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Results for “INTERACTION RANGE”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 325 records · Page 18
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

Robust qubit interactions mediated by photonic topological edge states

Here, we investigate the coupling of two spatially separated qubits via topologically protected edge states in a two-dimensional Hofstadter lattice. In this hybrid platform, the qubits are coupled to distinct edge sites of the lattice, enabling long-range interactions mediated by topological edge modes. We solve the full system Hamiltonian and analyze the resulting eigenstate structure to uncover the conditions under which coherent qubit interactions emerge. Our analysis reveals that the effective coupling is highly sensitive to the qubit placement, energy detuning, and the topological character of the edge spectrum. We obtain an analytical solution that goes beyond the perturbative regime, capturing the full interplay between the qubits and edge modes. These results provide a foundation for exploring information transport and many-body effects in engineered quantum systems where interactions are mediated by topological edge modes.

Chern insulators↗
DOE OSTI2020

Plasmon–emitter interactions at the nanoscale

Plasmon–emitter interactions are of central importance in modern nanoplasmonics and are generally maximal at short emitter–surface separations. However, when the separation falls below 10–20 nm, the classical theory deteriorates progressively due to its neglect of quantum effects such as nonlocality, electronic spill-out, and Landau damping. Here we show how this neglect can be remedied in a unified theoretical treatment of mesoscopic electrodynamics incorporating Feibelman d -parameters. Our approach incorporates nonclassical resonance shifts and surface-enabled Landau damping—a nonlocal damping effect—which have a dramatic impact on the amplitude and spectral distribution of plasmon–emitter interactions. We consider a broad array of plasmon–emitter interactions ranging from dipolar and multipolar spontaneous emission enhancement, to plasmon-assisted energy transfer and enhancement of two-photon transitions. The formalism gives a complete account of both plasmons and plasmon–emitter interactions at the nanoscale, constituting a simple yet rigorous platform to include nonclassical effects in plasmon-enabled nanophotonic phenomena.

Science & Technology - Other Topics↗
DOE OSTI2018

New Studies of Short-Range Correlations and Their Effects on Nuclei

Over the last decade, data gathered on short range correlations (SRC) and the EMC effect have stimulated tremendous progress in our understanding of the nuclear force. In particular, the tensor force was found to be the major factor in the formation of N-N short range correlations. More recently a connection between the N-N SRC probabilities and EMC effect amplitudes was first observed. However, the real origin and characteristics of this connection have not been convincingly determined experimentally or theoretically. The project consists of several approved experiments scheduled to run at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, VA. These inclusive scattering measurements will provide a detailed map of the nature of short range correlations and its role in the in-medium modification of the nucleons. The isospin dependence in 2 N- and 3 N-SRCs will be accessed through the use of two light mirror nuclei 3 He and 3 H. An extensive A-dependence study of 2 N and 3 N-SRCs will be performed as well as a measurement of the quark distribution in short range correlations, i.e. the EMC eect in SRCs. A measurement of the deuteron tensor structure function in the deep inelastic scattering regime will verify the possible contribution of hidden color components in the deuteron wave function. This project aims to help answer the fundamental question on the nature of the short range interactions and their implications at the nucleonic and partonic levels.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2023

The Evolution of Population III and Extremely Metal-poor Binary Stars

Numerical simulations have now shown that Population III (Pop III) stars can form in binaries and small clusters and that these stars can be in close proximity to each other. If so, they could be subject to binary interactions such as mass exchange that could profoundly alter their evolution, ionizing UV and Lyman–Werner photon emission and explosion yields, with important consequences for early cosmological reionization and chemical enrichment. Here we investigate the evolution of Pop III and extremely metal-poor binary stars with the MESA code. We find that interactions ranging from stable mass transfer to common envelope evolution can occur in these binaries for a wide range of mass ratios and initial separations. Mass transfer can nearly double UV photon yields in some of these binaries with respect to their individual stars by extending the life of the companion star, which in turn can enhance early cosmological reionization but also suppress the formation of later generations of primordial stars. Binary interactions can also have large effects on the nucleosynthetic yields of the stars by promoting or removing them into or out of mass ranges for specific SN types. We provide fits to total photon yields for the binaries in our study for use in cosmological simulations.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Relaxation of the degenerate one-dimensional Fermi gas

