Classical and Statistical Thermodynamics

Carter, Ashley H.; Styer, Daniel F.

doi:10.1119/1.1313522

Cited by 50 publications

(41 citation statements)

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“…(6) Classical statistics characterize "fit-getrich" and "first-mover-advantage" computational phases which approach zero connectivity in the thermodynamic limit. 12 In addition, the occupation number defined by FD statistics, 13,14 n(ε i ) = 1/(e β(ε i -µ i ) + 1),…”

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confidence: 99%

Arrhenius-kinetics evidence for quantum tunneling in microbial “social” decision rates

Clark¹

2010

Communicative & Integrative Biology

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Social-like bacteria, fungi and protozoa communicate chemical and behavioral signals to coordinate their specializations into an ordered group of individuals capable of fitter ecological performance. Examples of microbial "social" behaviors include sporulation and dispersion, kin recognition and nonclonal or paired reproduction. Paired reproduction by ciliates is believed to involve intra- and intermate selection through pheromone-stimulated "courting" rituals. Such social maneuvering minimizes survival-reproduction tradeoffs while sorting superior mates from inferior ones, lowering the vertical spread of deleterious genes in geographically constricted populations and possibly promoting advantageous genetic innovations. In a previous article, I reported findings that the heterotrich Spirostomum ambiguum can out-complete mating rivals in simulated social trials by learning behavioral heuristics which it then employs to store and select sets of altruistic and deceptive signaling strategies. Frequencies of strategy use typically follow Maxwell-Boltzmann (MB), Fermi-Dirac (FD) or Bose-Einstein (BE) statistical distributions. For ciliates most adept at social decision making, a brief classical MB computational phase drives signaling behavior into a later quantum BE computational phase that condenses or favors the selection of a single fittest strategy. Appearance of the network analogue of BE condensation coincides with Hebbian-like trial-and-error learning and is consistent with the idea that cells behave as heat engines, where loss of energy associated with specific cellular machinery critical for mating decisions effectively reduces the temperature of intracellular enzymes cohering into weak Fröhlich superposition. I extend these findings by showing the rates at which ciliates switch serial behavioral strategies agree with principles of chemical reactions exhibiting linear and nonlinear Arrhenius kinetics during respective classical and quantum computations. Nonlinear Arrhenius kinetics in ciliate decision making suggest transitions from one signaling strategy to another result from a computational analogue of quantum tunneling in social information processing.

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confidence: 99%

Arrhenius-kinetics evidence for quantum tunneling in microbial “social” decision rates

Clark¹

2010

Communicative & Integrative Biology

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“…One component of this study is comparing the treatment of thermodynamics in physics to that in mechanical engineering, both in content and approach. Examination of a typical mechanical engineering textbook (e.g., [2]) shows that it shares many chapter themes with a typical physics textbook (e.g., [3]). For example, both textbooks have chapters on definitions of terms, the First Law, and the Second Law.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing student conceptual understanding of thermodynamics in physics and engineering

Clark¹,

Thompson²,

Mountcastle³

2013

AIP Conference Proceedings

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Thermodynamics is a core part of curricula in physics and many engineering fields. Despite the apparent similarity in coverage, individual courses in each discipline have distinct emphases and applications. Physics education researchers have identified student difficulties with concepts such as heat, temperature, and entropy as well as with larger grain-sized ideas such as state variables, path-dependent processes, etc. Engineering education research has corroborated some of these findings and has identified additional difficulties unique to engineering contexts such as confusion between steady-state and equilibrium processes. We are beginning a project that provides an opportunity to expand the interdisciplinary research on conceptual understanding in thermodynamics. This project has two goals: first, determine the overlapping content and concepts across the disciplines; second, compare conceptual understanding between these groups using existing conceptual questions from PER and EER. We present a review of PER and EER literature in thermodynamics and highlight some concepts that we will investigate.

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“…These properties are revealed by the first and second laws of thermodynamics [15]. The first law of thermodynamics states that the change in the energy of a system, dU , is equal to the energy added to the system, dQ, minus the work done the system, which is the pressure, P , times the change in the volume, dV .…”

Section: Heat-pipe Ovenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Properties of Trapped Electron Bunches in a Plasma Wakefield Accelerator

Kirby¹

2009

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Plasma-based accelerators use the propagation of a drive bunch through plasma to create large electric fields. Recent plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA) experiments, carried out at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), successfully doubled the energy for some of the 42 GeV drive bunch electrons in less than a meter; this feat would have required 3 km in the SLAC linac. This dissertation covers one phenomenon associated with the PWFA, electron trapping. Recently it was shown that PWFAs, operated in the nonlinear bubble regime, can trap electrons that are released by ionization inside the plasma wake and accelerate them to high energies. These trapped electrons occupy and can degrade the accelerating portion of the plasma wake, so it is important to understand their origins and how to remove them. Here, the onset of electron trapping is connected to the drive bunch properties.Additionally, the trapped electron bunches are observed with normalized transverse emittance divided by peak current, N,x /I t , below the level of 0.2 µm/kA. A theoretical model of the trapped electron emittance, developed here, indicates that the emittance scales inversely with the square root of the plasma density in the nonlinear "bubble" regime of the PWFA. This model and simulations indicate that the observed values of N,x /I t result from multi-GeV trapped electron bunches with emittances of a few µm and multi-kA peak currents. These properties make the trapped electrons a possible particle source for next generation light sources.This dissertation is organized as follows. The first chapter is an overview of the PWFA, which includes a review of the accelerating and focusing fields and a survey of the remaining issues for a plasma-based particle collider. Then, the second chapter examines the physics of electron trapping in the PWFA. The third chapter uses theory and simulations to analyze the properties of the trapped electron bunches. Chapters vi four and five present the experimental diagnostics and measurements for the trapped electrons. Next, the sixth chapter introduces suggestions for future trapped electron experiments. Then, Chapter seven contains the conclusions. In addition, there is an appendix chapter that covers a topic which is extraneous to electron trapping, but relevant to the PWFA. This chapter explores the feasibility of one idea for the production of a hollow channel plasma, which if produced could solve some of the remaining issues for a plasma-based collider.vii Acknowledgement

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Classical and Statistical Thermodynamics

Cited by 50 publications

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Arrhenius-kinetics evidence for quantum tunneling in microbial “social” decision rates

Arrhenius-kinetics evidence for quantum tunneling in microbial “social” decision rates

Comparing student conceptual understanding of thermodynamics in physics and engineering

Properties of Trapped Electron Bunches in a Plasma Wakefield Accelerator

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