Small,but Perfectly Formed: The Microstructure of Nanocrystalline Oxides

There is considerable interest in nanocrystalline materials due to their unusual properties that offer the possibility of exciting technological applications. This paper concentrates on the microstructure of nanocrystalline binary oxides as revealed by X-ray absorption studies. It will be shown that these experiments yield a picture of the materials in which, even when the particles are only a few nanometres in size, the crystallites are highly ordered and the interfaces are similar to grain boundaries in normal bulk solids. This is in conflict with earlier ideas where it was often assumed the surfaces of nanocrystals and the interfaces between them were very disordered.     

Anomalous high resolution N.M.R. line-widths in plastic crystals

An optimized version of the force bias scheme is presented for the Monte Carlo simulation of water in which the random walk of the individual molecule is biased in the direction of the force and torque acting on the molecule. A new criterion is developed to judge the efficiency of sampling the configuration space by studying the translational and rotational diffusion of individual molecules during the random walk. The force bias method is compared with the uniform sampling method using ST2 water as an example, and with molecular dynamics. Similarities and differences between molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo are discussed with respect to pair correlations and energy distributions.     

Structure in rare earth doped β″-alumina

Abstract

Preliminary results of a combined EXAFS and computer simulation study of rare-earth doped β″-alumina are presented.     

Slender body expansions in potential theory along a finite straight line

Consider a distribution of singularities in a potential field along a finite straight line such that the potential satisfies the Laplace equation. An example is a distribution of sources representing a ship or missile moving with forward velocity in a potential inviscid flow field. Such bodies are often truncated or bluff at the ends, and so the strength of the resulting distributions may not gradually tend to zero close to these ends and may instead be non-zero finite. A near-field expansion is obtained which accounts for this using the slender body theory integral splitting method. All terms in the expansion are obtained, and the coefficient of each term in the infinite sequence is given in terms of differentials of the distribution strength. Hence an exact separation of variables solution (separating the axial distance from the cross-sectional distances) is obtained for the potential. This is different from previous representations in that it represents a distribution over a finite length, and the resulting expansion is a simple single summation expression that is straightforward to apply. The resulting numerical scheme is discussed, in particular the evaluation close to the ends and also a comparison between the presented slender body theory and existing numerical methods.