients are obtained as particular cases of our results. We also improve the above mentioned statements.     

Earth surface effects on active faults: An eigenvalue asymptotic analysis

We study in this paper an eigenvalue problem (of Steklov type), modeling slow slip events (such as silent earthquakes, or earthquake nucleation phases) occurring on geological faults. We focus here on a half space formulation with traction free boundary condition: this simulates the earth surface where displacements take place and can be picked up by GPS measurements. We construct an appropriate functional framework attached to a formulation suitable for the half space setting. We perform an asymptotic analysis of the solution with respect to the depth of the fault. Starting from an integral representation for the displacement field, we prove that the differences between the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions attached to the half space problem and those attached to the free space problem, is of the order of d^-2, where d is a depth parameter: intuitively, this was expected as this is also the order of decay of the derivative of the Green's function for our problem. We actually prove faster decay in case of symmetric faults. For all faults, we rigorously obtain a very useful asymptotic formula for the surface displacement, whose dominant part involves a so called seismic moment. We also provide results pertaining to the analysis of the multiplicity of the first eigenvalue in the line segment fault case. Finally we explain how we derived our numerical method for solving for dislocations on faults in the half plane. It involves integral equations combining regular and Hadamard's hypersingular integration kernels.     

Interpolation operators on a triangle with one curved side

We construct certain Lagrange, Hermite and Birkhoff-type operators, which interpolate a given function and some of its derivatives on the border of a triangle with one curved side, as well as some of their product and Boolean sum operators. We study the interpolation properties and the order of accuracy (degree of exactness and precision set) of the constructed operators, respectively the remainders of the corresponding interpolation formulas. Finally, we give some numerical examples.