In this work, we study how a system of one-dimensional spin-1/2 fermions at temperatures well below the Fermi energy approaches thermal equilibrium. The interactions between fermions are assumed to be weak and are accounted for within the perturbation theory. In the absence of an external magnetic field, spin degeneracy strongly affects relaxation of the Fermi gas. For sufficiently short-range interactions, the rate of relaxation scales linearly with temperature. Focusing on the case of the system near equilibrium, we linearize the collision integral and find the exact solution of the resulting relaxation problem. Furthermore, we discuss the application of our results to the evaluation of the transport coefficients of the one-dimensional Fermi gas.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
NASA NTRS1982

On the geometric nature of high energy nucleus-nucleus reaction cross sections

Within the context of a high energy double-folding optical potential approximation to the exact nucleus-nucleus multiple-scattering series, eikonal scattering theory is used to investigate the validity of geometric reaction cross sections in relativistic heavy ion collisions. The potential used includes a finite range interaction and nuclear single-particle densities extracted from nuclear charge distributions by unfolding the finite proton charge distribution. Pauli correlation effects are also included in an approximate way. The sensitivity of the predictions to the assumed interaction, Pauli correlation approximation, and nuclear density distributions is investigated. These results are in agreement with early predictions concerning the geometric nature of relativistic heavy ion collisions and in disagreement with a recent analysis, utilizing the zero range approximation, which suggested otherwise. Reasons for the lack of agreement between the analyses are also presented. Finally, approximate applicability limits for geometric reaction cross sections are determined.

Townsend, L. W.↗
DOE OSTI2017

Interactions regulating the head-to-tail directed assembly of biological Janus rods

We can generalize the directed, head-to-tail self-assembly of microtubule filaments in the context of Janus colloidal rods. Specifically, their assembly at the tens of micron-length scale involves a careful balance between long-range electrostatic repulsion and short-range attractive forces. We show that the addition of counterion salts increases the rate of directed assembly by screening the electrostatic forces and enhancing the effectiveness of short-range interactions at the microtubule ends.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2013

Multiscale Modeling of Inclusions and Precipitation Hardening in Metal Matrix Composites: Application to Advanced High-Strength Steels

In this study, the strengthening effect of inclusions and precipitates in metals is investigated within a multiscale approach that utilizes models at various length scales, namely, Molecular Mechanics (MM), discrete Dislocation Dynamics (DD), and an Eigenstrain Inclusion Method (EIM). Particularly, precipitates are modeled as hardsoft particles whose stress fields interact with dislocations. The stress field resulting from the elastic mismatch between the particles and the matrix is accounted for through the EIM. While the MM method is employed for the purpose of developing rules for DD for short range interaction between a single dislocation and an inclusion, the DD method is used to predict the strength of the composite resulting from the interaction between ensembles of dislocations and particles. As an application to this method, the mechanical behavior of Advanced High Strength Steel (AHSS) is investigated and the results are then compared to the experimental data. The results show that the finely dispersive precipitates can strengthen the material by pinning the dislocations up to a certain shear stress and retarding the recovery, as well as annihilation of dislocations. The DD results show that strengthening due to nano sized particles is a function of the density and size of the precipitates. This size effect is then explained using a mechanistic model developed based on dislocation-particle interaction.

Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory↗
DOE OSTI2020

Quench dynamics of two-component dipolar fermions subject to a quasiperiodic potential

Motivated by recent experiments in fermionic polar gases, we study the nonequilibrium dynamics of two-component dipolar fermions subject to a quasiperiodic potential. We investigate the localization of charge and spin degrees of freedom time evolving with a long-range spin-SU(2) symmetric fermionic Hamiltonian by calculating experimentally accessible dynamical observables. To study the nonequilibrium dynamics, we start the time evolution with two initial states at half-filling: (i) product state with doublons |↑↓0↑↓0↑↓0↑↓0↑↓$\rangle$ and (ii) product state with singlons |↑↓↑↓↑↓↑↓↑↓$\rangle$. We carried out the real-time evolution via the fermionic Hamiltonian using exact diagonalization (ED) and the time-dependent variational principle (TDVP) for finite matrix product states (MPS), within experimentally relevant timescales. For the product state with doublons, we observe a delocalized to localized phase transition varying disorder strengths by monitoring the decay of charge imbalance with time. For the long-range interacting Hamiltonian of our focus, and in the presence of strong enough disorder, starting the time evolution with singlons we find a strong reduction in the spin delocalization, contrary to results of previous studies using the disordered short-range (on-site) Hubbard model with SU(2) symmetry. In addition to the quench dynamics, we also demonstrate the localization of charge and spin in the full energy spectrum of the long-range spin-SU(2) symmetric Hamiltonian by monitoring spin and charge autocorrelation functions. Finally, our predictions for localization of both charge and spin should be observable in ultracold experiments with fermionic dipolar atoms subject to a quasiperiodic potential.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2024

