Spontaneous Formation of Stable Capillary Bridges for Firming Compact Colloidal Microstructures in Phase Separating Liquids: A Computational Study

Computer modeling and simulations are performed to investigate capillary bridges spontaneously formed between closely packed colloidal particles in phase separating liquids. The simulations reveal a self-stabilization mechanism that operates through diffusive equilibrium of two-phase liquid morphologies. Such mechanism renders desired microstructural stability and uniformity to the capillary bridges that are spontaneously formed during liquid solution phase separation. This self-stabilization behavior is in contrast to conventional coarsening processes during phase separation. The volume fraction limit of the separated liquid phases as well as the adhesion strength and thermodynamic stability of the capillary bridges are discussed. Capillary bridge formations in various compact colloid assemblies are considered. The study sheds light on a promising route to in-situ (in-liquid) firming of fragile colloidal crystals and other compact colloidal microstructures via capillary bridges

Automated Lemma Synthesis in Symbolic-Heap Separation Logic

The symbolic-heap fragment of separation logic has been actively developed and advocated for verifying the memory-safety property of computer programs. At present, one of its biggest challenges is to effectively prove entailments containing inductive heap predicates. These entailments are usually proof obligations generated when verifying programs that manipulate complex data structures like linked lists, trees, or graphs. To assist in proving such entailments, this paper introduces a lemma synthesis framework, which automatically discovers lemmas to serve as eureka steps in the proofs. Mathematical induction and template-based constraint solving are two pillars of our framework. To derive the supporting lemmas for a given entailment, the framework firstly identifies possible lemma templates from the entailment's heap structure. It then sets up unknown relations among each template's variables and conducts structural induction proof to generate constraints about these relations. Finally, it solves the constraints to find out actual definitions of the unknown relations, thus discovers the lemmas. We have integrated this framework into a prototype prover and have experimented it on various entailment benchmarks. The experimental results show that our lemma-synthesis-assisted prover can prove many entailments that could not be handled by existing techniques. This new proposal opens up more opportunities to automatically reason with complex inductive heap predicates

Generation of isolated attosecond pulses in the far field by spatial filtering with an intense few-cycle mid-infrared laser

We report theoretical calculations of high-order harmonic generation (HHG) of Xe with the inclusion of multi-electron effects and macroscopic propagation of the fundamental and harmonic fields in an ionizing medium. By using the time-frequency analysis we show that the reshaping of the fundamental laser field is responsible for the continuum structure in the HHG spectra. We further suggest a method for obtaining an isolated attosecond pulse (IAP) by using a filter centered on axis to select the harmonics in the far field with different divergence. We also discuss the carrier-envelope-phase dependence of an IAP and the possibility to optimize the yield of the IAP. With the intense few-cycle mid-infrared lasers, this offers a possible method for generating isolated attosecond pulses.Comment: 8 figure

Penguin-Induced Radiative Baryonic B Decays

Weak radiative baryonic B decays B\to\B_1\ov \B_2\gamma mediated by the electromagnetic penguin process $b\to s\gamma$ have appreciable rates larger than their two-body counterparts B\to\B_1\ov \B_2. The branching ratios for $B^-\to\Lambda\bar p\gamma$ and $B^-\to\Xi^0\bar\Sigma^-\gamma$ are sizable, falling into the range of $(1\sim 6)\times 10^{-6}$ with the value preferred to be on the large side, and not far from the bottom baryon radiative decays $\Lambda_b\to\Lambda\gamma$ and $\Xi_b\to\Xi\gamma$ due to the large short-distance enhancement for $b\to s\gamma$ penguin transition and the large strong coupling of the anti-triplet bottom baryons with the B meson and the light baryon. These penguin-induced radiative baryonic B decay modes should be accessible by B factories.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure. Branching ratios are corrected as previous values are too large by a factor of 2 and a new reference is adde