First-principles calculation of H vibrational excitations at a dislocation core of Pd

Palladium is an ideal system for understanding the behavior of hydrogen in metals. In Pd, H is located both in octahedral sites and in dislocation cores, which act as nanoscale H traps and form Cottrell atmospheres. Adjacent to a dislocation core, H experiences the largest possible distortion in alpha-Pd. Ab initio density-functional theory computes the potential energy for a hydrogen in an octahedral site in alpha-Pd and in a trap site at the core of a partial of an edge dislocation. The Pd partial dislocation core changes the environment for H, distorting the H-Pd bonding which changes the local potential, vibrational spectra, and inelastic form factor for an isolated H atom. The decrease in excitation energy is consistent with experiments, and the calculations predict distortions to the H wavefunction.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

Factors determining exchange rates : a simple model and empirical tests

An abstract for this article is not availableEquilibrium (Economics)

SLE-type growth processes and the Yang-Lee singularity

The recently introduced SLE growth processes are based on conformal maps from an open and simply-connected subset of the upper half-plane to the half-plane itself. We generalize this by considering a hierarchy of stochastic evolutions mapping open and simply-connected subsets of smaller and smaller fractions of the upper half-plane to these fractions themselves. The evolutions are all driven by one-dimensional Brownian motion. Ordinary SLE appears at grade one in the hierarchy. At grade two we find a direct correspondence to conformal field theory through the explicit construction of a level-four null vector in a highest-weight module of the Virasoro algebra. This conformal field theory has central charge c=-22/5 and is associated to the Yang-Lee singularity. Our construction may thus offer a novel description of this statistical model.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX, v2: thorough revision with corrections, v3: version to be publishe

Measurement of Holmium Rydberg series through MOT depletion spectroscopy

We report measurements of the absolute excitation frequencies of $^{165}$Ho $4f^{11}6sns$ and $4f^{11}6snd$ odd-parity Rydberg series. The states are detected through depletion of a magneto-optical trap via a two-photon excitation scheme. Measurements of 162 Rydberg levels in the range $n=40-101$ yield quantum defects well described by the Rydberg-Ritz formula. We observe a strong perturbation in the $ns$ series around $n=51$ due to an unidentified interloper at 48515.47(4) cm$^{-1}$. From the series convergence, we determine the first ionization potential $E_\mathrm{IP}=48565.939(4)$ cm$^{-1}$, which is three orders of magnitude more accurate than previous work. This work represents the first time such spectroscopy has been done in Holmium and is an important step towards using Ho atoms for collective encoding of a quantum register.Comment: 6 figure

Stationarity of SLE

A new method to study a stopped hull of SLE(kappa,rho) is presented. In this approach, the law of the conformal map associated to the hull is invariant under a SLE induced flow. The full trace of a chordal SLE(kappa) can be studied using this approach. Some example calculations are presented.Comment: 14 pages with 1 figur