The possibility of controlling traffic dynamics by applying high-frequency time modulation of traffic flow parameters is studied. It is shown that the region of the car density where the uniform (free) flow is unstable changes in the presence of time modulation compared with the unmodulated case. This region shrinks when the speed-up of cars does not exceed some critical value and expands in the opposite case. The flux of the time-modulated flow is an increasing function of the amplitude of the modulation for traffic flows whose density is larger than $1/h$ where $h$ is the safety distance in the nonmodulated case, while it is a decreasing function in the opposite case. In other words, the safety distance time modulation facilitates car propagation in the case when the mean distance between cars in the congestive traffic is less than $h$ and hinders it when the neighboring cars in the flow are well separated. A link between a microscopic description and the macroscopic fundamental diagram is established.

We examine the nonlinear response of a bistable system driven by a high-frequency force to a low-frequency weak field. It is shown that the rapidly varying temporal oscillation breaks the spatial symmetry of the centrosymmetric potential. This gives rise to a finite nonzero response at the second harmonic of the low-frequency field, which can be optimized by an appropriate choice of vibrational amplitude of the high-frequency field close to that for the linear response. The potential implications of the nonlinear vibrational resonance are analyzed.

The lifting Hele-Shaw cell flow is a variation of the celebrated radial viscous fingering problem for which the upper cell plate is lifted uniformly at a specified rate. This procedure causes the formation of intricate interfacial patterns. Most theoretical studies determine the total number of emerging fingers by maximizing the linear growth rate, but this generates discrepancies between theory and experiments. In this work, we tackle the number of fingers selection problem in the lifting Hele-Shaw cell by employing the recently proposed maximum-amplitude criterion [Dias and Miranda, Phys. Rev. E 88, 013016 (2013)]. Our linear stability analysis accounts for the action of capillary, viscous normal stresses, and wetting effects, as well as the cell confinement. The comparison of our results with very precise laboratory measurements for the total number of fingers shows a significantly improved agreement between theoretical predictions and experimental data.

The diagrammatic Monte Carlo (DiagMC) method is a numerical technique which samples the entire diagrammatic series of the Green's function in quantum many-body systems. In this work, we incorporate the flat histogram principle in the diagrammatic Monte Carlo method, and we term the improved version the “flat histogram diagrammatic Monte Carlo” method. We demonstrate the superiority of this method over the standard DiagMC in extracting the long-imaginary-time behavior of the Green's function, without incorporating any a priori knowledge about this function, by applying the technique to the polaron problem.

We present a theoretical treatment of energy transfer in a molecular motor described in terms of overdamped Brownian motion on a multidimensional tilted periodic potential. The tilt represents a thermodynamic force driving the system out of equilibrium and, for nonseparable potentials, energy transfer occurs between degrees of freedom. For deep potential wells, the continuous theory transforms to a discrete master equation that is tractable analytically. We use this master equation to derive formal expressions for the hopping rates, drift and diffusion, and the efficiency and rate of energy transfer in terms of the thermodynamic force. These results span both strong and weak coupling between degrees of freedom, describe the near and far from equilibrium regimes, and are consistent with generalized detailed balance and the Onsager relations. We thereby derive a number of diverse results for molecular motors within a single theoretical framework.

We report on the spontaneous formation of hierarchical wrinkling patterns in Cr films deposited on silicone oil drops with constrained edges. The appearance of the wrinkling patterns is strongly dependent on the film thickness and the size of the silicone oil drop. Because the Cr film at the drop edge is constrained due to the strong adhesion between the film and the glass surface, the wrinkle wavelength merely depends on the distance starting from the drop edge. When the distance increases, the wavelength increases quickly first, and then it slows down gradually in compliance with a simple power law. The evolution of the wrinkle amplitude is similar to that of the wavelength, but it is also closely related to the film thickness and the oil drop size. Based on the fact that the silicone oil is polymerized to form an elastic layer during deposition, the formation and evolution of the hierarchical wrinkling patterns have been analyzed in detail.

Lagrangian statistics from millions of particles are used to study the turbulent entrainment mechanism in a direct numerical simulation of a turbulent plane jet at ${\mathrm{Re}}_{\lambda }\approx 110$. The particles (tracers) are initially seeded at the irrotational region of the jet near the turbulent shear layer and are followed as they are drawn into the turbulent region across the turbulent-nonturbulent interface (TNTI), allowing the study of the enstrophy buildup and thereby characterizing the turbulent entrainment mechanism in the jet. The use of Lagrangian statistics following fluid particles gives a more correct description of the entrainment mechanism than in previous works since the statistics in relation to the TNTI position involve data from the trajectories of the entraining fluid particles. The Lagrangian statistics for the particles show the existence of a velocity jump and a characteristic vorticity jump (with a thickness which is one order of magnitude greater than the Kolmogorov microscale), in agreement with previous results using Eulerian statistics. The particles initially acquire enstrophy by viscous diffusion and later by enstrophy production, which becomes “active” only deep inside the turbulent region. Both enstrophy diffusion and production near the TNTI differ substantially from inside the turbulent region. Only about 1$\%$ of all particles find their way into pockets of irrotational flow engulfed into the turbulent shear layer region, indicating that “engulfment” is not significant for the present flow, indirectly suggesting that the entrainment is largely due to “nibbling” small-scale mechanisms acting along the entire TNTI surface. Probability density functions of particle positions suggests that the particles spend more time crossing the region near the TNTI than traveling inside the turbulent region, consistent with the particles moving tangent to the interface around the time they cross it.

