Modern Physics Letters B

Consider a binary substitutional solid solution not in equilibrium with a fluid rich in either solid component. At the interface, depending on the chemical energy, the solid may selectively lose or gain atoms from the fluid. Any atom exchange upsets the nominal composition; thereby stresses are generated in the solid by simultaneous action of lattice dilation and interdiffusion. As stresses build up, the local changing volume tends to split up into islands in an effort to escape from stresses, while curvature tends to amalgamate the islands in an effort to minimize surface energy. This competition could lead to substantial corrugations of the solid-fluid interface. These corrugations and the thresholds for noticeable competition between stresses and curvatures had an old tradition in chemo-mechanical models of sharp interfaces beginning with Srolovitz (1989). However, stresses were generally considered as a mere cause of external loads, so a pure solid was tacitly asserted. This paper couples elasticity with a conserved-phase field model to mainly investigate the effect of compositional strain on the interface instability process between a binary solid selectively interacting with a fluid. The chemical energy barrier is considered, however, uncoupled from stress, and the mobility quadratically dependent on the gradient of composition. Under initial enforced sinusoidal perturbations, results of simulations showed that the compositional strain parameter can dramatically alter the effect of the chemical energy barrier on the critical wavelength of perturbations that trigger interface instability.

Network resilience is vital for the survival of networks, and scale-free networks are fragile when confronted with targeted attacks. We survey network robustness to targeted attacks from the viewpoint of network clients by designing a unique mechanism based on the undeniable roles of network clients in real-world networks. Especially, the mechanism here is designed on the actual phenomenon that the vital nodes in a network may be totally different for clients with different demands. Concretely, node client-demand centrality is proposed to quantify the contributions of nodes to network clients and we show that it is a proper index to assign an order to network nodes according to node importance for network clients. Great discrepancy of node importance order for clients with different demands is found in scale-free networks with four different kinds of link weight distribution, which suggests that the destructiveness of fatal attacks on networks can be greatly reduced by adjusting the demands of network clients.

Ground states of a two-electron system in generalized screened potential (GSP) with screening parameter λ:

We investigate ballistic phonon transport through Gaussian acoustic nanocavities in a semiconductor nanowire at low temperatures. When the transverse widths of acoustic nanocavities takes a Gaussian function, it is found that wide band gap and resonant peaks appear in transmission spectra. The phonon-cavity confined modes exist as the number of the nanocavities is large. The phonon transmission and thermal conductance strongly depend on the number and length of nanocavities. The results suggest that the Gaussian acoustic nanocavities may be useful for controlling thermal conductance artificially and the design of phonon devices to manipulate ballistic phonons in nanophononics.

Single-crystalline SnO₂ zigzag nanobelts and straight nanobelts with triangular tip were synthesized by a simple Tin–water reaction method. The product was characterized by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, Raman scattering and micro-photoluminescence spectroscopy to obtain the structural and optical information. Why zigzag nanobelts and straight nanobelts can be formed respectively under the same experimental conditions? On the basis of TEM characterization and thermodynamic analysis, the formation mechanism of zigzag nanobelts and straight nanobelts were proposed respectively.

The Wehrl classical information entropy of random phase negative binomial states (RPNBS) is investigated, and their Wigner function evolution in the thermal environment is also discussed. It is shown that the evolution of the RPNBS in the thermal channel can be roughly regarded as the shift of the parameters ε and α₀ of the RPNBS.