Related papers: Catastrophe machines a few nanometers in size
The critical Casimir effect provides a thermodynamic analogue of the well-known quantum mechanical Casimir effect. It acts between two surfaces immersed in a critical binary liquid mixture, and results from the confinement of concentration…
Complex systems, when poised near a critical point of a phase transition between order and disorder, exhibit a dynamics comprising a scale-free mixture of order and disorder which is universal, i.e. system-independent (1-5). It allows…
Experimental systems with a first order phase transition will often exhibit hysteresis when out of equilibrium. If defects are present, the hysteresis loop can have different shapes: with small disorder the hysteresis loop has a macroscopic…
When a high voltage (~30 kV) is applied to a capacitor whose electrodes have different physical dimensions, the capacitor experiences a net force toward the smaller electrode (Biefeld-Brown effect). We have verified this effect by building…
We demonstrate the role of proximity effect in the thermal hysteresis of superconducting constrictions. From the analysis of successive thermal instabilities in the transport characteristics of micron-size superconducting quantum…
The influence of lateral vibrations on the stick-slip motion of a nanotip elastically pulled on a flat crystal surface is studied by atomic force microscopy (AFM) measurements on a NaCl(001) surface in ultra-high vacuum. The slippage of the…
Simple models of clarinet instruments based on iterated maps have been used in the past to successfully estimate the threshold of oscillation of this instrument as a function of a constant blowing pressure. However, when the blowing…
The thermal Casimir effect, arising from fluctuating electromagnetic fields of thermally agitated charges, induces thermosensitive forces and presents a novel approach to detecting nanoscale hot electrons, elusive yet ubiquitous in modern…
We study the critical thresholds for the compressible pressureless Euler equations with pairwise attractive or repulsive interaction forces and non-local alignment forces in velocity in one dimension. We provide a complete description for…
Dynamical hysteresis is a phenomenon which arises in ferromagnetic systems below the critical temperature as a response to adiabatic variations of the external magnetic field. We study the problem in the context of the mean-field Ising…
We study the influence of the electromagnetic vacuum force on the behaviour of a model device based on materials, like germanium tellurides, that undergo fast and reversible metal-insulator transitions on passing from the crystalline to the…
We study the fatigue fracture of disordered materials by means of computer simulations of a discrete element model. We extend a two-dimensional fracture model to capture the microscopic mechanisms relevant for fatigue, and we simulate the…
We consider both massive Euler-Heisenberg-like and Euler-Heisenberg-like Electrodynamics in the approximation of the strong-field limit. Our analysis shows that massive Euler-Heisenberg-type Electrodynamics displays the vacuum birefringence…
We investigate a cantilevered elastic beam subjected to harmonic rotational motion. In the rotating frame, the beam experiences centrifugal and Euler fictitious forces, with negligible Coriolis effects. We validate a reduced-order…
It has been long stated that there are profound analogies between fracture experiments and earthquakes; however, few works attempt a complete characterization of the parallelisms between these so separate phenomena. We study the Acoustic…
We characterize the thermodynamical equilibrium states of axisymmetric Euler-Beltrami flows. They have the form of coherent structures presenting one or several cells. We find the relevant control parameters and derive the corresponding…
We report a theoretical study suggesting a novel type of electronic switching effect, driven by the geometrical reconstruction of nanoscale graphene-based junctions. We considered junction struc- tures which have alternative metastable…
A complete model of the dynamics of scrape-off layer filaments will be rather complex, including temperature evolution, three dimensional geometry and finite Larmor radius effects. However, the basic mechanism of…
An infinite-range model of an elastic manifold pulled through a random potential by an applied force $F$ is analyzed focusing on inertial effects. When the inertial parameter, $M$, is small, there is a continuous depinning transition from a…
Two equal and opposite distributed dead loads are applied orthogonally to the axis of an elastic rod in its rectilinear reference configuration, one at the extrados and the other at the intrados, such that the resultant applied force per…