Metastable phase in the quantum Hall ferromagnet

Time-dependent capacitance measurements reveal an unstable phase of electrons in gallium arsenide quantum well that occurs when two Landau levels with opposite-spin are brought close to degeneracy by applying a gate voltage. This phase emerges below a critical temperature and displays a peculiar non-equilibrium dynamical evolution. The relaxation dynamics is found to follow a stretched-exponential behaviour and correlates with hysteresis loops observed by sweeping the magnetic field. These experiments indicate that metastable randomly distributed magnetic domains with peculiar excitations are involved in the relaxation process in a way that is equivalently tunable by a change in gate voltage or temperature.     

Altering the Remote Past

An abstract treatment of Bell inequalities in proposed, in which the parameters characterizing Bell's observable can be times rather than directions. The violation of a Bell inequality might then be taken to mean that a property of a system can be changed by the timing of a distant measurement, which could take place in the future.     

Braiding structures on formal Poisson groups and classical solutions of the QYBE

If is a quasitriangular Lie bialgebra, the formal Poisson group can be given a braiding structure. This was achieved by Weinstein and Xu using purely geometrical means, and independently by the authors by means of quantum groups. In this paper we compare these two approaches. First, we show that the braidings they produce share several similar properties (in particular, the construction is functorial); secondly, in the simplest case (G=SL₂) they do coincide. The question then rises of whether they are always the same this is positively answered in a separate paper.     

Structure and optical properties of lead iodide based two-dimensional perovskite compounds containing fluorophenethylamines

Phenethylammonium-based perovskites, which can be regarded as a semiconductor/insulator multiple quantum well consisting of lead halide semiconductor layers sandwiched between phenethylammonium insulator layers were prepared. To investigate the effects of the electronic state and the orientation of organic insulator layers on the optical properties of layered perovskites, fluorine substituted analogues were also prepared. The structure and optical properties were investigated by the XRD, UV–Vis absorption, and fluorescence measurements. The exciton absorption peak was shifted by the substitution of fluorine atoms in organic ammonium compounds. It became clear that the optical properties of two-dimensional perovskite compounds were controlled by the substitution of fluorine atoms.     

Fatigue Loading and Life Prediction in Three Fretting Fatigue Fixtures

Three fixtures for conducting laboratory fretting fatigue tests are described and their respective testing methods and the results of the analysis are compared. Each of these fixtures has been used to investigate the effects of various parameters of interest in fretting fatigue. These fixtures include a unique apparatus in which all load applied to the specimen is transferred to the fretting pads, an apparatus similar to many found in the literature where partial load transfer occurs across the pads, and a simplified dovetail fixture in which the clamping load, P, and the shear load, Q, are varied in phase. Select test conditions from prior experiments performed on identical material and resulting in similar lives ranging from one to ten million cycles from these fixtures are identified. The various testing conditions were used to compute the unique stress field for each case. The resulting contact stresses were used to calculate crack initiation based criteria, and to calculate stress intensity factors. The three fixtures were shown to be able to accommodate a range of loads, fretting pad contours, and specimen geometries that produced a variety of stress fields. A crack-initiation-based criterion was shown to predict the failure lives of thinner specimens accurately. The stress intensity factor calculations showed the possibility of a crack arresting for a stress field that decays rapidly and the possibility of a local minimum for K as a function of depth. The fixtures are shown to be complementary in generating data for development of robust fretting fatigue models that use these criteria.     

Axisymmetric frictionless contact of functionally graded materials

The main interest of this study is a new method to solve the axisymmetric frictionless contact problem of functionally graded materials (FGMs). Based on the fact that an arbitrary curve can be approached by a series of continuous but piecewise linear curves, the FGM is divided into a series of sub-layers with shear modulus varying linearly in each sub-layer and continuous at the sub-interfaces. With this model, the axisymmetric frictionless contact problem of a functionally graded coated half-space is investigated. By using the transfer matrix method and Hankel integral transform technique, the problem is reduced to a Cauchy singular integral equation. The contact pressure, contact region and indentation are calculated for various indenters by solving the equations numerically. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Path Integrals in Noncommutative Quantum Mechanics

We consider an extension of the Feynman path integral to the quantum mechanics of noncommuting spatial coordinates and formulate the corresponding formalism for noncommutative classical dynamics related to quadratic Lagrangians (Hamiltonians). The basis of our approach is that a quantum mechanical system with a noncommutative configuration space can be regarded as another effective system with commuting spatial coordinates. Because the path integral for quadratic Lagrangians is exactly solvable and a general formula for the probability amplitude exists, we restrict our research to this class of Lagrangians. We find a general relation between quadratic Lagrangians in their commutative and noncommutative regimes and present the corresponding noncommutative path integral. This method is illustrated with two quantum mechanical systems in the noncommutative plane: a particle in a constant field and a harmonic oscillator.     

On Publications on the Brittle Fracture Mechanics of Prestressed Materials

The paper analyzes new publications on the brittle fracture mechanics of prestressed materials. It is found out that new scientific results published in the International Journal of Solids and Structures in 2002 are a particular case of the results obtained at the Institute of Mechanics 20 years ago     

A Reality Proof in PT-Symmetric Quantum Mechanics

We review the proof of a conjecture concerning the reality of the spectra of certain PT-symmetric quantum mechanical systems, obtained via a connection between the theories of ordinary differential equations and integrable models. Spectral equivalences inspired by the correspondence are also discussed.     

Classical Limit of Expectation Values in a Wave Packet Involving Few Stationary States

Expectation values of physical quantities in a wave packet involving few stationary states in an infinite square well are calculated. Explicit results show that the expectation values in the classical limit go over to the corresponding classical quantity in the form of the arithmetic mean (in mathematical term, the Fejér's average) of the partial Fourier series converging to the classical quantity. The number of the stationary states is that of the partial Fourer series in the Fejér's average. The quantum uncertainty is then demonstrated to have a classical counterpart.