It is demonstrated theoretically that the nonlinear stage of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability can be retarded at arbitrary Atwood numbers in a rotating system with the axis of rotation normal to the acceleration of the interface between two uniform inviscid fluids. The Coriolis force provides an effective restoring force on the perturbed interface, and the uniform rotation will always decrease the nonlinear saturation amplitude of the interface at any disturbance wavelength.

We investigate emulsion droplet formation in coflowing liquid streams based on a computational fluid dynamics simulation using the volume-of-fluid method to track the interface motion with a focus on the dynamics of the dripping and jetting regimes. The simulations reproduce dripping, widening jetting and narrowing jetting simultaneously in a coflowing microchannel in agreement with the experimental observations in this work. The result indicates that the dripping regime, rather than the jetting regime, is a favorable way to producing monodisperse emulsions. We find that, in dripping and widening jetting regimes, the breakup of a drop is induced by higher pressure in the neck which squeezes liquid into the lower-pressure region in subsequent and primary droplets, while the breakup in the narrowing jetting regime is due to slow velocity at the back end of the trough with respect to the leading end of the trough. In addition, the capillary number of the outer fluid and the Weber number of the inner fluid not only determine the drop diameter and generation rate but also the regime of emulsification.

Colloidal droplets including micro- and nanoparticles generally leave a ringlike stain, called the “coffee ring,” after evaporation. We show that fingering emerges during evaporation inside the coffee ring, resulting from a bidispersed colloidal mixture of micro- and nanoparticles. Microscopic observations suggest that finger formation is driven by competition between the coffee-ring and Marangoni effects, especially when the inward Marangoni flow is overwhelmed by the outward coffee-ring flow. This finding could help to understand the variety of the final deposition patterns of colloidal droplets.

Considering high temperature and pressure during single bubble sonoluminescence collapse, a hot plasma core is generated at the center of the bubble. In this paper a statistical mechanics approach is used to calculate the core pressure and temperature. A hydrochemical model alongside a plasma core is used to study the bubble dynamics in two host liquids of water and sulfuric acid 85 wt $\%$ containing Ar atoms. Calculation shows that the extreme pressure and temperature in the plasma core are mainly due to the interaction of the ionized Ar atoms and electrons, which is one step forward to sonofusion. The thermal bremsstrahlung mechanism of radiation is used to analyze the emitted optical energy per flash of the bubble core.

We show that the nature of the scaling behavior can be revealed by studying the conditional structure functions evaluated at given values of the locally averaged thermal dissipation rate. These conditional structure functions have power-law dependence on the value of the locally averaged thermal dissipation rate, and such dependence for the Bolgiano-Obukhov scaling is different from the other scaling behaviors. Our analysis of experimental measurements verifies the power-law dependence and reveals the Bolgiano-Obukhov scaling behavior at the center of the bottom plate of the convection cell.

A self-consistent nonlocal model of the positive column of a dc glow discharge with dust particles is presented. Radial distributions of plasma parameters and the dust component in an axially homogeneous glow discharge are considered. The model is based on the solution of a nonlocal Boltzmann equation for the electron energy distribution function, drift-diffusion equations for ions, and the Poisson equation for a self-consistent electric field. The radial distribution of dust particle density in a dust cloud was fixed as a given steplike function or was chosen according to an equilibrium Boltzmann distribution. The balance of electron and ion production in argon ionization by an electron impact and their losses on the dust particle surface and on the discharge tube walls is taken into account. The interrelation of discharge plasma and the dust cloud is studied in a self-consistent way, and the radial distributions of the discharge plasma and dust particle parameters are obtained. It is shown that the influence of the dust cloud on the discharge plasma has a nonlocal behavior, e.g., density and charge distributions in the dust cloud substantially depend on the plasma parameters outside the dust cloud. As a result of a self-consistent evolution of plasma parameters to equilibrium steady-state conditions, ionization and recombination rates become equal to each other, electron and ion radial fluxes become equal to zero, and the radial component of electric field is expelled from the dust cloud.

In this paper, a scheme for specifying contact angle and its hysteresis is incorporated into a multiphase lattice Boltzmann method. The scheme is validated through investigations of the dynamic behaviors of a droplet sliding along two kinds of walls: a smooth (ideal) wall and a rough or chemically inhomogeneous (nonideal) wall. For an ideal wall, the wettability of solid substrates is able to be prescribed. For a nonideal wall, arbitrary contact angle hysteresis can be obtained through adjusting advancing and receding angles. Significantly different phenomena can be recovered for the two kinds of walls. For instance, a droplet on an inclined ideal wall under gravity is impossible to stay stationary. However, the droplet on a nonideal wall may be pinned due to contact angle hysteresis. The steady interface shapes of the droplet on an inclined nonideal wall under gravity or in a shear flow quantitatively agree well with the previous numerical studies. Besides, the complex motion of a droplet creeping like an inchworm could be simulated. The scheme is found suitable for the study of contact line problems with and without contact angle hysteresis.

