As-placed contact angles for sessile drops

As-placed contact angle is the contact angle a drop adapts as a result of its placement on a surface. As expected, the as-placed contact angle, thetaAP, of a sessile drop on a horizontal surface decreases with the drop size due to the increase in hydrostatic pressure. We present a theoretical prediction for thetaAP which shows that it is a unique function of the advancing contact angle, thetaA, drop size, and material properties (surface tensions and densities). We test our prediction with published and new data. The theory agrees with the experiments. From the relation of the as-placed contact angle to drop size the thermodynamic equilibrium contact angle is also calculated.     

Velocity averaging,kinetic formulations,and regularizing effects in quasi‐linear PDEs

We prove in this paper new velocity‐averaging results for second‐order multidimensional equations of the general form ??(?_x, v)f(x, v) = g(x, v) where ??(?_x, v) := a (v) · ?_x ? ? ${}_{\text{x}}^{\text{?}}$ · b (v)?_x. These results quantify the Sobolev regularity of the averages, ∫_v f(x, v)?(v)dv, in terms of the nondegeneracy of the set {v: |??(iξ, v)| ≤ δ} and the mere integrability of the data, (f, g) ∈ (L, L). Velocity averaging is then used to study the regularizing effect in quasi‐linear second‐order equations, ??(?_x, ρ)ρ = S(ρ), which use their underlying kinetic formulations, ??(?_{x, v})χ_ρ = g_S. In particular, we improve previous regularity statements for nonlinear conservation laws, and we derive completely new regularity results for convection‐diffusion and elliptic equations driven by degenerate, nonisotropic diffusion. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Bioinspired Supramolecular Packing Enables High Thermo-Sustainability

Bottom-up self-assembled bioinspired materials have attracted increasing interest in a variety fields. The use of peptide supramolecular semiconductors for optoelectronic applications is especially intriguing. However, the characteristic thermal unsustainability limits their practical application. Here, we report the thermal sustainability of cyclo-ditryptophan assemblies up to 680 K. Non-covalent interactions underlie the stability mechanism, generating a low exciton-binding energy of only 0.29 eV and a high thermal-quenching-activation energy of up to 0.11 eV. The contributing forces comprise predominantly of aromatic interactions, followed by hydrogen bonding between peptide molecules, and, to a lesser extent, water-mediated associations. This thermal sustainability results in a temperature-dependent conductivity of the supramolecular semiconductors, showing 93 % reduction of the resistance from 320 K to 440 K. Our results establish thermo-sustainable peptide self-assembly for heat-sensitive applications.     

On the piecewise smoothness of entropy solutions to scalar conservation laws

The behavior and structure of entropy solutions of scalar convex conservation laws are studied. It is well known that such entropy solutions consist of at most countable number of C¹-smooth regions. We obtain new upper. bounds on the higher order derivatives of the entropy solution in any one of its C¹-smoothness regions. These bounds enable us to measure the high order piecewise smoothness of the entropy solution. To this end we introduce an appropriate new Cⁿ-semi norm - localized to the smooth part of the entropy solution, and we show that the entropy solution is stable with respect to this norm. We also address the question regarding the number of C¹-smoothness pieces; we show that if the initial speed has a finite number of decreasing inflection points then it bounds the number of future shock discontinuities. Loosely speaking this says that in the case of such generic initial data the entropy solution consists of a finite number of smooth pieces, each of which is as smooth as the data permits. It is this type of piecewise smoothness which is assumed - sometime implicitly - in many finite-dimensional computations for such discontinuous problems.     

Two-photon path-entangled states in multimode waveguides

We experimentally show that two-photon path-entangled states can be coherently manipulated by multimode interference in multimode waveguides. By measuring the output two-photon spatial correlation function versus the phase of the input state, we show that multimode waveguides perform as nearly ideal multiport beam splitters at the quantum level, creating a large variety of entangled and separable multipath two-photon states.     

Line energy,line tension and drop size

The relation between drop radius, r, the force to move the three phase contact line and the advancing and receding contact angles θ_A and θ_R is studied. To keep the line energy (energy per 2πr, also named line tension) independent of r, the modified Young equation predicts that the advancing and receding contact angles, θ_A and θ_R, change considerably with r. As shown by many investigators, θ_A and θ_R change negligibly, if at all, with r. We quantify recent evidences showing that the line energy is a function of the Laplace pressure and show that this way the modified Young equation is correct and still θ_A and θ_R should hardly change with r. According to our model, the small surface deformation associated with the unsatisfied normal component of the Young equation results in higher intermolecular interactions at the three phase contact line which corresponds to a higher retention force. This time increasing effect is supported by recent experiments.     

Hierarchical Construction of Bounded Solutions in Critical Regularity Spaces

We construct uniformly bounded solutions for the equations div U = f and U = f in the critical cases and , respectively. Criticality in this context manifests itself by the lack of a linear solution operator mapping . Thus, the intriguing aspect here is that although the problems are linear, construction of their solutions is not. Our constructions are special cases of a general framework for solving linear equations of the form , where is a linear operator densely defined in Banach space with a closed range in a (proper subspace) of Lebesgue space , and with an injective dual . The solutions are realized in terms of a multiscale hierarchical representation, , interesting for its own sake. Here, u _j's are constructed recursively as minimizers of where the residuals are resolved in terms of a dyadic sequence of scales with large enough . The nonlinear aspect of this construction is a counterpart of the fact that one cannot linearly solve in critical regularity spaces.© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

A New Model for Self-organized Dynamics and Its Flocking Behavior

We introduce a model for self-organized dynamics which, we argue, addresses several drawbacks of the celebrated Cucker-Smale (C-S) model. The proposed model does not only take into account the distance between agents, but instead, the influence between agents is scaled in term of their relative distance. Consequently, our model does not involve any explicit dependence on the number of agents; only their geometry in phase space is taken into account. The use of relative distances destroys the symmetry property of the original C-S model, which was the key for the various recent studies of C-S flocking behavior. To this end, we introduce here a new framework to analyze the phenomenon of flocking for a rather general class of dynamical systems, which covers systems with non-symmetric influence matrices. In particular, we analyze the flocking behavior of the proposed model as well as other strongly asymmetric models with “leaders”.