Analytical model for the motion and interaction of two-dimensional active nematic defects

Here, we develop an approximate, analytical model for the velocity of defects in active nematics by combining recent results for the velocity of topological defects in nematic liquid crystals with the flow field generated from individual defects in active nematics. Importantly, our model takes into account the long-range interactions between defects that result from the flows they produce as well as the orientational coupling between defects inherent in nematics. Our work complements previous studies of active nematic defect motion by introducing a linear approximation that allows us to treat defect interactions as two-body interactions and incorporates the hydrodynamic screening length as a tuning parameter. We show that the model can analytically predict bound states between two +1/2 winding number defects, effective attraction between two –1/2 defects, and the scaling of a critical unbinding length between ±1/2 defects with activity. The model also gives predictions for the trajectories of defects, such as the scattering of +1/2 defects by –1/2 defects at a critical impact parameter that depends on activity. In the presence of circular confinement, the model predicts a braiding motion for three +1/2 defects that was recently seen in experiments, as well as stable and ergodic trajectories for four or more defects.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2025

Periodic GFN1-xTB Tight Binding: A Generalized Ewald Partitioning Scheme for the Klopman–Ohno Function

A novel formulation is presented for the treatment of electrostatics in the periodic GFN1-xTB tight-binding model. Periodic GFN1-xTB is hindered by the functional form of the second-order electrostatics, which only recovers Coulombic behavior at large interatomic distances and lacks a closed-form solution for its Fourier transform. We address this by introducing a binomial expansion of the Klopman–Ohno function to partition short- and long-range interactions, enabling the use of a generalized Ewald summation for the solution of the electrostatic energy. This approach is general and is applicable to any damped potential of the form |R n + c| –m . Benchmarks on the X23 molecular crystal dataset and a range of prototypical bulk semiconductors demonstrate that this systematic treatment of the electrostatics eliminates unphysical behavior in the equation of state curves. In the bulk systems studied, we observe a mean absolute error in total energy of 35 meV/atom, comparable to the machine-learned universal force field, M3GNet, and sufficiently precise for structure relaxation. These results highlight the promising potential of GFN1-xTB as a universal tight-binding parametrization.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2019

Quantitative Electromechanical Atomic Force Microscopy

The ability to probe a materials electromechanical functionality on the nanoscale is significant to applications from energy storage and computing to biology and medicine. Voltage modulated atomic force microscopy (VM-AFM) has become a mainstay characterization tool for investigating these materials due to its ability to locally probe electromechanically responsive materials with spatial resolution from microns to nanometers. However, with the wide popularity of VM-AFM techniques such as piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) and electrochemical strain microscopy (ESM) there has been a rise in reports of nanoscale electromechanical functionality, including hysteresis, in materials that should be incapable of exhibiting piezo- or ferroelectricity. Explanations for the origins of unexpected nanoscale phenomena have included new material properties, surface-mediated polarization changes and/or spatially resolved behavior that is not present in bulk measurements. At the same time, it is well known that VM-AFM measurements are vulnerable to numerous forms of crosstalk and, despite efforts within the AFM community, a global approach for eliminating this has remained elusive. Here, we develop a method for easily demonstrating the presence of hysteretic ( i.e. “false ferroelectric”) long-range interactions between the sample and cantilever body. This approach should be easy to implement in any VM-AFM measurement. We then go on to demonstrate fully quantitative and repeatable nanoelectromechanical characterization using an interferometer. These quantitative measurements are critical for a wide range of devices including mems actuators and sensors, memristor, energy storage and memory.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2020

Effective field theory for two-body systems with shallow S -wave resonances

Resonances are of particular importance to the scattering of composite particles in quantum mechanics. We build an effective field theory for two-body scattering which includes a low-energy S-wave resonance. Our starting point is the most general Lagrangian with short-range interactions. We demonstrate that these interactions can be organized into various orders so as to generate a systematic expansion for an S matrix with two low-energy poles. The pole positions are restricted by renormalization at leading order, where the common feature is a non-positive effective range. We carry out the expansion explicitly to next-to-leading order and illustrate how it systematically accounts for the results of a toy model — a spherical well with a delta shell at its border.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Exactly Solvable Model for Strongly Interacting Electrons in a Magnetic Field