We present a model based on the lattice Boltzmann equation that is suitable for the simulation of dynamic wetting. The model is capable of exhibiting fundamental interfacial phenomena such as weak adsorption of fluid on the solid substrate and the presence of a thin surface film within which a disjoining pressure acts. Dynamics in this surface film, tightly coupled with hydrodynamics in the fluid bulk, determine macroscopic properties of primary interest: the hydrodynamic slip; the equilibrium contact angle; and the static and dynamic hysteresis of the contact angles. The pseudo-potentials employed for fluid-solid interactions are composed of a repulsive core and an attractive tail that can be independently adjusted. This enables effective modification of the functional form of the disjoining pressure so that one can vary the static and dynamic hysteresis on surfaces that exhibit the same equilibrium contact angle. The modeled fluid-solid interface is diffuse, represented by a wall probability function that ultimately controls the momentum exchange between solid and fluid phases. This approach allows us to effectively vary the slip length for a given wettability (i.e., a given static contact angle) of the solid substrate.

The classical Heisenberg antiferromagnet with uniaxial exchange anisotropy, the XXZ model, and competing planar single-ion anisotropy in a magnetic field on a simple cubic lattice is studied with the help of extensive Monte Carlo simulations. The biconical (supersolid) phase, bordering the antiferromagnetic and spin-flop phases, is found to become thermally unstable well below the onset of the disordered, paramagnetic phase, leading to interesting multicritical points.

The response in capacitance to low external magnetic fields (up to 0.1 T) of suspensions of spherical magnetic nanoparticles, single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNT), SWCNT functionalized with carboxyl group (SWCNT-COOH), and SWCNT functionalized with Fe${}_3$O${}_4$ nanoparticles in a nematic liquid crystal has been studied experimentally. The volume concentration of nanoparticles was ${\varphi }_1={10}^{-4}$ and ${\varphi }_2={10}^{-3}$. Independent of the type and the volume concentration of the nanoparticles, a linear response to low magnetic fields (far below the magnetic Fréederiksz transition threshold) has been observed, which is not present in the undoped nematic.

The dissociation dynamics of heteronuclear diatomic molecules induced by infrared laser pulses is investigated within the framework of the classical driven Morse oscillator. The interaction between the molecule and the laser field described in the dipole formulation is given by the product of a time-dependent external field with a position-dependent permanent dipole function. The effects of changing the spatial range of the dipole function in the classical dissociation dynamics of large ensembles of trajectories are studied. Numerical calculations have been performed for distinct amplitudes and carrier frequencies of the external pulses and also for ensembles with different initial energies. It is found that there exist a set of values of the dipole range for which the dissociation probability can be completely suppressed. The dependence of the dissociation on the dipole range is explained through the examination of the Fourier series coefficients of the dipole function in the angle variable of the free system. In particular, the suppression of dissociation corresponds to dipole ranges for which the Fourier coefficients associated with nonlinear resonances are null and the chaotic region in the phase space is reduced to thin layers. In this context, it is shown that the suppression of dissociation of heteronuclear molecules for certain frequencies of the external field is a consequence of the finite range of the corresponding permanent dipole.

It has been known for some time that singular perturbation and reductive perturbation can be unified from the renormalization-group theoretical point of view: Reductive extraction of space-time global behavior is the essence of singular perturbation methods. Reductive renormalization was proposed to make this unification practically accessible; actually, this reductive perturbation is far simpler than most reduction methods, such as the rather standard scaling expansion. However, a rather cryptic exposition of the method seems to have been the cause of some trouble. Here, an explicit demonstration of the consistency of the reductive renormalization-group procedure is given for partial differentiation equations (of a certain type, including time-evolution semigroup type equations). Then, the procedure is applied to the reduction of a phase-field crystal equation to illustrate the streamlined reduction method. We conjecture that if the original system is structurally stable, the reductive renormalization-group result and that of the original equation are diffeomorphic.

We investigate the value of the correlation function of an inhomogeneous hard-sphere fluid at contact. This quantity plays a critical role in statistical associating fluid theory, which is the basis of a number of recently developed classical density functionals. We define two averaged values for the correlation function at contact and derive formulas for each of them from the White Bear version of the fundamental measure theory functional, using an assumption of thermodynamic consistency. We test these formulas, as well as two existing formulas, against Monte Carlo simulations and find excellent agreement between the Monte Carlo data and one of our averaged correlation functions.

