Repositório RCAAP

In this work we introduce a method to study stochastic growth equations, which follows a dynamics based on cellular automata modeling. The method defines an interface growth process that depends on height differences between neighbors. The growth rules assign a probability p i(t) for site i to receive a particle at time t, where p i(t) = rho exp[<FONT FACE=Symbol>kG</FONT>i(t)]. Here r and k are two parameters and gammai(t) is a kernel that depends on height h i(t) of site i and on heights of its neighbors, at time t. We specify the functional form of this kernel by the discretization of the deterministic part of the equation that describes some growth process. In particular, we study the Edwards-Wilkinson (EW) equation which describes growth processes where surface relaxation plays a major role. In this case we have a Laplacian term dominating in the growth equation and gammai(t) = h i+1(t)+h i-1(t)-2h i(t), which follows from the discretization of <FONT FACE=Symbol>Ñ</FONT>2h. By means of simulations and statistical analysis of the height distributions of the profiles, we obtain the roughening exponents, beta, alpha and z, whose values confirm that the processes defined by the method are indeed in the universality class of the original growth equation.

Sandpile models with conserved number of particles (also called fixed energy sandpiles) may undergo phase transitions between active and absorbing states. We generalize the Manna sandpile model with fixed number of particles, introducing a parameter -1 < lambda < 1 related to the toppling of particles from active sites to its first neighbors. In particular, we discuss a model with height restrictions, allowing for at most two particles on a site. Sites with double occupancy are active, and their particles may be transfered to first neighbor sites, if the height restriction do allow the change. For lambda = 0 each one of the two particles is independently assigned to one of the two first neighbors and the original stochastic sandpile model is recovered. For lambda = 1 exactly one particle will be placed on each first neighbor and thus a deterministic (BTW) sandpile model is obtained. When lambda = -1 two particles are moved to one of the first neighbors, and this implies that the density of active sites is conserved in the evolution of the system, and no phase transition is observed. Through simulations of the stationary state, we estimate the critical density of particles and the critical exponents as functions of lambda.

We use a set of evoked words to define the vertices of a network. The connections between vertices are established by individuals in a population that evoke these words. The resulting graph is called an Evoked Words Network, EWN. The data of evoked words comes from an epidemiological research in odontological public health. In this research we consider three concept themes or evocative words: mouth, disease, and health. We investigate these words in two populations: an upper middle class and a poor district of the city of Natal. We compare and analyze six EWNs. The distribution of connectivities of all of these EWNs indicates a scale-free structure, with the data fitting a power law. The analyzed quantities of the EWNs depend more on the concept theme than on the income of population. This conclusion is discussed in the context of language-based networks.

A kinetic formulation developed to analyze wave propagation in dusty plasmas, which takes into account the variation of the charge of the dust particles due to inelastic collisions with electrons and ions, is utilized to study the propagation and damping of electrostatic waves with wave number exactly parallel to the external magnetic field and Maxwellian distributions for the electrons and ions in the equilibrium. It is shown that, due to the presence of the dust, the damping of Langmuir waves in the region of large wavelengths is increased as compared to conventional Landau damping. Langmuir waves in the occurrence of collisional charging of dust particles also feature weak damping for small wavelengths, which vanishes if the effect of collisional charging of the dust particles is neglected in the dispersion relation. It is also shown that the damping of ion-acoustic waves is modified by the presence of the dust, and that some damping effect due to the dust particles remains even if the effect of collisional charging of dust particles is neglected in the dispersion relation.

Quartessence cosmological models with exponential and logarithmic equation of state are investigated using dynamical systems methods. We focus our analysis on the stability of these models.

We investigate the relativistic Brownian motion in the context of Fokker-Planck equation. Due to the multiplicative noise term of the corresponding relativistic Langevin equation many Fokker-Planck equations can be generated. Here, we only consider the Ito, Stratonovich and Hänggi-Klimontovich approaches. We analyze the behaviors of the second moment of momentum in terms of temperature. We show that the second moment increases with the temperature T for all three approaches. Also, we present differential equations for more complicated averages of the momentum. In a specific case, in the Ito approach, we can obtain an analytical solution of the temporal evolution of an average of the momentum. We present approximate solutions for the probability density for all three cases.

