Physics

Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry is a powerful analytical technique. Because of its sensitivity, accuracy, multielement capability, high throughput, rapid analysis times and low detection limits, it is able to determine simultaneously long-lived radionuclides at trace and ultra-trace levels as well as isotope ratios. It has been increasingly applied in the framework of rare events experiments like those investigating the nature of dark matter and neutrinos, where the screening and selection of extremely radiopure materials for the experimental apparatus is crucial. Here, the inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) measurements of the chemical purity of a Cs₂HfCl₆ crystal scintillator used to study α decay of naturally occurring Hf isotopes and its own raw materials are reported. Moreover, in the framework of the GERDA/LEGEND experiment, an overview of the ICP-MS results to monitor the recycling process of enriched germanium scraps is shown. Significant outcomes, such as low detection limits despite the small amount of sample to analyze and fast ICP-MS results, have been achieved in response to the challenges required by modern low background experiments. Full article

The Ermakov–Milne–Pinney equation is ubiquitous in many areas of physics that have an explicit time-dependence, including quantum systems with time-dependent Hamiltonian, cosmology, time-dependent harmonic oscillators, accelerator dynamics, etc. The Eliezer and Gray physical interpretation of the Ermakov–Lewis invariant is applied as a guiding principle for the derivation of the special relativistic analog of the Ermakov–Milne–Pinney equation and associated first integral. The special relativistic extension of the Ray–Reid system and invariant is obtained. General properties of the relativistic Ermakov–Milne–Pinney are analyzed. The conservative case of the relativistic Ermakov–Milne–Pinney equation is described in terms of a pseudo-potential, reducing the problem to an effective Newtonian form. The non-relativistic limit is considered to be well. A relativistic nonlinear superposition law for relativistic Ermakov systems is identified. The generalized Ermakov–Milne–Pinney equation has additional nonlinearities, due to the relativistic effects. Full article

Brain dynamics show a rich spatiotemporal behavior whose stability is neither ordered nor chaotic, indicating that neural networks operate at intermediate stability regimes including critical dynamics represented by a negative power-law distribution of avalanche sizes with exponent $\alpha =-1.5$. However, it is unknown which stability regimen allows global and local information transmission with reduced metabolic costs, which are measured in terms of synaptic potentials and action potentials. In this work, using a hierarchical neuron model with rich-club organization, we measure the average number of action potentials required to activate n different neurons (avalanche size). Besides, we develop a mathematical formula to represent the metabolic synaptic potential cost. We develop simulations variating the synaptic amplitude, synaptic time course (ms), and hub excitatory/inhibitory ratio. We compare different dynamic regimes in terms of avalanche sizes vs. metabolic cost. We also implement the dynamic model in a Drosophila and Erdos–Renyi networks to computer dynamics and metabolic costs. The results show that the synaptic amplitude and time course play a key role in information propagation. They can drive the system from subcritical to supercritical regimes. The later result promotes the coexistence of critical regimes with a wide range of excitation/inhibition hub ratios. Moreover, subcritical or silent regimes minimize metabolic cost for local avalanche sizes, whereas critical and intermediate stability regimes show the best compromise between information propagation and reduced metabolic consumption, also minimizing metabolic cost for a wide range of avalanche sizes. Full article

Recent developments in the gravitational waves interferometry require more pertinent theoretical models of gravitational waves generation and propagation. Untouched possible mechanisms of spin-2 spacetime perturbations production, we will consider their subsequent scattering on other black holes (BHs). Specifically, we consider a generalization of the Regge-Wheeler-Zerilli equations for the case of distorted BHs (BHs surrounded with matter) in Minkowski and Anti-de Sitter spacetimes, the metric potential of which obeys the Liouville equation. We establish significant differences in scattering characteristics of waves of different spins and angular momenta, including the gravitational waves, caused by losing the spherical symmetry of their propagation background. In particular, we demonstrate the strong impact of the background geometry deformation on the grey-body factors, hence on the absorption cross-sections of scattering waves, and explore the issue of stability of the background geometry upon changing the deformation degree parameters. Full article

Drying of an aqueous suspension containing fine granules leads to the formation of a circular pattern, i.e., the coffee-ring effect. Here, we report the effect of mechanical rotation with drying of an aqueous suspension containing a large amount of granular particles as in the Turkish coffee. It was found that wavy fragmented stripes, or a “waggly pattern”, appear in the early stage of the drying process and a “polka-dot pattern” with many small circles is generated in the late stage. We discuss the mechanism of these patterns in terms of the kinetic effect on micro phase-segregation. We suggest that the waggly pattern is induced through a mechanism similar to spinodal decomposition, whereas polka-dot formation is accompanied by the enhanced segregation of a water-rich phase under mechanical rotation. Full article

