Volume 12, Issue 1

A reinvention of the classical Maxwel demon was proposed by Szilard around the time quantum mechanics was developed. His model continues to attract great interest, especially quantum versions of it. A quantum formulation of the Szilard engine is introduced and investigated here. It is made to operate through specified cycles in such a way that all thermodynamic quantities which pertain to the system can be evaluated exactly in closed form along each sequence of steps through a cycle. It is shown that as a result of the structure of the model, it is possible to calculate and compare various thermodynamic quantities as the engine proceeds around a well defined specific cycle.

We investigate the entanglement between two atoms in an overdamped cavity injected with squeezed vacuum when these two atoms are initially prepared in coherent states. It is shown that the stationary entanglement exhibits a strong dependence on the initial state of the two atoms when the spontaneous emission rate of each atom is equal to the collective spontaneous emission rate, corresponding to the case where the two atoms are close together. It is found that the stationary entanglement of two atoms increases with decreasing effective atomic cooperativity parameter. The squeezed vacuum can enhance the entanglement of two atoms when the atoms are initially in coherent states. Valuably, this provides us with a feasible way to manipulate and control the entanglement, by changing the relative phases and the amplitudes of the polarized atoms and by varying the effective atomic cooperativity parameter of the system, even though the cavity is a bad one. When the spontaneous emission rate of each atom is not equal to the collective spontaneous emission rate, the steady-state entanglement of two atoms always maintains the same value, as the amplitudes of the polarized atoms varies. Moreover, the larger the degree of two-photon correlation, the stronger the steady-state entanglement between the atoms.

To investigate the stability characteristic of hypersonic flow under the action of a freestream pulse wave, a high-order finite difference method was employed to do direction numerical simulation (DNS) of hypersonic unsteady flow over an 8° half-wedge-angle blunt wedge with freestream slow acoustic wave. The evolution of disturbance wave modes in the boundary layer under a pulse wave and a continuous wave are compared, and the wall temperature effect on the hypersonic boundary layer stability for a pulse wave disturbance is discussed. Results show that, both for a pulse wave and a continuous wave in freestream, the disturbance waves inside the nose boundary layer are mainly a fundamental mode; the Fourier amplitude of pressure disturbance mode in the boundary layer for a pulse wave is far less than that for a continuous wave, and the band frequency of the former is wider than that of the latter. All disturbance modes decay rapidly along the streamwise in the nose boundary layer. In the non-nose boundary layer, the dominant mode is transferred from fundamental mode into second harmonic. The transformation of dominant mode for a pulse wave appears much earlier than that for a continuous wave. Different frequency disturbance modes present different changes along streamline in the boundary layer, and the frequency band narrows around the second harmonic mode along the streamwise. Keen competition and the transformation of energy exist among different modes in the boundary layer. Wall temperature modifies the stability characteristic of the hypersonic boundary layer, which presents little effect on the development of fundamental modes and cooling wall could accelerates the growth of the high frequency mode as well as the dominant mode transformation.

A homogeneous and isotropic Universe in the framework of a nonlinear sigma model with non-minimal coupling to the target space is considered. Preliminary investigation of a two-component model of this sort is conducted. Some solutions for this model are given. Perspectives and directions of development of such a sort of models are discussed.

The structures of Ne, Na, Mg, Al, Si, P and S nuclei near the neutron drip-line region are investigated in the frame-work of relativistic mean field theory and non-relativistic Skyrme Hartree-Fock formalism. The recently discovered nuclei 40Mg and 42Al, which are beyond the drip-line predicted by various mass formulae are located within these models. We find many largely deformed neutron-rich nuclei, whose structures are analyzed. From the structure anatomy, we find that at large deformation low orbits of opposite parities (e.g. $$\frac{1} {2}^ +$$ and $$\frac{1} {2}^ -$$) occur close to each other in energy.

The goal of this work was to investigate the spectroscopic properties of Pr3+ ions, embedded in two different tellurite glass matrices, TeO2-WO3-PbO-La2O3 and TeO2-WO3-PbO-Lu2O3. The absorption and fluorescence spectra have been recorded and analyzed in terms of the Judd-Ofelt theory along with the luminescence decay of the 3P0 and 1D2 levels of the Pr3+ ion. The spectroscopic studies were completed with ellipsometric measurements providing the dispersion relation of the refractive index of the investigated glasses.

Much progress has been made in the research of synchronization for chaotic real or complex nonlinear systems. In this paper we introduce a new type of synchronization which can be studied only for chaotic complex nonlinear systems. This type of synchronization may be called complex lag synchronization (CLS). A definition of CLS is introduced and investigated for two identical chaotic complex nonlinear systems. Based on Lyapunov function a scheme is designed to achieve CLS of chaotic attractors of these systems. The effectiveness of the obtained results is illustrated by a simulation example. Numerical results are plotted to show state variables, modulus errors and phase errors of these chaotic attractors after synchronization to prove that CLS is achieved.

Structural, electronic and thermal properties of Zn1−x MgxS ternary alloys are studied by using the full potential-linearized augmented plane wave method (FP-LAPW) within the density functional theory (DFT). The Wu-Cohen generalized gradient approximation (WC-GGA) is used in this approach for the exchangecorrelation potential. Moreover, the modified Becke-Johnson approximation (mBJ) is adopted for band structure calculations. The dependence of the lattice constant, bulk modulus and band gap on the composition x showed that the first exhibits a small deviation from the Vegard’s law, whereas, a marginal deviation of the second from linear concentration dependence (LCD). The bowing of the fundamental gap versus composition predicted by our calculations agrees well with the available theoretical data. The microscopic origins of the gap bowing are explained by using the approach of Zunger and co-workers. Thermal effects on some macroscopic properties of Zn1−x MgxS alloys are also investigated using the quasi-harmonic Debye model, in which the phononic effects are considered. As, this is the first quantitative theoretical prediction of the thermal properties of Zn1−x MgxS alloys, no other calculated results and furthermore no experimental studies are available for comparison.