States of strongly interacting particles are of fundamental interest in physics and can produce exotic emergent phenomena and topological structures. We consider here two-dimensional electrons in a magnetic field, and, departing from the standard practice of restricting to the lowest LL, introduce a model short-range interaction that is infinitely strong compared to the cyclotron energy. Here, we demonstrate that this model lends itself to an exact solution for the ground as well as excited states at arbitrary filling factors v<1/2p and produces a fractional quantum Hall effect at fractions of the form v=n/(2pn+1), where n and p are integers. The fractional quantum Hall states of our model share many topological properties with the corresponding Coulomb ground states in the lowest Landau level, such as the edge physics and the fractional charge of the excitations.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2023

Phenomenology of the Prethermal Many-Body Localized Regime

The dynamical phase diagram of interacting disordered systems has seen substantial revision over the past few years. Theory must now account for a large prethermal many-body localized regime in which thermalization is extremely slow, but not completely arrested. We derive a quantitative description of these dynamics in short-ranged one-dimensional systems using a model of successive many-body resonances. Here, the model explains the decay timescale of mean autocorrelators, the functional form of the decay—a stretched exponential—and relates the value of the stretch exponent to the broad distribution of resonance timescales. The Jacobi method of matrix diagonalization provides numerical access to this distribution, as well as a conceptual framework for our analysis. The resonance model correctly predicts the stretch exponents for several models in the literature. Successive resonances may also underlie slow thermalization in strongly disordered systems in higher dimensions, or with long-range interactions.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2015

The shape of protein–polymer conjugates in dilute solution

ABSTRACT Protein–polymer conjugation can significantly affect many different aspects of protein behavior, ranging from their solution properties to their ability to form solution and bulk nanostructured materials. An underlying fundamental question is how the molecular design affects the shape of the conjugate and, consequently, its properties. This work measures the molecular configuration of model protein–polymer conjugates in dilute solution using small‐angle neutron scattering (SANS) and uses quantitative model fitting to understand the shape of the molecules. Form factor measurements of four model bioconjugates of the red fluorescent protein mCherry and the polymers poly( N ‐isopropylacrylamide), poly(hydroxypropyl acrylate), poly(oligoethylene glycol acrylate), and poly(ethylene glycol) show that these protein–polymer conjugates are well described by a recently developed scattering function for colloid–polymer conjugates that explicitly incorporates excluded volume interactions in the polymer configuration. In the regime where the protein does not exhibit strong interactions with the polymer, modeling the protein–polymer interactions using a purely repulsive Weeks–Chandler–Andersen potential also leads to a coarse‐grained depiction of the conjugate that agrees well with its scattering behavior. The coarse‐grained model can additionally be used for systems with varying protein–polymer interactions, ranging from purely repulsive to strongly attractive, which may be useful for conjugates with strong electrostatic or hydrophobic attractive interactions. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part A: Polym. Chem. 2016, 54, 292–302

Lam, Christopher N.↗
DOE OSTI2015

Geometry-guided colloidal interactions and self-tiling of elastic dipoles formed by truncated pyramid particles in liquid crystals

The progress of realizing colloidal structures mimicking natural forms of organization in condensed matter is inherently limited by the availability of suitable colloidal building blocks. To enable new forms of crystalline and quasicrystalline self-organization of colloids, we develop truncated pyramidal particles that form nematic elastic dipoles with long-range electrostaticlike and geometry-guided low-symmetry short-range interactions. Using a combination of nonlinear optical imaging, laser tweezers, and video microscopy, we characterize colloidal pair interactions and demonstrate unusual forms of self-tiling of these particles into crystalline, quasicrystalline, and other arrays. Here, our findings are explained using an electrostatics analogy along with liquid crystal elasticity and symmetry breaking considerations, potentially expanding photonic and electro-optic applications of colloids.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2018

Absence of a charge diffusion pole at finite energies in an exactly solvable interacting flat-band model in $d$ dimensions

Motivated by recent bounds for charge diffusion in critical matter, we investigate the following question: What sets the scale for the velocity for diffusing degrees of freedom in a scale-invariant system? To make our statements precise, here we analyze the diffusion pole in an exactly solvable model for a Mott transition in the presence of a long-range interaction term. To achieve scale invariance, we limit our discussion to the flat-band regime. We find in this limit that the diffusion pole, which would normally obtain at finite energy, is pushed to zero energy, resulting in a vanishing of the diffusion constant. This occurs even in the presence of interactions in certain limits, indicating the robustness of this result to the inclusion of a scale in the problem. Consequently, scale invariance precludes any reasonable definition of the diffusion constant. Nonetheless, we do find that a scale can be defined, albeit irrelevant to diffusion, which is the product of the squared band velocity and the density of states.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