No Arabic abstract
We develop a microscopic approach to the consistent construction of the kinetic theory of dilute weakly ionized gases of hydrogen-like atoms. The approach is based on the framework of the second quantization method in the presence of bound states of particles and the method of reduced description of relaxation processes. Within the approach we developed the first-order perturbation theory over the weak interaction for a system of kinetic equations for the Wigner distribution functions of free fermions of both kinds and their bound states, the hydrogen-like atoms. It is shown that the conditions of low-temperature approximation, of the gas non-degeneracy and the approximation of weak interaction are realistic and can be met in a wide range of temperatures and the densities of the studied system. We obtain dispersion equations for determining the frequency and wave attenuation coefficients in dilute weakly ionized gas of hydrogen-like atoms near the described equilibrium state. In the two-level atom approximation it is shown that in the system there are longitudinal waves of matter polarization and transverse waves with the behavior characteristic of plasmon polaritons. The expressions for the dependence of the frequency and the Landau damping coefficients on the wave vector for all branches of the oscillations detected, are obtained. Quantitative estimations of the characteristics of the elementary perturbations in the system on an example of a weakly ionized dilute gas of Na-23 atoms are presented. The possibility of using the results of the theory developed to describe the properties of a Bose condensate of photons in dilute weakly ionized gas of hydrogen-like atoms is noted and the directions of its generalizations are discussed.
Statistical mechanics of 1D multivalent Coulomb gas may be mapped onto non-Hermitian quantum mechanics. We use this example to develop instanton calculus on Riemann surfaces. Borrowing from the formalism developed in the context of Seiberg-Witten duality, we treat momentum and coordinate as complex variables. Constant energy manifolds are given by Riemann surfaces of genus $ggeq 1$. The actions along principal cycles on these surfaces obey ODE in the moduli space of the Riemann surface known as Picard-Fuchs equation. We derive and solve Picard-Fuchs equations for Coulomb gases of various charge content. Analysis of monodromies of these solutions around their singular points yields semiclassical spectra as well as instanton effects such as Bloch bandwidth. Both are shown to be in perfect agreement with numerical simulations.
Mapping the Internet generally consists in sampling the network from a limited set of sources by using traceroute-like probes. This methodology, akin to the merging of different spanning trees to a set of destinations, has been argued to introduce uncontrolled sampling biases that might produce statistical properties of the sampled graph which sharply differ from the original ones. Here we explore these biases and provide a statistical analysis of their origin. We derive a mean-field analytical approximation for the probability of edge and vertex detection that exploits the role of the number of sources and targets and allows us to relate the global topological properties of the underlying network with the statistical accuracy of the sampled graph. In particular we find that the edge and vertex detection probability is depending on the betweenness centrality of each element. This allows us to show that shortest path routed sampling provides a better characterization of underlying graphs with scale-free topology. We complement the analytical discussion with a throughout numerical investigation of simulated mapping strategies in different network models. We show that sampled graphs provide a fair qualitative characterization of the statistical properties of the original networks in a fair range of different strategies and exploration parameters. The numerical study also allows the identification of intervals of the exploration parameters that optimize the fraction of nodes and edges discovered in the sampled graph. This finding might hint the steps toward more efficient mapping strategies.
We show that thermalization of the motion of atoms at negative temperature is possible in an optical lattice, for conditions that are feasible in current experiments. We present a method for reversibly inverting the temperature of a trapped gas. Moreover, a negative-temperature ensemble can be cooled, reducing abs(T), by evaporation of the lowest-energy particles. This enables the attainment of the Bose-Einstein condensation phase transition at negative temperature.
We present a general computational scheme based on molecular dynamics (m.d.) simulation for calculating the chemical potential of adsorbed molecules in thermal equilibrium on the surface of a material. The scheme is based on the calculation of the mean force in m.d. simulations in which the height of a chosen molecule above the surface is constrained, and subsequent integration of the mean force to obtain the potential of mean force and hence the chemical potential. The scheme is valid at any coverage and temperature, so that in principle it allows the calculation of the chemical potential as a function of coverage and temperature. It avoids all statistical mechanical approximations, except for the use of classical statistical mechanics for the nuclei, and assumes nothing in advance about the adsorption sites. From the chemical potential, the absolute desorption rate of the molecules can be computed, provided the equilibration rate on the surface is faster than the desorption rate. We apply the theory by {em ab initio} m.d. simulation to the case of H$_2$O on MgO (001) in the low-coverage limit, using the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE) form of exchange-correlation. The calculations yield an {em ab initio} value of the Polanyi-Wigner frequency prefactor, which is more than two orders of magnitude greater than the value of $10^{13}$ s$^{-1}$ often assumed in the past. Provisional comparison with experiment suggests that the PBE adsorption energy may be too low, but the extension of the calculations to higher coverages is needed before firm conclusions can be drawn. The possibility of including quantum nuclear effects by using path-integral simulations is noted.
We present a variational density matrix approach to the thermal properties of interacting fermions in the continuum. The variational density matrix is parametrized by a permutation equivariant many-body unitary transformation together with a discrete probabilistic model. The unitary transformation is implemented as a quantum counterpart of neural canonical transformation, which incorporates correlation effects via a flow of fermion coordinates. As the first application, we study electrons in a two-dimensional quantum dot with an interaction-induced crossover from Fermi liquid to Wigner molecule. The present approach provides accurate results in the low-temperature regime, where conventional quantum Monte Carlo methods face severe difficulties due to the fermion sign problem. The approach is general and flexible for further extensions, thus holds the promise to deliver new physical results on strongly correlated fermions in the context of ultracold quantum gases, condensed matter, and warm dense matter physics.