A new set of actively cooled toroidal double-ring graphite limiters have been developed on the HT-7 tokamk for long pulse operation. In this paper, a Multifaceted asymmetric radiation from the edge (MARFE) phenomena and improved particle confinement induced by a MARFE, characterized by Halpha line emissions drops and the line-averaged density increase have been studied in the HT-7 ohmic discharges (where the plasma current Ip=145 kA, loop voltage Vloop =2-3 V, toroidal field B T =1.7 T, and Zeff =2-8). It is found that the improved particle confinement phase exists for about 90 ms and the particle confinement time tP increased about 1.6 times.

A matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization tandem time-of-flight mass spectrometer has been built with the capabilities to perform structural analyzes. The first time-of-flight mass spectrometer includes a timing ion gate to select the ions to be analyzed. After the selection process, the ions are activated using an electrically floating collision cell. The fragments produced in the collision cell are analyzed in the second time-of-flight stage. A two-step mass calibration procedure is introduced that allows one to obtain accurate mass values. The characteristics of this calibration procedure make possible to automate it. The experimental results of the tandem mass spectrometer and calibration procedure using different standard peptides are presented.

The main objective of this work is to present an analysis and brief discussion of experimental ionic conductivity s data in the binary alkali tellurite system, including on 47 glasses that extend the ionic conductivity range by more than 14 orders of magnitude in a wide compositional range. A 'universal' behavior is obtained, using log sigma or log sigmaT vs. E A/kB T, where E A is the activation enthalpy for conduction, kB is the Boltzmann constant and T is the absolute temperature. This finding further indicates the importance of a scaling factor F recently proposed, that is correlated to the free volume of glass composition. For a given value of E A/kB T, the difference between large and small values of sigma is only one order of magnitude in 87% of these glass systems. The influence of alkali content and temperature was minor on the pre-exponential terms, considering both expressions log10sigma and log10sigmaT. Indeed, the pre-exponential term sigma0 varies around an average value of 50 omega-1cm-1 considering different compositions in this system. The fact that s lies on these single 'universal' curves for so many ion-conducting binary tellurite glasses means that sigma is governed mainly by E A. The composition dependence of the activation enthalpy is explained in the context of the Anderson-Stuart theory.

We describe a procedure to calculate charge transport properties across a nanosystem. This scheme is based on a Green's Function formalism to treat a non-equilibrium problem, coupled to the Density Functional Theory to describe the electronic structure. As an illustration, we perform calculations for the charge transport across a (5,5) carbon nanotube with a vacancy.

We study the transport properties of a spin filter consisting of a double-barrier resonant tunneling device in which the well is made of a semimagnetic material. Even if the device could be made of several materials, we discuss here the case of a Ga1-xMn xAs/Ga1-yAl yAs system because it can be integrated into the well known AlAs/GaAs technology. We solve the Hamiltonian H = H K+H P+H E+H M+Hh-i+Hh-h. Its terms represent the kinetic energy, the double-barrier profile, the applied bias, the magnetic interaction, the hole-impurity attraction and the hole-hole repulsion, respectively. A very simple one-dimensional Green function is introduced to solve self-consistently the Poisson equation for the profile due to the charge distribution. A real space renormalization formalism is used to calculate exactly the currents. In a previous work we have shown that the Rashba effect is weak. Therefore the results show very well defined spin-polarized currents. Our results confirm that this system is a good device for spintronics.

A theoretical study of the effects of disorder on the Mn-Mn exchange interactions for Ga1-xMn xAs diluted magnetic semiconductors is presented. The disorder is intrinsically considered in the calculations, which are performed using an ab initio total energy density-functional approach, for a 128 atoms supercell, and by considering a variety of configurations with 2, 3 and 4 Mn atoms. Results are obtained for the effective J$^{Mn-Mn}_n$, from first (n = 1) all the way up to sixth (n = 6) neighbors via a Heisenberg Hamiltonian used to map the magnetic excitations from ab initio total energy calculations. One then obtains a clear dependence in the magnitudes of the J$^{Mn-Mn}_n$ with the Mn concentration x. Moreover, we show that, in the case of fixed Mn concentration, configurational disorder and/or clustering effects lead to large dispersions in the Mn-Mn exchange interactions. Also, calculations for the ground-state total energies for several configurations suggest that a proper consideration of disorder is needed when one is interested in treating temperature and annealing effects.