A confined colloidal glass, under the imposition of a uniform shear stress, is investigated using numerical simulations. Both at macro- and microscales, the consequent dynamics during the onset of flow is studied. When the imposed stress is gradually decreased, the time scale for the onset of steady flow diverges, associated with long-lived spatial heterogeneities. Near this yield-stress regime, persistent creep in the form of shear-banded structures is observed.

We have developed an analytical physics model from fundamental physics principles and used the reduced one-dimensional model to derive a thermonuclear ignition criterion and implosion energy scaling laws applicable to inertial confinement fusion capsules. The scaling laws relate the fuel pressure and the minimum implosion energy required for ignition to the peak implosion velocity and the equation of state of the pusher and the hot fuel. When a specific low-entropy adiabat path is used for the cold fuel, our scaling laws recover the ignition threshold factor dependence on the implosion velocity, but when a high-entropy adiabat path is chosen, the model agrees with recent measurements.

The critical anomaly of the isobaric molar heat capacity for the liquid-liquid phase transition in binary nonionic mixtures is explained through a theory based on the general assumption that their partition function can be exactly mapped into that of the Ising three-dimensional model. Under this approximation, it is found that the heat capacity singularity is directly linked to molar excess enthalpy. In order to check this prediction and complete the available data for such systems, isobaric molar heat capacity and molar excess enthalpy near the liquid-liquid critical point were experimentally determined for a large set of binary liquid mixtures. Agreement between theory and experimental results—both from literature and from present work—is good for most cases. This fact opens a way for explaining and predicting the heat capacity divergence at the liquid-liquid critical point through basically the same microscopic arguments as for molar excess enthalpy, widely used in the frame of solution thermodynamics.

Disordered systems show deviations from the standard Debye theory of specific heat at low temperatures. These deviations are often attributed to two-level systems of uncertain origin. We find that a source of excess specific heat comes from correlations between quanta of energy if excitations are localized on an intermediate length scale. We use simulations of a simplified Creutz model for a system of Ising-like spins coupled to a thermal bath of Einstein-like oscillators. One feature of this model is that energy is quantized in both the system and its bath, ensuring conservation of energy at every step. Another feature is that the exact entropies of both the system and its bath are known at every step, so that their temperatures can be determined independently. We find that there is a mismatch in canonical temperature between the system and its bath. In addition to the usual finite-size effects in the Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac distributions, if excitations in the heat bath are localized on an intermediate length scale, this mismatch is independent of system size up to at least 10${}^6$ particles. We use a model for correlations between quanta of energy to adjust the statistical distributions and yield a thermodynamically consistent temperature. The model includes a chemical potential for units of energy, as is often used for other types of particles that are quantized and conserved. Experimental evidence for this model comes from its ability to characterize the excess specific heat of imperfect crystals at low temperatures.

We study the statistics of the work done by globally changing in time with a generic protocol the mass in a free bosonic field theory with relativistic dispersion and the transverse field in the one-dimensional Ising chain both globally and locally. In the latter case we make the system start from the critical point and we describe it in the scaling limit. We provide exact formulas in all these cases for the full statistics of the work and we show that the low-energy part of the distribution of the work displays an edge singularity whose exponent does not depend on the specifics of the protocol that is chosen and may only depend on the position of the initial and final values with respect to the critical point of the system. We also show that the condensation transition found in the bosonic system for sudden quenches [A. Gambassi and A. Silva, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 250602 (2012)] is robust with respect to the choice of the protocol.

Some experimental results in the study of disordered systems, polymeric fluids, solutions of micelles and surfactants, ionic-glass conductors, and others show a hydrodynamic behavior labeled “anomalous” with properties described by some kind of fractional power laws in place of the standard ones. This is a consequence of the fractal-like structure that is present in these systems of which we do not have a detailed description, thus impairing the application of the conventional ensemble formalism of statistical mechanics. In order to obtain a physical picture of the phenomenon for making predictions which may help with technological and industrial decisions, one may resort to different styles (so-called nonconventional) in statistical mechanics. In that way can be introduced a theory for handling such impaired situations, a nonconventional mesoscopic hydrothermodynamics (MHT). We illustrate the question presenting an application in a contracted description of such nonconventional MHT, consisting in the use of the Renyi approach to derive a set of coupled nonstandard evolution equations, one for the density, a nonconventional Maxwell-Cattaneo equation, which in a limiting case goes over a non-Fickian diffusion equation, and other for the velocity in fluids under forced flow. For illustration the theory is applied to the study of the hydrodynamic motion in several soft-matter systems under several conditions such as streaming flow appearing in electrophoretic techniques and flow generated by harmonic forces arising in optical traps. The equivalence with Lévy processes is discussed and comparison with experiment is done.

