Related papers: Paramagnetic alignment of fractal grains
We study the thermodynamics of ultrasmall metallic grains with level spacing $\delta$ comparable or smaller than the pairing correlation energy, at finite temperatures, $T \gsim \delta$. We describe a method which allows to find quantum…
The study of the magnetic properties depending upon mechanical milling of the ferromagnetic polycrystalline TbAl_2 material is reported. The Rietveld analysis of the X-ray diffraction data reveals a decrease of the grain size down to 14 nm…
Dust grains drift through the interstellar medium (ISM) and are aligned with the magnetic field. Here we study the effect of grain alignment and grain motion on grain growth in molecular clouds (MCs). We first discuss the characteristic…
The quantization of energy levels in very nanoparticles suppresses dissipative processes that convert grain rotational kinetic energy into heat. For grains small enough to have GHz rotation rates, the suppression of dissipation can be…
Aligned non-spherical dust particles polarize starlight passing through the dust cloud. They also emit polarized far infrared and sub-mm radiation. Substantial progress in understanding of grain alignment theory makes the interpretation of…
We develop a theory of superconductivity in ultrasmall (nm-scale) metallic grains having a discrete electronic eigenspectrum with a mean level spacing of order of the bulk gap. The theory is based on calculating the eigenspectrum using a…
The role of grain size in determining fracture toughness in metals is incompletely understood with apparently contradictory experimental observations. We study this grain-size dependence computationally by building a model that combines the…
When decreasing the size of nanoscale magnetic particles their magnetization becomes vulnerable to thermal fluctuations as approaching the superparamgnetic limit, hindering thus applications relying on a stable magnetization. Here, we show…
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…
Aligned grains present a foreground for cosmic microwave emission studies. We review basic physical processes involved in grain alignment and discuss the niches for different alignment mechanisms. We show that mechanisms which were favored…
Most astrophysical systems, e.g. stellar winds, the diffuse interstellar medium, molecular clouds, are magnetized with magnetic fields that influence almost all of their properties. One of the most informative techniques of magnetic field…
We examine the destruction of superconducting pairing in metallic grains as their size is decreased for both even and odd numbers of electrons. This occurs when the average level spacing d is of the same order as the BCS order parameter.…
The recent detection of interstellar polarization in the solid CO feature near 4.67 micron shows that CO-mantled grains can be aligned in cold molecular clouds. These observations conflict with a theory of grain alignment which attributes…
The electrical conductivity induced near the superconducting transition by thermal fluctuations was measured in different granular aluminum films. The seemingly anomalous behavior at high reduced temperatures and magnetic fields is…
We study the fluctuation conductivity of superconducting granular metals at low temperatures and strong magnetic field destroying the Cooper pairs. Explicit calculations are performed for larger values of the coupling between the grains…
We study the magnetic-field-induced breakdown of superconductivity in nm-scale metal grains having a mean electron level spacing $d \simeq \tilde\Delta$ (bulk gap). Using a generalized variational BCS approach that yields good qualitative…
Angular resolved measurements of the exchange bias field and the coercive field are a powerful tool to distinguish between different competing magnetic anisotropies in polycrystalline exchange bias layer systems. No simple analytical model…
We review recent experimental and theoretical work on superconductivity in ultrasmall metallic grains, i.e. grains sufficiently small that the conduction electron energy spectrum becomes discrete. The discrete excitation spectrum of an…
Orbital magnetism is studied for graphene flakes with various shapes and edge configurations using the tight-binding approximation. In the low-temperature regime where the thermal energy is much smaller than to the energy level spacing, the…
The optical and magnetic properties of dust grains are reviewed, as they relate to the problem of interstellar grain alignment. Grain geometry plays an important role in determining the optical properties, and scattering and absorption of…