Effect of Pore Geometry on the Compressibility of a Confined Simple Fluid

Fluids confined in nanopores exhibit properties different from the properties of the same fluids in bulk, among these properties are the isothermal compressibility or elastic modulus. The modulus of a fluid in nanopores can be extracted from ultrasonic experiments or calculated from molecular simulations. Using Monte Carlo simulations in the grand canonical ensemble, we calculated the modulus for liquid argon at its normal boiling point (87.3~K) adsorbed in model silica pores of two different morphologies and various sizes. For spherical pores, for all the pore sizes (diameters) exceeding 2~nm, we obtained a logarithmic dependence of fluid modulus on the vapor pressure. Calculation of the modulus at saturation showed that the modulus of the fluid in spherical pores is a linear function of the reciprocal pore size. The calculation of the modulus of the fluid in cylindrical pores appeared too scattered to make quantitative conclusions. We performed additional simulations at higher temperature (119.6~K), at which Monte Carlo insertions and removals become more efficient. The results of the simulations at higher temperature confirmed both regularities for cylindrical pores and showed quantitative difference between the fluid moduli in pores of different geometries. Both of the observed regularities for the modulus stem from the Tait-Murnaghan equation applied to the confined fluid. Our results, along with the development of the effective medium theories for nanoporous media, set the groundwork for analysis of the experimentally-measured elastic properties of fluid-saturated nanoporous materials

Multilevel Analysis of Oscillation Motions in Active Regions of the Sun

We present a new method that combines the results of an oscillation study made in optical and radio observations. The optical spectral measurements in photospheric and chromospheric lines of the line-of-sight velocity were carried out at the Sayan Solar Observatory. The radio maps of the Sun were obtained with the Nobeyama Radioheliograph at 1.76 cm. Radio sources associated with the sunspots were analyzed to study the oscillation processes in the chromosphere-corona transition region in the layer with magnetic field B=2000 G. A high level of instability of the oscillations in the optical and radio data was found. We used a wavelet analysis for the spectra. The best similarities of the spectra of oscillations obtained by the two methods were detected in the three-minute oscillations inside the sunspot umbra for the dates when the active regions were situated near the center of the solar disk. A comparison of the wavelet spectra for optical and radio observations showed a time delay of about 50 seconds of the radio results with respect to optical ones. This implies a MHD wave traveling upward inside the umbral magnetic tube of the sunspot. Besides three-minute and five-minute ones, oscillations with longer periods (8 and 15 minutes) were detected in optical and radio records.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, accepted to Solar Physics (18 Jan 2011). The final publication is available at http://www.springerlink.co

How much laser power can propagate through fusion plasma?

Propagation of intense laser beams is crucial for inertial confinement fusion, which requires precise beam control to achieve the compression and heating necessary to ignite the fusion reaction. The National Ignition Facility (NIF), where fusion will be attempted, is now under construction. Control of intense beam propagation may be ruined by laser beam self-focusing. We have identified the maximum laser beam power that can propagate through fusion plasma without significant self-focusing and have found excellent agreement with recent experimental data, and suggest a way to increase that maximum by appropriate choice of plasma composition with implication for NIF designs. Our theory also leads to the prediction of anti-correlation between beam spray and backscatter and suggests the indirect control of backscatter through manipulation of plasma ionization state or acoustic damping.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusio

Gluon Field Strength Correlation Functions within a Constrained Instanton Model

We suggest a constrained instanton (CI) solution in the physical QCD vacuum which is described by large-scale vacuum field fluctuations. This solution decays exponentially at large distances. It is stable only if the interaction of the instanton with the background vacuum field is small and additional constraints are introduced. The CI solution is explicitly constructed in the ansatz form, and the two-point vacuum correlator of gluon field strengths is calculated in the framework of the effective instanton vacuum model. At small distances the results are qualitatively similar to the single instanton (SI) case, in particular, the form factor $D_{1}$ is small, which is in agreement with the lattice calculations.Comment: 25 pages (RevTex), 7 ps figures; some references added, one figure replace