Numerical calculations are shown to reproduce the main results of recent experiments involving nonlocal spin control in nanostructures (N. J. Craig et al., Science 304, 565 (2004)). In particular, the splitting of the zero-bias-peak discovered experimentally is clearly observed in our studies. To understand these results, a simple "circuit model" is introduced and shown to provide a good qualitative description of the experiments. The main idea is that the splitting originates in a Fano anti-resonance, which is caused by having one quantum dot side-connected in relation to the current's path. This scenario provides an explanation of Craig et al.'s results that is alternative to the RKKY proposal, which is here also addressed.

Electron tunneling through a double quantum dot molecule side attached to a quantum wire, in the Kondo regime, is studied. The mean-field finite-U slave-boson formalism is used to obtain the solution of the problem. We investigate the many body molecular Kondo state and its interplay with the inter-dot antiferromagnetic correlation as a function of the parameters of the system.

A review of the dependence of the electron mobility on the free carrier concentration for gallium nitride and indium nitride nanowires grown using hot-wall chemical vapour deposition is presented. Gallium nitride nanowires exhibit mobilities of 100 cm²/Vs to below 1 cm²/Vs for carrier concentrations of 10(19) to 10(20) cm- 3. Theoretical estimations and annealing experiments indicate that the nanowires are heavily compensated. Indium nitride nanowires also exhibit high carrier concentrations, of the order of 10(20) to 10(22) cm- 3. For both types of nanowires, mobility decreases with increasing carrier concentration, consistent with transport limited by impurity scattering.

Recent developments in the field of nano-electronics have encouraged the study of quasi one dimensional systems such as DNA and its applications to new devices. In this work we use two models to explore the vibrational properties of DNA-like chains: a linear chain and two laterally coupled linear chains. In the former case, the disorder induces a diatomic behavior, while monoatomic characteristics are displayed in the last case.

We report here theoretical and experimental studies on the spatial confinement of phonons in ternary CdSxSe1-x nanocrystals embedded in a glass matrix formed by the composites SiO2-Na2CO3-B2O3-Al2O3 doped with CdO, S and Se. We determined the morphologic characteristics of the nanocrystals by analyzing the dependence of surface phonon modes on the geometrical parameters. The calculated frequencies are compared with values from Raman spectra of CdSxSe1-x nanocrystals grown under different thermal treatments. A good correlation between experimental and calculated CdS-like and CdSe-like surface optical modes is observed. Raman selection rules and their connection with the nature of the surface optical phonons is discussed.

We calculate the exciton states of a Quantum Dot (QD) and a Quantum Dot Molecule (QDM) in an exact way for single, double and triply charged excitons without and with an applied external magnetic field. For the case of single quantum dot, we reproduce the experimental results reported in [2]. We also calculate the emission energies for the neutral molecule QDM as function of the barrier width between the two dots and we find that the Coulomb interaction splits the emission spectra in case of QDM. Concerning hybridization the triply charged QDM behaves in the same way as the QD, but showing several anticrossings with the lower Landau level of the continuum.

The lignin is an extremely challenging natural material with wide and interesting applications, during the last two decades, great efforts have been dedicated to the study of its optical properties. About this subject have occurred many controversial opinions because of the nature and interactions of this material with other components of the vegetal cellular wall. In this work we will explore and simulate the electronic absorption and vibrations spectrums based on the semiempirical geometrical and quantum mechanics optimizations of amorphous two and tree units softwoods lignin fragments of Coniferyl Alcohol. These fragments were previously obtained using the semiempirical methods, Modified Neglect of Diatomic Overlap MNDO and Zerner's spectroscopic version of the Intermediate Neglect of Differential Overlap in configuration interactions mode: ZINDO/S CI.

The evolution of a surface excitation in a two dimentional model is analyzed. I) It starts quadratically up to a spreading time tS. II) It follows an exponential behavior governed by a self-consistent Fermi Golden Rule. III) At longer times, the exponential is overrun by an inverse power law describing return processes governed by quantum diffusion. At this last transition time tRa survival collapse becomes possible, bringing the survival probability down by several orders of magnitude. We identify this strongly destructive interference as an antiresonance in the time domain.