1,721,314 research outputs found
Solvent-mediated forces in critical fluids
The effective interaction between two planar walls immersed in a fluid is investigated by use of density functional theory in the supercritical region of the phase diagram. A hard core Yukawa model of fluid is studied with special attention to the critical region. To achieve this goal a formulation of the weighted density approximation coupled with the hierarchical reference theory, able to deal with critical long wavelength fluctuations, is put forward and compared with other approaches. The effective interaction between the walls is seen to change character on lowering the temperature: The strong oscillations induced by layering of the molecules, typical of the depletion mechanism in hard core systems, are gradually smoothed and, close to the critical point, a long range attractive tail emerges leading to a scaling form which agrees with the expectations based on the critical Casimir effect. Strong corrections to scaling are seen to affect the results up to very small reduced temperatures. By use of the Derjaguin approximation, this investigation has natural implications for the aggregation of colloidal particles in critical solvents
Magnetoelastic instability in molecular antiferromagnetic rings
Lattice stability in a model of an antiferromagnetic ring coupled to adiabatic phonons is investigated for different values of the spin and numbers of magnetic sites. The magnetoelastic transition is shown to be heavily affected by the spin value, displaying a qualitative difference in the nature of the instability for spin one-half. Among the different synthesized materials, Cu8 seems to be the best candidate to observe lattice dimerization in these systems. Our analysis excludes stable lattice distortions in higher spin rings. The effects of thermal fluctuations are studied in the Cu8 model, where a characteristic crossover temperature is estimated
Spin-charge decoupling and the photoemission line-shape in one dimensional insulators
The recent advances in angle-resolved photoemission techniques allowed the unambiguous experimental confirmation of spin-charge decoupling in quasi-one-dimensional (1D) Mott insulators. This opportunity stimulates a quantitative analysis of the spectral function A(k,ω) of prototypical one-dimensional correlated models. Here we combine Bethe Ansatz results, Lanczos diagonalizations, and field theoretical approaches to obtain A(k,ω) for the 1D Hubbard model as a function of the interaction strength. By introducing a single spinon approximation, an analytic expression is obtained, which shows the location of the singularities and allows, when supplemented by numerical calculations, to obtain an accurate estimate of the spectral weight distribution in the (k,ω) plane. Several experimental puzzles on the observed intensities and line-shapes in quasi-1D compounds such as SrCuO2, find a natural explanation in this theoretical framework
- …
