6 search hits
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Active and Passive Transport at Interfaces
(2011)
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Saeedeh Aliaskarisohi
- In this thesis we studied different forms of transport at interfaces. Four different interfacial transport mechanisms have been investigated. In each of them one physical aspect of active and passive transport is discussed. The four systems are arranged and discussed in four separate chapters. In chapter 3 and 4 we study the effect of static or hydrodynamic interactions on the cross over from individual diffusion towards collective diffusion. In chapter 3 the diffusion of circular domains on a giant unilamellar vesicle is measured. By tracking the motion of hydrodynamic interacting domains on a curved membrane we determined whether it is possible to extract rheological properties of the bilayer membrane. A similar two dimensional system interacting via static dipole interactions is studied in chapter 4. A mixture of paramagnetic and nonmagnetic colloidal particles immersed into a diluted ferrofluid is self assembled into colloidal flowers. In this experiment the effect of static interactions on the modes of diffusion of the petals of the colloidal flower is investigated in a one dimensional system. The results are compared with the single file diffusion of a hard core interacting one dimensional system. In chapter 5, the effect of actively directing particles with fluctuating active forces in a symmetry broken environment is studied. We address the question how to competing symmetry breaking effects decide on the direction of motion. The system consists of paramagnetic colloidal particles placed into an aqueous solution above the liquid-solid interface of a magnetic garnet film. An external modulated field supplies the fluctuations and the symmetry is broken by tilting the external field with respect to the magnetic film and/or by a magnetic symmetry broken pattern of the magnetic film. The direction of motion of the paramagnetic colloids is measured and we give a theoretical explanation of why which symmetry breaking wins. The fluidization of a two dimensional solid to a two dimensional liquid via the yielding of the monolayer is studied in chapter 6. The monolayer is locally yielded with thermo capillary interactions by focusing a laser onto it. We investigate the yielding as a function of the chemical nature of the monolayer and determine the thermodynamic requirements necessary for thermo capillary yielding.
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Surface Deformations of Magnetic Continua in Homogeneous Fields
(2009)
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Christian Gollwitzer
- In this thesis, experiments with magnetic liquids and gels are presented. Ferrofluids are synthetically created suspensions of magnetic nanoparticles in a carrier liquid. By adding a gelator, such a ferrofluid can be turned into a ferrogel. The magnetic properties of these substances are similar to a usual paramagnet with the important difference, that the susceptibility of the former is higher by a factor of 10^3 to 10^6. By the application of a homogeneous field, a transformation of the shape of a magnetic sample can be induced. In this thesis, four experiments on the surface deformation in homogeneous magnetic fields are presented. Two geometric configurations are considered: a horizontally extended flat layer with a free surface as well as a spherical sample. In both cases, the application of a homogeneous magnetic field leads to changes of the shape of the free boundary. In the case of the spherical geometry, the sample is deformed into a prolate ellipsoid under the action of the field, the so called magnetodeformational effect. In case of the extended flat layer, an abrupt shape transition into a patterned state takes place, the normal field or Rosensweig instability. In contrast to the smooth deformation of the sphere, this is an instability, which breaks the translational symmetry, and the transition occurs at a certain threshold value of the magnetic induction. Each of the four experiments in this thesis is briefly summarized in the following paragraphs. Part I of the