Metallic powders such as thermite are known as efficient fuels also applicable in oxygen-free environments. However, due to their hydrophobicity, they hardly penetrate into water. This paper presents an effect that enables the insertion and confinement of hydrophobic metallic powders in water, based on encapsulating an air bubble surrounded by a hydrophobic metallic shell. This effect, regarded as an inverse of the known liquid-marble effect, is named here “bubble marble” (BM). The sole BM is demonstrated experimentally as a stable, maneuverable, and controllable soft-solid-like structure, in a slightly deformed hollow spherical shape of $\sim 1\text{−}\mathrm{cm}$ diameter. In addition to experimental and theoretical BM aspects, this paper also demonstrates its potential for underwater applications, such as transportation of solid objects within BM and underwater combustion of thermite BM by localized microwaves. Hence, the BM phenomena may open new possibilities for heat and thrust generation, as well as material processing and mass transfer underwater.

Effects of heterogeneity in the suspected-infected-susceptible model on networks are investigated using quenched mean-field theory. The emergence of localization is described by the distributions of the inverse participation ratio and compared with the rare-region effects appearing in simulations and in the Lifschitz tails. The latter, in the linear approximation, is related to the spectral density of the Laplacian matrix and to the time dependent order parameter. I show that these approximations indicate correctly Griffiths phases both on regular one-dimensional lattices and on small-world networks exhibiting purely topological disorder. I discuss the localization transition that occurs on scale-free networks at $\gamma =3$ degree exponent.

We employ Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the nonequilibrium relaxation properties of the two- and three-dimensional Coulomb glass with different long-range repulsive interactions. Specifically, we explore the aging scaling laws in the two-time density autocorrelation function. We find that, in the time window and parameter range accessible to us, the scaling exponents are not universal, depending on the filling fraction and temperature: As either the temperature decreases or the filling fraction deviates more from half filling, the exponents reflect markedly slower relaxation kinetics. In comparison with a repulsive Coulomb potential, appropriate for impurity states in strongly disordered semiconductors, we observe that, for logarithmic interactions, the soft pseudogap in the density of states is considerably broader, and the dependence of the scaling exponents on external parameters is much weaker. The latter situation is relevant for flux creep in the disorder-dominated Bose glass phase of type-II superconductors subject to columnar pinning centers.

We derive a coarse-grained model for heat conduction in nanoscale mechanical systems. Starting with an all-atom description, this approach yields a reduced model, in the form of conservation laws of momentum and energy. The model closure is accomplished by introducing a quasilocal thermodynamic equilibrium, followed by a linear response approximation. Of particular interest is the constitutive relation for the heat flux, which is expressed nonlocally in terms of the spatial and temporal variation of the temperature. Nanowires made of copper and silicon are presented as examples.

Inspired by spring-block models, we elaborate a “minimal” physical model of earthquakes which reproduces two main empirical seismological laws, the Gutenberg-Richter law and the Omori aftershock law. Our point is to demonstrate that the simultaneous incorporation of aging of contacts in the sliding interface and of elasticity of the sliding plates constitutes the minimal ingredients to account for both laws within the same frictional model.

Science is increasingly dominated by teams. Understanding patterns of scientific collaboration and their impacts on the productivity and evolution of disciplines is crucial to understand scientific processes. Electronic bibliography offers a unique opportunity to map and investigate the nature of scientific collaboration. Recent studies have demonstrated a counterintuitive organizational pattern of scientific collaboration networks: densely interconnected local clusters consist of weak ties, whereas strong ties play the role of connecting different clusters. This pattern contrasts itself from many other types of networks where strong ties form communities while weak ties connect different communities. Although there are many models for collaboration networks, no model reproduces this pattern. In this paper, we present an evolution model of collaboration networks, which reproduces many properties of real-world collaboration networks, including the organization of tie strengths, skewed degree and weight distribution, high clustering, and assortative mixing.

We study spreading wave packets in a disordered nonlinear ladder with broken time-reversal symmetry induced by synthetic gauge fields. The model describes the dynamics of interacting bosons in a disordered and driven optical ladder within a mean-field approximation. The second moment of the wave packet $m_2=g{t}^{\alpha }$ grows subdiffusively with the universal exponent $\alpha \simeq 1/3$ similar to the time-reversal case. However, the prefactor $g$ is strongly modified by the field strength and shows a nonmonotonic dependence. For a weak field, the prefactor increases since time-reversal enhanced backscattering is suppressed. For strong fields the spectrum of the linear wave equation reduces the localization length through the formation of gaps and narrow bands. Consequently the prefactor for the subdiffusive spreading law is suppressed.