The event-shape and multiplicity dependence of the chemical freeze-out temperature ($T_{\mathrm{ch}}$), freeze-out radius (R), and strangeness saturation factor (${\gamma }_s$) are obtained by studying the particle yields from the PYTHIA8 Monte Carlo event generator in proton-proton (pp) collisions at the centre-of-mass $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV. Spherocity is one of the transverse event-shape techniques to distinguish jetty and isotropic events in high-energy collisions and helps in looking into various observables in a more differential manner. In this study, spherocity classes are divided into three categories, namely (i) spherocity integrated, (ii) isotropic, and (iii) jetty. The chemical freeze-out parameters are extracted using a statistical thermal model as a function of the spherocity class and charged particle multiplicity in the canonical, strangeness canonical, and grand canonical ensembles. A clear observation of the multiplicity and spherocity class dependence of $T_{\mathrm{ch}}$, R, and ${\gamma }_s$ is observed. A final state multiplicity, $N_{\mathrm{ch}}\ge$ 30 in the forward multiplicity acceptance of the ALICE detector appears to be a thermodynamic limit, where the freeze-out parameters become almost independent of the ensembles. This study plays an important role in understanding the particle production mechanism in high-multiplicity pp collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) energies in view of a finite hadronic phase lifetime in small systems. Full article

A technique devised some years ago permits us to develop a theory regarding a regime of strong perturbations. This translates into a gradient expansion that, at the leading order, can recover the Belinsky-Kalathnikov-Lifshitz solution for general relativity. We solve exactly the leading order Einstein equations in a spherical symmetric case, assuming a Schwarzschild metric under the effect of a time-dependent perturbation, and we show that the 4-velocity in such a case is multiplied by an exponential warp factor when the perturbation is properly applied. This factor is always greater than one. We will give a closed form solution of this factor for a simple case. Some numerical examples are also given. Full article

We present an overview of a proposal in relativistic proton-proton ($pp$) collisions emphasizing the thermal or kinetic freeze-out stage in the framework of the Tsallis distribution. In this paper we take into account the chemical potential present in the Tsallis distribution by following a two step procedure. In the first step we used the redudancy present in the variables such as the system temperature, T, volume, V, Tsallis exponent, q, chemical potential, $\mu$, and performed all fits by effectively setting to zero the chemical potential. In the second step the value q is kept fixed at the value determined in the first step. This way the complete set of variables $T,q,V$ and $\mu$ can be determined. The final results show a weak energy dependence in $pp$ collisions at the centre-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}=20$ TeV to 13 TeV. The chemical potential $\mu$ at kinetic freeze-out shows an increase with beam energy. This simplifies the description of the thermal freeze-out stage in $pp$ collisions as the values of T and of the freeze-out radius R remain constant to a good approximation over a wide range of beam energies. Full article

In this paper, the Maxwell equations for the electric field in a cold magnetized plasma in the half-space of $x\ge 0$ cm are solved. The boundary conditions for the electric field include a pointwise source at the plane $x=0$ cm, the derivatives of the electric field that are zero statV/cm${}^2$ at $x=0$ cm, and the field with all its derivatives that are zero at infinity. The solution is explored in terms of the Laplace transform in x and the Fourier transform in y-z directions. The expressions of the field components are obtained by the inverse Laplace transform and the inverse Fourier transform. The saddle-point technique and power expansion have been used for evaluating the inverse Fourier transform. The model represents the propagation of a lower hybrid wave generated by a pointwise antenna located at the boundary of the plasma. Here, the antenna is the boundary condition. The validation of the model is performed assuming that the electric field component $E_y=0$ statV/cm and by comparing it with the model of electromagnetic waves generated by a local small antenna located near the boundary of a tokamak, and an experiment is suggested. Full article

This paper proposes a method for examining chaotic structures in semiconductor or alloy voltage oscillation time-series, and focuses on the case of the TlInTe₂ semiconductor. The available voltage time-series are characterized by instabilities in negative differential resistance in the current–voltage characteristic region, and are primarily chaotic in nature. The analysis uses a complex network analysis of the time-series and applies the visibility graph algorithm to transform the available time-series into a graph so that the topological properties of the graph can be studied instead of the source time-series. The results reveal a hybrid lattice-like configuration and a major hierarchical structure corresponding to scale-free characteristics in the topology of the visibility graph, which is in accordance with the default hybrid chaotic and semi-periodic structure of the time-series. A novel conceptualization of community detection based on modularity optimization is applied to the available time-series and reveals two major communities that are able to be related to the pair-wise attractor of the voltage oscillations’ phase portrait of the TlInTe₂ time-series. Additionally, the network analysis reveals which network measures are more able to preserve the chaotic properties of the source time-series. This analysis reveals metric information that is able to supplement the qualitative phase-space information. Overall, this paper proposes a complex network analysis of the time-series as a method for dealing with the complexity of semiconductor and alloy physics. Full article

