Effect of crack tip sharpness on the strength of vulcanized rubbers

The effect of crack tip sharpness on crack propagation in vulcanized rubbers has been studied. For very sharp cracks, tearing is found to occur on a small scale at very low energies not far above the threshold required for the onset of mechanical crack growth. The “small-scale” tearing energies show relatively little variation for rubbers that differ widely in tear strength as normally measured. Thus the latter property appears to be strongly influenced by variations in the ability of rubbers to promote tip blunting. The small-scale tear behavior is of relevance to other fracture phenomena, including cutting by sharp objects and tensile failure. Natural variations in tip sharpness occur during cyclic or time-dependent mechanical crack growth and influence the form of the crack growth characteristics.     

Ion structure determinations and ion—molecule reactions by double quadrupole mass spectrometry

The QQ mass spectrometer is shown to be applicable to ion structure determination via collision-induced dissociations of mass-selected ions. The instrument can be scanned so as to record the products of dissociation as well as those of ion—molecule association reactions. The dissociations correspond to those observed at high kinetic energy in mass-analyzed ion kinetic energy spectrometers and the association reactions show parallels with reactions seen in ion cyclotron resonance spectroscopy and in high-pressure mass spectrometry     

Molecular orbital momentum distributions and binding energies for nitric oxide

Binding energy spectra of the valence electrons of the open shell molecule NO have been obtained up to 55 eV at azimuthal angles of 0° and 7° using binary (e, 2e) spectroscopy at an impact energy of 1200 eV. The momentum distribution has been obtained for the least tightly bound (unpaired) electron, removal of which leads to formation of the X ¹Σ⁺ ground state of NO⁺. Momentum distributions have also been measured at 21.0 and 40.5 eV. The measured momentum distributions are compared with several literature wavefunctions of varying complexity. They are found to be in excellent agreement with those calculated using the natural spin orbital wavefunctions of Kouba and Ohrn.     

Absorption and emission dynamics in concentrated optical ensembles under laser excitation

A new theoretical model describing the emission and absorption dynamics in an ensemble of molecules under intense coherent pulsed pumping is developed on the basis of the concepts of cooperative light-induced luminescence (CLIL). The CLIL development is described within the framework of formalism of the system density matrix in the space of photon wave functions. It is shown that the fast growth of CLIL relates to the development of coherent states of the quantum field in the area of efficient cooperative interactions of molecules (coherence volume). A system of equations for the calculation of CLIL energy, population of excited states, and optical absorption of the system in dependence on the laser pump energy density is solved. The theoretical results obtained are in good agreement with the experimental data.