Related papers: Alignment of interstellar grains by mechanical tor…
Electron tunneling through mesoscopic metallic grains can be treated perturbatively only provided the tunnel junction conductances are sufficiently small. If it is not the case, fluctuations of the grain charge become strong. As a result…
In protoplanetary discs, the coagulation of dust grains into large aggregates still remains poorly understood. Grain porosity appears to be a promising solution to allow the grains to survive and form planetesimals. Furthermore, dust…
Electron transport in magnetic orders and the magnetic orders dynamics have a mutual dependence, which provides the key mechanisms in spin-dependent phenomena. Recently, antiferromagnetic orders are focused on as the magnetic order, where…
We study the drag force on dust grains moving at relativistic velocities through interstellar gas and explore its application. First, we derive a new analytical formula of the drag force at high energies and find that it is significantly…
Accurate modeling of gravitational interactions is fundamental to the analysis, prediction, and control of space systems. While the Newtonian point-mass approximation suffices for many preliminary studies, real celestial bodies exhibit…
The properties of the processes of deformation of a packing of rigid grains are analysed when the exact distribution of the normal forces at contacts is known. Importance of grain rotation and of counter-rotation of adjacent grains is…
Interstellar dust grains can be spun up by radiative torques, and the resulting centrifugal force may be strong enough to disrupt large dust grains. We examine the effect of this rotational disruption on the evolution of grain size…
The alignment of interstellar dust grains is described by the joint distribution function for certain ``internal'' and ``external'' variables, where the former describe the orientation of a grain's axes with respect to its angular momentum,…
The contact mechanics of individual, very small particles with other particles and walls is studied using a nanoindenter setup that allows normal and lateral displacement control and measurement of the respective forces. The sliding,…
A relativistic spacecraft of the type envisioned by the Breakthrough Starshot initiative will inevitably get charged through collisions with interstellar particles and UV photons. Interstellar magnetic fields would, therefore, deflect the…
For assemblies of superconductor nanograins, the magnetic response is analyzed as a function of both temperature and magnetic field. In order to describe the interaction energy of electron pairs for a huge number of many-particle states,…
In light of the race towards macroscale superlubricity of graphitic contacts, the effect of grain boundaries on their frictional properties becomes of central importance. Here, we elucidate the unique frictional mechanisms characterizing…
We investigate analytically a large-scale coherence in the orientation of galaxies embedded in two-dimensional sheet-like structures in the frame of the tidal torque theory. Assuming that the galaxy spin and the surrounding matter fields…
We calculate the torque on galaxies in clusters due to gravity and to dynamical friction forces in order to study the possible origin of small-scale alignment effects as the result of interactions with their environment. The equation of…
This paper considers the segregation of a granular mixture in a rotating drum. Extending a recent kinematic model for grain transport on sandpile surfaces to the case of rotating drums, an analysis is presented for radial segregation in the…
A question of some fundamental importance is whether a given assembly of frictional granules (say sand or powder) will exhibit stress autocorrelations with long-range anisotropic decay as determined by the elastic Green's function. In…
The interaction of dust grains originating from the local interstellar cloud with the environment inside the heliosphere is investigated. As a consequence of this interaction the spatial distribution of interstellar dust grains changes with…
We investigate the role and behaviour of dust grains in C-type MHD shock waves in weakly ionized, dense molecular clouds. New shock models are presented for steady, oblique C-type shock structures with shock speed v_s=18km/s, n_H=10^5cm^-3,…
Spin-orbit coupling in inversion-asymmetric magnetic crystals and structures has emerged as a powerful tool to generate complex magnetic textures, interconvert charge and spin under applied current, and control magnetization dynamics.…
We study the rotational and translational kinetics of massive particulates (dust grains) absorbing the ambient gas. Equations for microscopic phase densities are deduced resulting in the Fokker-Planck equation for the dust component. It is…