thesis considers ferrofluids. In chapter 2, the ideal geometry of an infinitely extended flat layer is intentionally reduced to a cylinder such that only a single spike in the centre exists, and the solution space becomes rotationally symmetric. This makes the problem very feasible for experimental methods and numerical simulations. Two measurement techniques are applied and compared to each other, namely an X-ray technique, where the surface deformation is extracted from radioscopic images, and a laser technique, which focuses a laser spot onto the surface. The experiments and the simulations, the latter performed in close cooperation with a group in Athens, show a convincing agreement within a few percent. It remains an open question, whether the result can be deduced in analytic form, however. In chapter 3, a highly viscous ferrofluid is utilized to study the nonlinear dynamics of the normal field instability at very low Reynolds numbers. The linear growth rate for the growth and decay of the pattern at small amplitudes is extracted from the measurements and compared with an existing theoretical model. In addition, the measurement technique provides the reconstruction of a fully nonlinear amplitude equation, which is qualitatively compared to model equations. These nonlinear amplitude equations can only describe the dynamics of the growth in the immediate vicinity of the critical point so far. For a quantitative comparison, there is a need for a model with an extended range of validity. Additionally, localized patterns are observed which arise spontaneously in the neighbourhood of the unstable solution branch, which have previously been observed with the help of an external disturbance Part II of the thesis deals with thermoreversible ferrogels. Chapter 4 studies the magnetodeformational effect. A ferrogel sphere is exposed to homogeneous magnetic field. When the field is applied suddenly, the sphere not only elongates in the direction of the field, but also vibrates about the new equilibrium. On a longer time scale, the deformation continuously increases due to the viscoelastic properties of the gel. Both phenomena can well be described by a harmonic oscillator model, where the spring constant changes with time. From the deformation parallel and perpendicular to the applied field, Poisson´s ratio can be calculated, which turns out to be close to the limit of incompressibility. The absolute values of the deformation are compared to recent theoretical models. The resulting deviation of about 10% is attributed to the viscoelastic properties of the ferrogel, which are not taken into account in the static models. In chapter 5, the normal field instability is realized for the first time with a ferrogel. A flat layer of a thermoreversible ferrogel is exposed to a homogeneous magnetic field at different temperatures, where the gel is viscoelastic. This is a consequence of the need for a very soft material, such that the growth of the pattern is not completely suppressed by the elastic forces. The magnetic field is periodically modulated in time, and the amplitude of the instability is measured, which is modulated with the same frequency. The comparison with rheological measurements reveals a scaling of the modulated amplitude with the complex viscosity of the ferrogel. A comparison with the theoretical model for a ferrogel is difficult due to the viscoelasticity of the gel.
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The Rosensweig instability in isotropic magnetic gels
(2008)
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Stefan Bohlius
- Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit der nichtlinearen theoretischen Analyse der Rosensweig Instabilität in isotropen magnetischen Gelen. Die Rosensweig Instabilität beschreibt den Übergang einer zunächst flachen Oberfläche zwischen einer magnetischen Flüssigkeit zu einer hexagonal geordneten Stacheloberfläche, sobald ein senkrecht zur flachen Oberfläche angelegtes homogenes Magnetfeld einen bestimmten kritischen Wert überschreitet. Startet man den Vernetzungsprozess in einer Mischung aus Polymeren, Vernetzungsreagenzien und einem Ferrofluid, so erhält man ein isotropes Ferrogel, ein elastisches Medium, welches zusätzlich superparamagnetisches Verhalten aufweist. Theoretisch lässt sich zeigen, dass auch die Oberfläche dieser Medien in einem angelegten Magnetfeld instabil wird, wobei die typische Wellenlänge im Vergleich zu gewöhnlichen Ferrofluiden unverändert bleibt, während die kritische Magnetfeldstärke mit wachsendem elastischen Schermodul steigt. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit kommt in der Diskussion dem stationären Charakter der Rosensweig Instabilität zu. Dieser ist, wie sich herausstellt, als ein Grenzprozess zu interpretieren, bei welchem die Dynamik der charakteristischen Mode mit Annäherung an die Schwelle immer stärker verlangsamt wird und schließlich zu einem statischen Oberflächenmuster führt. Der Grund für dieses Grenzverhalten ist in der deformierbaren Oberfläche und im Besonderen in der daraus resultierenden kinematischen Randbedingung zu sehen. Unter Anwendung der Energiemethode nach Gailitis, wird die Oberflächenenergiedichte bezüglich regulärer Streifen, Quadrate und Hexagone minimiert. Es zeigt sich, dass am Einsatz der Instabilität Hexagone das energetisch favorisierte Oberflächenmuster sind. Für hohe Magnetfeldstärken hingegen bilden Quadrate die bevorzugte Anordnung. Die Energiemethode hat jedoch bedeutende Nachteile, die als Motivation für eine schwach nichtlineare Analyse der fundamentalen hydrodynamischen Gleichungen und der Herleitung einer Amplitudengleichung dienen. Ganz besondere Beachtung verdient dabei die Bestimmung des adjungierten Systems für die Rosensweig Instabilität. Dieses ist zur Befriedigung der Fredholmschen Alternative, die wiederum die Amplitudengleichungen liefert, von zentraler Bedeutung. Zur Herleitung der adjungierten Gleichungen und der dazugehörigen Randbedingungen wird die Erkenntnis aus der Diskussion der linearen Instabilität, dass das System als dynamisch zu betrachten und der statische Grenzfall erst am Ende zu vollziehen ist, benutzt. Des weiteren stellt es sich als wichtig heraus, die Gleichungen zunächst für ein kompressibles Medium zu adjungieren und ebenfalls erst am Ende die Näherung für inkompressible Medien zu bestimmen. Das adjungierte System wird ebenfalls für die Marangoni Instabilität bestimmt. Dort induzieren Temperaturfluktuationen an der Oberfläche eines Fluids Fluktuationen der Oberflächenspannung, die wiederum Konvektion hervorrufen. Mit Hilfe der Lösungen des adjungierten Systems lassen sich nun die Lösbarkeitsbedingungen in der zweiten und dritten Störungsordnung erfüllen und man erhält letztlich die Amplitudengleichung. Im Rahmen unser Näherungen entkoppeln die hydrodynamischen Volumengleichungen von denen des Magnetfeldes. Allerdings müssen die Lösungen auch noch den Randbedingungen genügen und im Besonderen ist die normale Randbedingungen in den höheren Ordnungen nicht trivial erfüllt. Vielmehr liefert sie noch eine zusätzliche Bedingung zur Fredholmschen Alternative. In der Arbeit wird zum ersten Mal der quadratische Koeffizient aus den fundamentalen hydrodynamischen Gleichungen abgeleitet. Dieser garantiert zum einen die Existenz von Hexagonen, zum anderen das Auftreten einer transkritischen Bifurkation. Beides sind experimentell bestätigte Eigenschaften der Rosensweig Instabilität. Zum anderen enthält die Amplitudengleichung für Ferrogele eine zweifache Zeitableitung. Die linearisierte Amplitudengleichung nimmt im Fall der Ferrogele die Gestalt eines gedämpften harmonischen Oszillators an. Im Fall der Rosensweig Instabilität in Ferroflüssigkeiten, deren zugehörige Amplitudengleichung ebenfalls bestimmt wird, tritt diese zweifache Zeitableitung nicht auf. Die Rosensweig Instabilität ist im Rahmen unserer Näherungen rein oberflächengetriebenen. Das motiviert die Frage, inwieweit dünne magnetische Filme oder Membranen instabil werden können. Diese Frage wird in dieser Arbeit ebenfalls diskutiert. Beschränkt man sich in einer linearen Stabilitätsanalyse auf den symmetrischen Fall, das heißt der isotrope Ferrogelfilm ist auf beiden Seiten vom gleichen Medium umgeben, so findet man, dass der Film linear nicht instabil werden kann. Eine Instabilität zeigt sich nur im Fall von anisotropen magnetischen Gelen oder im Fall eines magnetischen Kontrastes zwischen den beiden umgebenden Medien.