We investigate the behavior of the electromagnetic wave that propagates in a metamaterial for negative index regime. Second-order dispersion and cubic-quintic nonlinearities are taken into account. The behavior obtained for negative index regime is compared to that observed for absorption regime. The collective coordinates technique is used to characterize the light pulse intensity profile at some frequency ranges. Five frequency ranges have been pointed out. The perfect combination of second-order dispersion and cubic nonlinearity leads to a robust soliton at each frequency range for negative index regime. The soliton peak power progressively decreases for absorption regime. Further, this peak power also decreases with frequency. We show that absorption regime can induce rogue wave trains generation at a specific frequency range. However, this rogue wave trains generation is maintained when the quintic nonlinearity comes into play for negative index regime and amplified for absorption regime at a specific frequency range. It clearly appears that rogue wave behavior strongly depends on the frequency and the regime considered. Furthermore, the stability conditions of the electromagnetic wave have also been discussed at frequency ranges considered for both negative index and absorption regimes.

Microwave plasmas excited at electron-cyclotron resonance were studied in the 0.5–15 mTorr pressure range. In contrast with low-limit pressure conditions where the plasma emission highlights a fairly homogeneous spatial structure, a periodic spatial modulation (period ∼6.2 cm) appeared as pressure increased. This feature is ascribed to a local power deposition (related to the electron density) due to the presence of a standing electromagnetic wave created by the feed electromagnetic field (2.45 GHz) in the cavity formed by the reactor walls. Analysis of the electron energy probability function by Langmuir probe and optical emission spectroscopy further revealed the presence of a high-energy tail that showed strong periodic spatial modulation at higher pressure. The spatial evolution of the electron density and of the characteristic temperature of these high-energy electrons coincides with the nodes (maximum) and antinodes (minimum) of the standing wave. These spatially-modulated power deposition and electron heating mechanisms are then discussed.

At low temperatures, the two-dimensional continuous-spin systems exhibit large correlation lengths. Some of them show the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless-like transitions, and some others show pseudocritical behaviors for which correlation lengths are extremely large but finite. To distinguish pseudo and genuine critical behaviors, it is important to understand the nature of spin-spin correlations and topological defects at low temperatures in continuous-spin systems. In this paper, I develop a finite-size scaling analysis which is suitable for distinguishing the critical behavior and its applications to the two-dimensional $XY$, Heisenberg, and ${\mathrm{RP}}^2$ models.

The evolution of wide shear zones or shear bands was investigated experimentally and numerically for quasistatic dry granular flows in split bottom shear cells. We compare the behavior of materials consisting of beads, irregular grains, such as sand, and elongated particles. Shearing an initially random sample, the zone width was found to significantly decrease in the first stage of the process. The characteristic shear strain associated with this decrease is about unity and it is systematically increasing with shape anisotropy, i.e., when the grain shape changes from spherical to irregular (e.g., sand) and becomes elongated (pegs). The strongly decreasing tendency of the zone width is followed by a slight increase which is more pronounced for rodlike particles than for grains with smaller shape anisotropy (beads or irregular particles). The evolution of the zone width is connected to shear-induced packing density change and for nonspherical particles it also involves grain reorientation effects. The final zone width is significantly smaller for irregular grains than for spherical beads.

Feed-forward loops are hierarchical three-node transcriptional subnetworks, wherein a top-level protein regulates the activity of a target gene via two paths: a direct-regulatory path, and an indirect route, whereby the top-level proteins act implicitly through an intermediate transcription factor. Using a transcriptional network of the model bacterium Escherichia coli, we confirmed that nearly all types of feed-forward loop were significantly overrepresented in the bacterial network. We then used mathematical modeling to study their dynamics by manipulating the rise times of the top-level protein concentration, termed the induction time, through alteration of the protein destruction rates. Rise times of the regulated proteins exhibited two qualitatively different regimes, depending on whether top-level inductions were “fast” or “slow.” In the fast regime, rise times were nearly independent of rapid top-level inductions, indicative of biological robustness, and occurred when RNA production rate-limits the protein yield. Alternatively, the protein rise times were dependent upon slower top-level inductions, greater than approximately one bacterial cell cycle. An equation is given for this crossover, which depends upon three parameters of the direct-regulatory path: transcriptional cooperation at the DNA-binding site, a protein-DNA dissociation constant, and the relative magnitude of the top-level protien concentration.