We carried out an improved characterization of phase transitions among chiral smectic-$C$ subphases observed for various antiferroelectric liquid crystals by precise heat capacity measurements. It was found that the phase transitions are intrinsically first order exhibiting a remarkable heat anomaly which involves little pretransitional thermal fluctuation and a finite thermal hysteresis. On the other hand, we also noticed that the critical point of the smectic-$C_{\alpha }^{*}$–smectic-$C^{*}$ transition is induced by the destabilization of the smectic-$C_{\alpha }^{*}$ phase which couples with the fluctuation associated with the smectic-$A$–smectic-$C_{\alpha }^{*}$ phase transition.

We introduce a rigorous method to microscopically compute the observables which characterize the thermodynamics and kinetics of rare macromolecular transitions for which it is possible to identify a priori a slow reaction coordinate. In order to sample the ensemble of statistically significant reaction pathways, we define a biased molecular dynamics (MD) in which barrier-crossing transitions are accelerated without introducing any unphysical external force. In contrast to other biased MD methods, in the present approach the systematic errors which are generated in order to accelerate the transition can be analytically calculated and therefore can be corrected for. This allows for a computationally efficient reconstruction of the free-energy profile as a function of the reaction coordinate and for the calculation of the corresponding diffusion coefficient. The transition path time can then be readily evaluated within the dominant reaction pathways approach. We illustrate and test this method by characterizing a thermally activated transition on a two-dimensional energy surface and the folding of a small protein fragment within a coarse-grained model.

The quantum network model with real variables is usually used to describe the excitation energy transfer (EET) in the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complexes. In this paper we add the quantum phase factors to the hopping terms and find that the quantum phase factors play an important role in the EET. The quantum phase factors allow us to consider the space structure of the pigments. It is found that phase coherence within the complexes would allow quantum interference to affect the dynamics of the EET. There exist some optimal phase regions where the transfer efficiency takes its maxima, which indicates that when the pigments are optimally spaced, the exciton can pass through the FMO with perfect efficiency. Moreover, the optimal phase regions almost do not change with the environments. In addition, we find that the phase factors are useful in the EET just in the case of multiple pathways. Therefore, we demonstrate that the quantum phases may bring the other two factors, the optimal space of the pigments and multiple pathways, together to contribute the EET in photosynthetic complexes with perfect efficiency.

Cu wires attached to Al cones are used to investigate the energy coupling efficiency of laser light to fast electrons through a cone into a dense plasma. We present experimental and simulation results demonstrating the effect on the energy coupling of effectively placing the cone in a surrounding high density plasma as well as the effect of a large preformed plasma inside the cone. Thick cone walls, simulating plasma surrounding the cone in fast ignition, reduce the energy coupling by a factor of up to 4. An increase in prepulse inside the cone by a factor of 50 further reduces coupling by a factor of 3. Simulations with the pic code lsp that include the laser plasma interaction and the preformed plasma from the flash code show that electron refluxing in thin cone-wall targets enhances coupling to the wire. The implications for full-scale cone-guided fast ignition are discussed.

We present a study of the earthquake intertime distribution $D\left(\Delta t\right)$ for a California catalog in temporal periods of short duration $T$. We compare experimental results with theoretical predictions and analytical approximate solutions. For the majority of intervals, rescaling intertimes by the average rate leads to collapse of the distributions $D\left(\Delta t\right)$ on a universal curve, whose functional form is well fitted by a Gamma distribution. The remaining intervals, exhibiting a more complex $D\left(\Delta t\right)$, are all characterized by the presence of large shocks. These results can be understood in terms of the relevance of the ratio between the characteristic time $c$ in the Omori law and $T$: Intervals with Gamma-like behavior are indeed characterized by a vanishing $c/T$. The above features are also investigated by means of numerical simulations of the Epidemic Type Aftershock Sequence (ETAS) model. This study shows that collapse of $D\left(\Delta t\right)$ is also observed in numerical catalogs; however, the fit with a Gamma distribution is possible only assuming that $c$ depends on the main-shock magnitude $m$. This result confirms that the dependence of $c$ on $m$, previously observed for $m>6$ main shocks, extends also to small $m>2$.

Most real-world networks do not live in isolation but are often coupled together within a larger system. Recent studies have shown that intersimilarity between coupled networks increases the connectivity of the overall system. However, unlike connected nodes in a single network, coupled nodes often share resources, like time, energy, and memory, which can impede flow processes through contention when intersimilarly coupled. We study a model of a constrained susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) process on a system consisting of two random networks sharing the same set of nodes, where nodes are limited to interact with (and therefore infect) a maximum number of neighbors at each epidemic time step. We obtain that, in agreement with previous studies, when no limit exists (regular SIR model), positively correlated (intersimilar) coupling results in a lower epidemic threshold than negatively correlated (interdissimilar) coupling. However, in the case of the constrained SIR model, the obtained epidemic threshold is lower with negatively correlated coupling. The latter finding differentiates our work from previous studies and provides another step towards revealing the qualitative differences between single and coupled networks.