Electrochemical Recovery of Silver from Lead Alloys in Chloride Melts

Electrochemical separation of lead-silver alloys into the constituents by thin-layer electrolysis in molten electrolytes, with bismuth as metal separator, is studied. It is proposed to determine the extent of component recovery by potentiometry.     

Bilateral generating functions and operational methods

Bilateral generating functions are those involving products of different types of polynomials. We show that operational methods offer a powerful tool to derive these families of generating functions. We study cases relevant to products of Hermite polynomials with Laguerre, Legendre and other polynomials. We also propose further extensions of the method which we develop here.     

Matrix Entries of Real Representations of the Groups O(3) and SO(3)

We indicate bases for spinor representations of the groups O(3), SO(3), and SU(2) in which the representation matrices are real-valued. The matrix entries in these bases are calculated. We describe the transformation of classical orthogonal harmonic polynomials in three-dimensional space by these matrix entries.     

Mass Power Spectrum in a Universe Dominated by the Chaplygin Gas

The mass power spectrum for a Universe dominated by the Chaplygin gas is evaluated numerically from scales of the order of the Hubble horizon to 100 Mpc. The results are compared with a pure baryonic Universe and a cosmological constant model. In all three cases, the spectrum increases with k, the wavenumber of the perturbations. The slope of the spectrum is higher for the baryonic model and smaller for the cosmological constant model, the Chaplygin gas interpolating these two models. The results are analyzed in terms of the sound velocity of the Chaplygin gas and the moment the Universe begins to accelerate.     

Stability of a Model of Relativistic Quantum Electrodynamics

The relativistic “no pair” model of quantum electrodynamics uses the Dirac operator, D(A) for the electron dynamics together with the usual self-energy of the quantized ultraviolet cutoff electromagnetic field A– in the Coulomb gauge. There are no positrons because the electron wave functions are constrained to lie in the positive spectral subspace of some Dirac operator, D, but the model is defined for any number, N, of electrons, and hence describes a true many-body system. In addition to the electrons there are a number, K, of fixed nuclei with charges ≤Z. If the fields are not quantized but are classical, it was shown earlier that such a model is always unstable (the ground state energy E=−∞) if one uses the customary D(0) to define the electron space, but is stable (E > − const.(N+K)) if one uses D(A) itself (provided the fine structure constant α and Z are not too large). This result is extended to quantized fields here, and stability is proved for α= 1/137 and Z≤ 42. This formulation of QED is somewhat unusual because it means that the electron Hilbert space is inextricably linked to the photon Fock space. But such a linkage appears to better describe the real world of photons and electrons. Received: 8 September 2001 / Accepted: 18 March 2002     

An unstructured mesh finite volume method for modelling saltwater intrusion into coastal aquifers

In this paper, a two-dimensional finite volume unstructured mesh method (FVUM) based on a triangular background interpolation mesh is developed for analysing the evolution of the saltwater intrusion into single and multiple coastal aquifer systems. The model formulation consists of a ground-water flow equation and a salt transport equation. These coupled and non-linear partial differential equations are transformed by FVUM into a system of differential/algebraic equations, which is solved using backward differentiation formulas of order one through five. Simulation results are compared with previously published solutions where good agreement is observed.     

Deformation Quantization for Systems with Fermions

Deformation quantization, which achieves the passage from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics by the replacement of the pointwise multiplication of functions on phase space by the star product, is a powerful tool for treating systems involving bosonic degrees of freedom, both in quantum mechanics and in quantum field theory. In the present paper we show how these methods may be naturally extended to systems involving fermions. In particular we show how supersymmetric quantum mechanics can be formulated in this approach and consider examples involving both non-relativistic and relativistic systems.     

The polar ionosphere at Zhongshan station on May 11, 1999, the day the solar wind almost disappeared

The solar wind almost disappeared on May 11, 1999: the solar wind plasma density and dynamic pressure were less than 1cm⁻³ and 0.1 nPa respectively, while the interplanetary magnetic field was northward. The polar ionospheric data observed by the multi-instruments at Zhongshan Station in Antarctica on such special event day was compared with those of the control day (May 14). It was shown that geomagnetic activity was very quiet on May 11 at Zhongshan. The magnetic pulsation, which usually occurred at about magnetic noon, did not appear. The ionosphere was steady and stratified, and the F₂ layer spread very little. The critical frequency of day-side F₂ layer, f₀F₂, was larger than that of control day, and the peak of f₀F₂ appeared 2 hours earlier. The ionospheric drift velocity was less than usual. There were intensive auroral E_s appearing at magnetic noon. All this indicates that the polar ionosphere was extremely quiet and geomagnetic field was much more dipolar on May 11. There were some signatures of auroral substorm before midnight, such as the negative deviation of the geomagnetic H component, accompanied with auroral E_s and weak Pc3 pulsation.

     

Absolutely indecomposable symmetric matrices

Let A be a symmetric matrix of size n×n with entries in some (commutative) field K. We study the possibility of decomposing A into two blocks by conjugation by an orthogonal matrix T∈Mat_n(K). We say that A is absolutely indecomposable if it is indecomposable over every extension of the base field. If K is formally real then every symmetric matrix A diagonalizes orthogonally over the real closure of K. Assume that K is a not formally real and of level s. We prove that in Mat_n(K) there exist symmetric, absolutely indecomposable matrices iff n is congruent to 0, 1 or −1 modulo 2s.