We show, that under very general conditions, a generic time-dependent billiard, for which a phase space of corresponding static (frozen) billiards is of the mixed type, exhibits the exponential Fermi acceleration in the adiabatic limit. The velocity dynamics in the adiabatic regime is represented as an integral over a path through the abstract space of invariant components of corresponding static billiards, where the paths are generated probabilistically in terms of transition-probability matrices. We study the statistical properties of possible paths and deduce the conditions for the exponential Fermi acceleration. The exponential Fermi acceleration and theoretical concepts presented in the paper are demonstrated numerically in four different time-dependent billiards.

We study, numerically and analytically, the forced transport of deformable containers through a narrow constriction. Our central aim is to quantify the competition between the constriction geometry and the active forcing, regulating whether and at which speed a container may pass through the constriction and under what conditions it gets stuck. We focus, in particular, on the interrelation between the force that propels the container and the radius of the channel, as these are the external variables that may be directly controlled in both artificial and physiological settings. We present lattice Boltzmann simulations that elucidate in detail the various phases of translocation and present simplified analytical models that treat two limiting types of these membrane containers: deformational energy dominated by the bending or stretching contribution. In either case we find excellent agreement with the full simulations, and our results reveal that not only the radius but also the length of the constriction determines whether or not the container will pass.

We present a class of algorithms for performing valence-bond quantum Monte Carlo of quantum spin models. Valence-bond quantum Monte Carlo is a projective $T=0$ Monte Carlo method based on sampling of a set of operator strings that can be viewed as forming a treelike structure. The algorithms presented here utilize the notion of a worm that moves up and down this tree and changes the associated operator string. In quite general terms, we derive a set of equations whose solutions correspond to a whole class of algorithms. As specific examples of this class of algorithms, we focus on two cases. The bouncing worm algorithm, for which updates are always accepted by allowing the worm to bounce up and down the tree, and the driven worm algorithm, where a single parameter controls how far up the tree the worm reaches before turning around. The latter algorithm involves only a single bounce where the worm turns from going up the tree to going down. The presence of the control parameter necessitates the introduction of an acceptance probability for the update.

In the present article, we extend and generalize our previous article [H. Safari, M. H. Rahimian, and M. Krafczyk, Phys. Rev. E 88, 013304 (2013)] to include the gradient of the vapor concentration at the liquid-vapor interface as the driving force for vaporization allowing the evaporation from the phase interface to work for arbitrary temperatures. The lattice Boltzmann phase-field multiphase modeling approach with a suitable source term, accounting for the effect of the phase change on the velocity field, is used to solve the two-phase flow field. The modified convective Cahn-Hilliard equation is employed to reconstruct the dynamics of the interface topology. The coupling between the vapor concentration and temperature field at the interface is modeled by the well-known Clausius-Clapeyron correlation. Numerous validation tests including one-dimensional and two-dimensional cases are carried out to demonstrate the consistency of the presented model. Results show that the model is able to predict the flow features around and inside an evaporating droplet quantitatively in quiescent as well as convective environments.

We consider the antiferromagnetic spin-$1/2$ Ising model with multisite interaction in an external magnetic field on an infinite zigzag ladder. The model is solved exactly by using the transfer matrix method. Using the exact expression for the total magnetization per site, the magnetic properties of the model are investigated in detail. The model exhibits the formation of magnetization plateaus for low temperatures, and it is shown that their properties depend strongly on the strength of the multisite interaction. All possible ground states of the model are found and discussed. The existence of nontrivial singular ground states is proven and exact explicit expressions for them are found. The macroscopic degeneracy of the ground states is investigated and discussed.

The master circadian pacemaker in mammals is localized in a small portion of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). It is unclear how the SCN produces circadian rhythms. A common interpretation is that the SCN produces oscillations through the coupling of genetic oscillators in the neurons. The coupling is effected by a network of neuropeptides and second messengers. This network is crucial for the correct function of the SCN. However, models that study a possible oscillatory behavior of the network itself have received little attention. Here we propose and analyze a model to examine this oscillatory potential. We show that an intercellular oscillator emerges in the SCN as a result of the neuropeptide and second messenger dynamics. We find that this intercellular clock can produce circadian rhythms by itself with and without genetic clocks. We also found that the model is robust to perturbation of parameters and can be entrained by light-dark cycles.

We investigate the combined effects of distributed delay and the balance between excitatory and inhibitory nodes on the stability of synchronous oscillations in a network of coupled Stuart-Landau oscillators. To this end a symmetric network model is proposed for which the stability can be investigated analytically. It is found that beyond a critical inhibition ratio, synchronization tends to be unstable. However, increasing distributional widths can counteract this trend, leading to multiple resynchronization transitions at relatively high inhibition ratios. The extended applicability of the results is confirmed by numerical studies on asymmetrically perturbed network topologies. All investigations are performed on two distribution types, a uniform distribution and a $\Gamma$ distribution.