No Arabic abstract
We study the interaction energy between two surfaces, one of them flat, the other describable as the composition of a small-amplitude corrugation and a slightly curved, smooth surface. The corrugation, represented by a spatially random variable, involves Fourier wavelengths shorter than the (local) curvature radii of the smooth component of the surface. After averaging the interaction energy over the corrugation distribution, we obtain an expression which only depends on the smooth component. We then approximate that functional by means of a derivative expansion, calculating explicitly the leading and next-to-leading order terms in that approximation scheme. We analyze the resulting interplay between shape and roughness corrections for some specific corrugation models in the cases of electrostatic and Casimir interactions.
We consider circuit complexity in certain interacting scalar quantum field theories, mainly focusing on the $phi^4$ theory. We work out the circuit complexity for evolving from a nearly Gaussian unentangled reference state to the entangled ground state of the theory. Our approach uses Nielsens geometric method, which translates into working out the geodesic equation arising from a certain cost functional. We present a general method, making use of integral transforms, to do the required lattice sums analytically and give explicit expressions for the $d=2,3$ cases. Our method enables a study of circuit complexity in the epsilon expansion for the Wilson-Fisher fixed point. We find that with increasing dimensionality the circuit depth increases in the presence of the $phi^4$ interaction eventually causing the perturbative calculation to breakdown. We discuss how circuit complexity relates with the renormalization group.
We study the fracture surface of three dimensional samples through a model for quasi-static fractures known as Born Model. We find for the roughness exponent a value of 0.5 expected for ``small length scales in microfracturing experiments. Our simulations confirm that at small length scales the fracture can be considered as quasi-static. The isotropy of the roughness exponent on the crack surface is also shown. Finally, considering the crack front, we compute the roughness exponents for longitudinal and transverse fluctuations of the crack line (both 0.5). They result in agreement with experimental data, and supports the possible application of the model of line depinning in the case of long-range interactions.
Computational complexity is a new quantum information concept that may play an important role in holography and in understanding the physics of the black hole interior. We consider quantum computational complexity for $n$ qubits using Nielsens geometrical approach. We investigate a choice of penalties which, compared to previous definitions, increases in a more progressive way with the number of qubits simultaneously entangled by a given operation. This choice turns out to be free from singularities. We also analyze the relation between operator and state complexities, framing the discussion with the language of Riemannian submersions. This provides a direct relation between geodesics and curvatures in the unitaries and the states spaces, which we also exploit to give a closed-form expression for the metric on the states in terms of the one for the operators. Finally, we study conjugate points for a large number of qubits in the unitary space and we provide a strong indication that maximal complexity scales exponentially with the number of qubits in a certain regime of the penalties space.
The thermodynamic geometry formalism is applied to strongly interacting matter to estimate the deconfinement temperature. The curved thermodynamic metric for Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is evaluated on the basis of lattice data, whereas the hadron resonance gas model is used for the hadronic sector. Since the deconfinement transition is a crossover, the geometric criterion used to define the mbox{(pseudo-)critical} temperature, as a function of the baryonchemical potential $mu_B$, is $R(T,mu_B)=0$, where $R$ is the scalar curvature. The (pseudo-)critical temperature, $T_c$, resulting from QCD thermodynamic geometry is in good agreement with lattice and phenomenological freeze-out temperature estimates. The crossing temperature, $T_h$, evaluated by the hadron resonance gas, which suffers of some model dependence, is larger than $T_c$ (about $20%$) signaling remnants of confinement above the transition.
We report on the systematic investigation of the role of surface nanoscale roughness and morphology on the charging behaviour of nanostructured titania (TiO2) surfaces in aqueous solutions. IsoElectric Points (IEPs) of surfaces have been characterized by direct measurement of the electrostatic double layer interactions between titania surfaces and the micrometer-sized spherical silica probe of an atomic force microscope in NaCl aqueous electrolyte. The use of a colloidal probe provides well-defined interaction geometry and allows effectively probing the overall effect of nanoscale morphology. By using supersonic cluster beam deposition to fabricate nanostructured titania films, we achieved a quantitative control over the surface morphological parameters. We performed a systematical exploration of the electrical double layer properties in different interaction regimes characterized by different ratios of characteristic nanometric lengths of the system: the surface rms roughness Rq, the correlation length {xi} and the Debye length {lambda}D. We observed a remarkable reduction by several pH units of IEP on rough nanostructured surfaces, with respect to flat crystalline rutile TiO2. In order to explain the observed behavior of IEP, we consider the roughness-induced self-overlap of the electrical double layers as a potential source of deviation from the trend expected for flat surfaces.