Condensed Matter Theory

Abstract:

Unscreened electrostatic interactions exert a profound effect on the onset of the buckling instability of a charged rod. When this interaction is unscreened, the threshold value of the compressional force needed to induce buckling is independent of rod length for sufficiently long rods. In the case of rods of intermediate length, the critical buckling force crosses over from the classic inverse-square length dependence to asymptotic length-independent form with increasing rod length. It is suggested that this effect might lead to the possibility of the ``electromechanical'' stiffening of nanotubes, which would allow relatively long segments of them to be used as atomic force probes.

Abstract:

The notion of fluctuation-induced forces is generalized to the cases where the fluctuations have nonequilibrium origin. It is shown that a net force is exerted on a single flat plate that restricts scale-free fluctuations of a scalar field in a temperature gradient. This force tends to push the object to the colder regions, which is a manifestation of thermophoresis or the Soret effect. In the classic two-plate geometry, it is shown that the Casimir forces exerted on the two plates differ from each other, and thus the Newton's third law is violated.

Abstract:

In bilayer quantum Hall systems at filling fractions near nu=1/2+1/2, as the spacing d between the layers is continuously decreased, intralayer correlations must be replaced by interlayer correlations, and the composite fermion (CF) Fermi seas at large d must eventually be replaced by a composite boson (CB) condensate or "111 state" at small d. We propose a scenario where CBs and CFs coexist in two interpenetrating fluids in the transition. Trial wave functions describing these mixed CB-CF states compare very favorably with exact diagonalization results. A Chern-Simons transport theory is constructed that is compatible with experiment.