Observation of mixed fermionic-bosonic helium clusters by transmission grating diffraction

Small weakly bound boson-fermion 4He(m) 3He(n) clusters formed in a free jet expansion are identified using nondestructive transmission grating diffraction. The observations confirm the existence of more than 11 very tenuous complexes including the three-body halo molecule 4He2 3He and the pseudo-Borromean complex 4He2 3He2. Effective cluster formation temperatures, extracted from a sudden freeze model for cluster growth using theoretical binding energies, increase smoothly with cluster size, thereby confirming the calculations with the possible exception of 4He2 3He2.     

"Eclipse" effect in the scattering of weakly bound helium clusters

The total cross sections of the helium dimer, trimer, and tetramer for scattering from Kr atoms have been measured for cluster beam velocities between 250 and 820 m/s. The dimer cross section is twice that of the atom within 5% indicating that the Kr atoms scatter from the He atoms independently, which is consistent with the large dimer bond distance of about 50 A. The trimer and tetramer cross sections are somewhat larger and can be described by an impulse approximation with a multiple "eclipse" correction, extending ideas of Glauber for high energy collisions with the deuteron.     

Evidence for a bound HeH2 halo molecule by diffraction from a transmission grating

The HeH2 van der Waals complex has been identified in a molecular beam produced by a cryogenic (T0=24.7 K) free jet expansion of a 1% H2 mixture in 99% 4He gas. The weakly bound HeH2 complexes in the beam are identified via their first order diffraction angles after passing through a 100 nm period transmission grating. An electron impact mass spectrometer analysis of the diffraction patterns is used to discriminate against ion fragments of the constituent gas clusters.     

Evolution of fractal particles in systems with conserved order parameter

Computer simulations of the evolution of fractal aggregates in systems with conserved order parameter are described in this work. The aggregates are generated by diffusion-limited aggregation. This model describes such important processes as annealing of dendrite inclusions in solids, healing of cracks in ceramics, temperature-induced transformations in composites, relaxation of rough surfaces, aging of colloid particles, etc. It is shown that the evolution in fractal media differs significantly from that occurring in initially homogeneous systems and leads to different values of the scaling exponent. A relationship between the fractal dimension, mechanism of relaxation, and scaling exponent was also derived.     

Asymptotic optimization of nonlinear singularly perturbed systems with control constrained by a hypersphere

We consider a terminal control problem for a nonlinear singularly perturbed system with constraints imposed on the right endpoint of the trajectories. The values of the multidimensional controls are bounded in the Euclidean norm. We suggest an algorithm for an approximate (in the asymptotic sense) solution of this problem. The key advantage of the algorithm is the following: the original problem splits into two optimal control problems of lower dimension, one of which is linear.     

Kinetics of supramolecular crystallization of concentrated suspensions of monodisperse spherical silica particles

The kinetics of supramolecular crystallization of concentrated suspensions is three-dimensional and follows the Avrami-Erofeev equation: A=1-exp[-(kt)^m], where m=4. The rate constant k is proportional to the probability of the appearance of a crystallization center in unit volume in unit time and the linear crystal growth rate, which is determined experimentally.