Quantum Statistical Fugacity Expansions for Partially Ionized Plasmas in Equilibrium

A derivation of screened fugacity expansions for nondegenerate Coulomb systems is given. Debye screening is taken into account by an iteration procedure. The fugacity expansion is applied to hydrogen plasmas. It is shown that the fugacity expansion of the pressure implicitely describes the ionization equilibrium.     

Effects of strong noise on attractors of dynamical systems

Stationary solutions of the Fokker-Planck equation are found by expansions of the probability distribution with respect to the reciprocal noise strength. It is shown that this expansion is convergent. Explicit representations for the probability distribution are obtained by numerical simulations for the Lorenz model and for a model of generators with inertial nonlinearity (GIN). The obtained distributions show an increasing amount of fine structure with decreasing noise which more and more reflects the fractal attractor structure. Results of measurements of the power spectrum of the GIN and of the distribution in the phase space are presented in dependence on the noise strengths.     

Pressure Ionization in Nonideal Alkali Plasmas

A system of electrons (e) and ions (i) is considered in which beside the Coulomb interaction short range forces are taken into account, i.e. for the e-i interaction a pseudopotential is used, and for the (classical) ions crystallographic radii are used. For a Cesium plasma the thermodynamic properties are calculated quantumstatistically in a wide temperature-density region. Degeneration effects are taken into account approximately. In the region with bound states the ionization equilibrium is discussed, and the Mott-Transition is investigated critically. A phase transition occurs in the framework of the model chosen at T_c ≈ 4500 K and n^c ≈ 4.10²⁰ cm^?3.     

Observation of the optoacoustic effect in an optical fibre

The rediationless absorption of light propagating in optical fibres induces both stress waves and thermal waves in the fibre medium. Detection of such waves is termed the optoacoustic effect. Successful detection in optical fibres is easily obscured by scattered light impinging on the detector. We have obtained a signal of 2 mV on a piezoceramic transducer attached to a commercial step-index optical fibre after passage of a 1 J ruby laser light pulse along the fibre axis. No signal was, however, produced when the transducer was not in contact with the fibre. Similar results were obtained using chopped cw laser radiation but then more care had to be taken since the transducers used had a measureable sensitivity to the low frequency chopped radiation emitted perpendicular to the optical fibre axis.     

Soliton-like excitations and solectrons in two-dimensional nonlinear lattices

We discuss here the thermal excitation of soliton-like supersonic, intrinsic localized modes in two-dimensional monolayers of atoms imbedded into a heat bath. These excitations induce local electrical polarization fields at the nano-scale in the lattice which influence electron dynamics, thus leading to a new form of trapping. We study the soliton-mediated electron dynamics in such systems at moderately high temperatures and calculate the density of embedded electrons in a suitable adiabatic approximation.     

Active particles with broken symmetry

We discuss and analyze the driving a polar active particle with a head-tail asymmetry based on the dynamics of an internal motor variable driven by an energy depot and a broken symmetry of friction with respect to the internal degree of freedom. We show that such a driving may be advantageous for driving large masses with small energy uptake from the environment and exhibits interesting properties such as resonance-driven optimal propulsion.     

Activation by nonlinear oscillations and solitonic excitations

Local excitations in molecular systems are studied taking into account the influence of soft impurities. The dynamics of activation processes (high-energy events) due to nonlinear mechanisms is studied. The following examples of classical macroscopic systems with strong nonlinear interaction are investigated: 1D Toda chains, 1D Morse rings, and 3D systems of hard spheres including impurities. It is shown that solitonlike excitations may lead to the concentration of energy at definite sites (weak springs or soft spheres). The accumulation of energy is mainly due to soliton-fusion effects. In thermal equilibrium an optimum temperature exists, where the thermally averaged potential energy is preferably partitioned to the soft springs embedded into a hard-spring solvent. Further, we show that the effect of thermal energy localization and the temperature dependence also persists for solutions of soft spheres in hard-sphere solvents.