Universal scaling in transient creep

We present experimental evidence that pressure solution creep does not establish a steady-state interface microstructure as previously thought. Conversely, pressure solution controlled strain and the characteristic length scale of interface microstructures grow as the cubic root of time. Transient creep with the same scaling is known in metallurgy (Andrade creep). The apparent universal scaling of pressure solution transient creep is explained using an analogy with spinodal dewetting.     

Enhancement by polydispersity of the biaxial nematic phase in a mixture of hard rods and plates

The phase diagram of a polydisperse mixture of uniaxial rodlike and platelike hard parallelepipeds is determined for aspect ratios kappa=5 and 15. All particles have equal volume, and polydispersity is introduced in a highly symmetric way. The corresponding binary mixture is known to have a biaxial phase for kappa=15, but to be unstable against demixing into two uniaxial nematics for kappa=5. The phase diagram for kappa=15 is qualitatively similar to that of the binary mixture, regardless of the amount of polydispersity, while for kappa=5 a sufficient amount of polydispersity stabilizes the biaxial phase. This provides clues for designing an experiment to observe this long searched biaxial phase.     

Self-written waveguides in photopolymerizable resins

We study the optically induced growth and interaction of self-written waveguides in a photopolymerizable resin. We investigate experimentally how the interaction depends on the mutual coherence and the relative power of the input beams and suggest an improved analytical model that describes the growth of single waveguides and the main features of their interaction in photosensitive materials.     

Classical Limits of Euclidean Gibbs States for Quantum Lattice Models

Models of quantum and classical particles on a lattice ^d are considered. The classical model is obtained from the corresponding quantum model when the reduced mass of the particle m = / #x210F;² tends to infinity. For these models, the convergence of the Euclidean Gibbs states, when m + , is described in terms of the weak convergence of local Gibbs specifications, determined by conditional Gibbs measures. In fact, it is shown that all conditional Gibbs measures of the quantum model weakly converge to the conditional Gibbs measures of the classical model. A similar convergence of the periodic Gibbs measures and, as a result, of the order parameters, for such models with pair interactions possessing the translation invariance, has also been shown.     

Pi-envelopes of Lie superalgebras

In this paper we find necessary and sufficient conditions on a finite-dimensional Lie superalgebra under which any associative PI-envelope of is finite-dimensional. We also extend M. Scheunert's result which enables one to pass from color Lie superalgebras to the ordinary ones, to the case of gradings by an arbitrary abelian group.

     

Bounded harmonic functions on nonamenable covers of compact manifolds

We show that the space of bounded harmonic functions on a nonamenable cover of a compact Riemannian manifold is infinite dimensional. Supported by US-Israel Binational Science Foundation Grant No. 84-00028.     

A room-temperature protocol for the rhodium(I)-catalyzed addition of arylboron compounds to sulfinimines

[reaction: see text] The addition of organoboronic acids to chiral sulfinimines proceeds under mild conditions at room temperature, using Rh(I) catalysis in the absence of external phosphine ligands. Clean reaction only occurs in the presence of water as a cosolvent. The sulfinamide adducts are formed with high diastereoselectivities, providing a convenient route to the synthesis of enantiomerically enriched chiral benzylic amines.     

Giant lamb shift in photonic crystals

We obtain a general result for the Lamb shift of excited states of multilevel atoms in inhomogeneous electromagnetic structures and apply it to study atomic hydrogen in inverse-opal photonic crystals. We find that the photonic-crystal environment can lead to very large values of the Lamb shift, as compared to the case of vacuum. We also suggest that the position-dependent Lamb shift should extend from a single level to a miniband for an assembly of atoms with random distribution in space, similar to the velocity-dependent Doppler effect in atomic/molecular gases.     

Nonlinear BLOCH-wave interaction and bragg scattering in optically induced lattices

We study, both theoretically and experimentally, the Bragg scattering of light in optically induced photonic lattices and reveal the key physical mechanisms which govern the nonlinear self-action of narrow beams under the combined effects of Bragg scattering and wave diffraction, allowing for selecting bands with different effective dispersion.