We study the stochastic macroscopic kinetics of photoinduced phase transitions in spin-crossover compounds assisted by white and colored Ornstein-Uhlenbeck noise. By using a phenomenological master equation obtained in the mean-field approach, the phase diagram is constructed based on the associated Lyapunov function. The stochastic behavior is then analyzed in the Langevin framework and the corresponding Fokker-Planck equations. Both additive and multiplicative and white and colored types of noise are considered and the stationary probability densities are found along with the noise-assisted light induced hysteretic loops. By using the Kramers formalism, we also focus our attention on the escape time problem in these noise perturbed systems. A detailed study of the relative escape time dependence on various noise characteristics is performed and the main features are compared for different types of noise.

We study the dynamics of a local load-sharing fiber bundle model in two dimensions under an external load (which increases with time at a fixed slow rate) applied at a single point. Due to the local load-sharing nature, the redistributed load remains localized along the boundary of the broken patch. The system then goes to a self-organized state with a stationary average value of load per fiber along the (increasing) boundary of the broken patch (damaged region) and a scale-free distribution of avalanche sizes and other related quantities are observed. In particular, when the load redistribution is only among nearest surviving fiber(s), the numerical estimates of the exponent values are comparable with those of the Manna model. When the load redistribution is uniform along the patch boundary, the model shows a simple mean-field limit of this self-organizing critical behavior, for which we give analytical estimates of the saturation load per fiber values and avalanche size distribution exponent. These are in good agreement with numerical simulation results.

We consider a class of lattice random walk models in which the random walker is initially confined to a finite connected set of allowed sites but has the opportunity to enlarge this set by colliding with its boundaries, each such collision having a given probability of breaking through. The model is motivated by an analogy to cell motility in tissue, where motile cells have the ability to remodel extracellular matrix, but is presented here as a generic model for stochastic erosion. For the one-dimensional case, we report some exact analytic results, some mean-field type analytic approximate results and simulations. We compute exactly the mean and variance of the time taken to enlarge the interval from a single site to a given size. The problem of determining the statistics of the interval length and the walker's position at a given time is more difficult and we report several interesting observations from simulations. Our simulations include the case in which the initial interval length is random and the case in which the initial state of the lattice is a random mixture of allowed and forbidden sites, with the walker placed at random on an allowed site. To illustrate the extension of these ideas to higher-dimensional systems, we consider the erosion of the simple cubic lattice commencing from a single site and report simulations of measures of cluster size and shape and the mean-square displacement of the walker.

We calculate tractable microscopic expressions for the low-shear normal-stress coefficients of colloidal dispersions. Although restricted to the low rate regime, the presented formulas are valid for all volume fractions below the glass transition and for any interaction potential. Numerical results are presented for a system of colloids interacting via a hard-core attractive Yukawa potential, for which we explore the interplay between attraction strength and volume fraction. We show that the normal-stress coefficients exhibit nontrivial features close to the critical point and at high volume fractions in the vicinity of the reentrant glass transition. Finally, we exploit our formulas to make predictions about rod-climbing effects in attractive colloidal dispersions.

We report optical birefringence data by two different methods with high temperature resolution for octylcyanobiphenyl (8CB) near the smectic-$A$ to nematic (Sm-$A$-$N$) phase transition temperature $T_{AN}$. Within the resolution of our experiments, we find that the Sm-$A$-$N$ phase transition is continuous. For a possible discontinuity in the orientational order parameter $S\left(T\right)$ at $T_{AN}$, we arrive at an upper limit of 0.0002, which is substantially smaller than other estimates in literature, but consistent with the value of 0.00008 derived from the upper limit of the latent heat from high-resolution adiabatic scanning calorimetry (ASC), which is itself consistent with the Halperin-Lubensky-Ma theory. The temperature derivative of the order parameter exhibits a power law divergence with a critical exponent that is consistent with the value $\alpha =0.31\pm 0.03$ for the specific heat capacity obtained by ASC.

In this paper, we introduce and study systematically, in terms of phase response curves, the effect of dual-pulse excitation on the dynamics of an autonomous oscillator. Specifically, we test the deviations from linear summation of phase advances resulting from two small perturbations. We analytically derive a correction term, which generally appears for oscillators whose intrinsic dimensionality is $>$1. The nonlinear correction term is found to be proportional to the square of the perturbation. We demonstrate this effect in the Stuart-Landau model and in various higher dimensional neuronal models. This deviation from the superposition principle needs to be taken into account in studies of networks of pulse-coupled oscillators. Further, this deviation could be used in the verification of oscillator models via a dual-pulse excitation.

We present a new representation of solutions of the one-dimensional nonlinear focusing Schrödinger equation (NLS) as a quotient of two determinants. This formulation gives in the case of the order 3, new solutions with four parameters. This gives a very efficient procedure to construct families of quasirational solutions of the NLS equation and to describe the apparition of multirogue waves. With this method, we construct analytical expressions of four-parameters solutions; when all these parameters are equal to 0, we recover the Peregrine breather of order 3. It makes possible with this four-parameters representation, to generate all the types of patterns for the solutions, like the triangular configurations or the ring structures.