A standard criterium in statistics is to define an optimal estimator as the one with the minimum variance. Thus, the optimality is proved with inequality among variances of competing estimators. The demonstrations of inequalities among estimators are essentially based on the Cramer, Rao and Frechet methods. They require special analytical properties of the probability functions, globally indicated as regular models. With an extension of the Cramer–Rao–Frechet inequalities and Gaussian distributions, it was proved the optimality (efficiency) of the heteroscedastic estimators compared to any other linear estimator. However, the Gaussian distributions are a too restrictive selection to cover all the realistic properties of track fitting. Therefore, a well-grounded set of inequalities must overtake the limitations to regular models. Hence, the inequalities for least-squares estimators are generalized to any model of probabilities. The new inequalities confirm the results obtained for the Gaussian distributions and generalize them to any irregular or regular model. Estimators for straight and curved tracks are considered. The second part deals with the shapes of the distributions of simplified heteroscedastic track models, reconstructed with optimal estimators and the standard (non-optimal) estimators. A comparison among the distributions of these different estimators shows the large loss in resolution of the standard least-squares estimators. Full article

The paper presents experimental data and a model of an electromagnetic rail accelerator. The model includes an equivalent circuit, magnetic field in the system and movement of the projectile (that is solved separately) which is computed numerically. The main results are compared with our experimental data and friction force during acceleration is evaluated. Full article

Kaluza was the first to realize that the four-dimensional gravitational field of general relativity and the classical electromagnetic field behave as if they were components of a five-dimensional gravitational field. We present a novel experimental test of the macroscopic classical interpretation of the Kaluza fifth dimension. Our experiment design probes a key feature of Kaluza unification—that electric charge is identified with motion in the fifth dimension. Therefore, we tested for a time dilation effect on an electrically charged clock. This test can also be understood as a constraint on time dilation from a constant electric potential of any origin. This is only the second such test of time dilation under electric charge reported in the literature, and a null result was obtained here. We introduce the concept of a charged clock in the Kaluza context, and discuss some ambiguities in its interpretation. We conclude that a classical, macroscopic interpretation of the Kaluza fifth dimension may require a timelike signature in the five-dimensional metric, and the associated absence of a rest frame along the fifth coordinate. Full article

Superstatistical approaches have played a crucial role in the investigations of mixtures of Gaussian processes. Such approaches look to describe non-Gaussian diffusion emergence in single-particle tracking experiments realized in soft and biological matter. Currently, relevant progress in superstatistics of Gaussian diffusion processes has been investigated by applying ${\chi }^2$-gamma and ${\chi }^2$-gamma inverse superstatistics to systems of particles in a heterogeneous environment whose diffusivities are randomly distributed; such situations imply Brownian yet non-Gaussian diffusion. In this paper, we present how the log-normal superstatistics of diffusivities modify the density distribution function for two types of mixture of Brownian processes. Firstly, we investigate the time evolution of the ensemble of Brownian particles with random diffusivity through the analytical and simulated points of view. Furthermore, we analyzed approximations of the overall probability distribution for log-normal superstatistics of Brownian motion. Secondly, we propose two models for a mixture of scaled Brownian motion and to analyze the log-normal superstatistics associated with them, which admits an anomalous diffusion process. The results found in this work contribute to advances of non-Gaussian diffusion processes and superstatistical theory. Full article

The quantum harmonic oscillator is a fundamental piece of physics. In this paper, we present a self-contained full-fledged analytical solution to the quantum harmonic oscillator. To this end, we use an eight-step procedure that only uses standard mathematical tools available in natural science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines. This solution is accessible not only for physics students but also for undergraduate engineering and chemistry students. We provide interactive web-based graphs for the reader to observe the shape of the wave functions for an electron and a proton when both are subject to the same potential. Each of the eight steps in our solution procedure is treated as a separate problem in order to allow the reader to quickly consult any step without the need to review the entire article. Full article

Since the pioneering works of Newton (1643–1727), mechanics has been constantly reinventing itself: reformulated in particular by Lagrange (1736–1813) then Hamilton (1805–1865), it now offers powerful conceptual and mathematical tools for the exploration of dynamical systems, essentially via the action-angle variables formulation and more generally through the theory of canonical transformations. We propose to the (graduate) reader an overview of these different formulations through the well-known example of Foucault’s pendulum, a device created by Foucault (1819–1868) and first installed in the Panthéon (Paris, France) in 1851 to display the Earth’s rotation. The apparent simplicity of Foucault’s pendulum is indeed an open door to the most contemporary ramifications of classical mechanics. We stress that adopting the formalism of action-angle variables is not necessary to understand the dynamics of Foucault’s pendulum. The latter is simply taken as well-known and simple dynamical system used to exemplify and illustrate modern concepts that are crucial in order to understand more complicated dynamical systems. The Foucault’s pendulum first installed in 2005 in the collegiate church of Sainte-Waudru (Mons, Belgium) will allow us to numerically estimate the different quantities introduced. Full article

Laser- and beam-driven plasma accelerators promise electron beam brightness at the exit of plasma cells suitable for X-ray free-electron lasers. Beam transport from the accelerator to the undulator may include a multi-bend, energy-dispersive switchyard, in which energy collimators can be installed to protect the undulator or to serve multiple photon beamlines. Coherent synchrotron radiation and microbunching instability in the switchyard can seriously degrade the brightness of the accelerated beam, reducing the lasing efficiency. We present a semi-analytical analysis of those collective effects for beam parameters expected at the exit of state-of-the-art plasma accelerators. Prescriptions for the linear optics design used to minimize transverse and longitudinal beam instability are discussed. Full article