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Vibrated granular matter
(2006)
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Andreas Götzendorfer
- Granular matter is defined as a large collection of particles the size of which is larger than one micron so that Brownian motion is negligible. Its behavior has been studied at least since the days of Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1736-1806), who originally stated his law of friction for granular materials. In the physics community interest in granular media started to grow considerably around 1990, driven by the fast-growing performances of computer simulations. Since then the number of publications in this field has surged enormously. Because of the dissipative nature of particle collisions, in order to maintain a steady flow or a dynamic steady state, energy has to be fed constantly into a granular system. In lab experiments this is often done by applying a sinusoidal horizontal or vertical oscillation to the container. One of the aims of this work was to study effects of the combined action of both forms of agitation. In the presented experiments vertical and horizontal oscillations were superposed such that every point of the support followed a circular trajectory. By choosing a ring-shaped container geometry, the long-time dynamics of a closed, mass conserving system devoid of disturbances from the influx and outpouring of grains could be studied. This setup was used to examine spatially extended surface wave patterns of a granular bed. Standing waves oscillating at half the forcing frequency were observed within a certain range of the driving acceleration. The dominant wavelength of the pattern was measured for various forcing frequencies at constant amplitude. These waves are not stationary, but drift with a velocity equal to the transport velocity of the granular material, determined by means of a tracer particle. At higher forcing strength localized period doubling waves arise. These traveling solitary wave packets are accompanied by a locally increased particle density. The length and velocity of the granular wave pulse were measured as a function of the amount of material in the container. Inspired by traffic flow models that explain the spontaneous appearance of pulses – “phantom jams” - out of initially homogeneous flow a simple continuum model for the material distribution was developed. Based on the measured granular transport velocity as a function of the bed thickness, it captures the essence of the experimental findings. Furthermore the fluidization of a monolayer of circularly vibrated glass beads was studied. At peak forcing accelerations within a certain interval a solid-like and a gas-like domain coexist. The solid fraction decreases with increasing acceleration and shows hysteresis. Complementary to the experimental studies a molecular dynamics simulation was used to extract local granular temperature, basically defined as the variance of the particle velocity distribution, and number density. It was found that the number density in the solid phase is several times that in the gas, while the temperature is orders of magnitude lower. To investigate the transition of a crystalline particle packing to a fully fluidized state a separate setup was used. Particles were confined to two dimensions in order to keep them visible at all times. With the help of a high speed camera all particles could then be traced. The vibration was restricted to the vertical direction. The experiment was designed flexible enough to allow an easy variation of driving parameters and the use of particles of various sizes. An initially close packed granular bed was exposed to sinusoidal container oscillations with gradually increasing amplitude. At first the particles close to the free surface become mobile. When a critical value of the forcing strength is reached the remaining crystal suddenly breaks up and the bed fluidizes completely. This transition leads to discontinuous changes in the density distribution and in the root mean square displacement of the individual particles. Likewise the vertical center of mass coordinate increases by leaps and bounds at the transition. It turns out that the maximum container velocity v is the crucial driving parameter determining the state of a fully fluidized system. For particles of various sizes the transition to full fluidization occurs at the same value of v^2/gd, where d is the particle diameter and g is the gravitational acceleration.
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Electrostatic Trapping as a Self-Consistent Phenomenon in Plasmas and other Collective Systems
(2004)
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Alejandro Luque Estepa
- This thesis investigates self-consistent electrostatic structures in plasmas and related collective systems. They are coherent structures in which particles become trapped in the wave potential. These phenomena require a kinetic description i.e. a description in which the velocity distribution of the particles is taken into account. Trapping structures extend the areas in configuration space in which a plasma is unstable. The main argument and result of this work is that there exist certain kinds of perturbations of an equilibrium that can destabilize the plasma, even if linear theory predicts stability. The usual procedure in plasma theory of analyzing the stability of a plasma by means of a linearization of the equations is therefore questioned. Particle trapping is an essentially nonlinear phenomenon, still present for infinitesimally small wave amplitudes. The effect of the particle trapping is therefore not linked only with the treatment of finite amplitudes, as often assumed, but has also to be taken into account from the very beginning if one wants to arrive at generally valid predictions about stability and the associated anomalous transport. Thus it is not surprising that the problem of transport represents a not yet closed chapter in the theory of plasmas, a fact which is shown in many examples from fusion and space research, where almost collisionless plasmas are present. Particle trapping is however not confined to classic plasmas. Another result of this work is to show that the applied formalism can also be extended to other systems that present a collective behavior. Namely, a quantum extension is possible, which allow us to investigate quantum-like systems and also to draw a connection between electrostatic trapping in plasmas and envelope solitons in nonlinear optical media like e.g. optical fibers. The longitudinal dynamics of charged particle beams in accelerators and storage rings provides a further example of a collective system in which the phenomenon of particle trapping plays an essential role of the dynamics.
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Dynamics of vortices in the two-dimensional anisotropic Heisenberg model with magnetic fields.
(2003)
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Juan Pablo Zagorodny
- The subject of this work is the dynamics of a vortex in a classical 2-dimensional spin system with anisotropic exchange interaction under the combined action of magnetic fields and damping. Static as well as dynamic magnetic fields were employed (as dynamical field we used a homogeneous field which is rotating in the XY-plane). The most important goal of this work was to demonstrate that there is a coupling between the inner and translational freedom degrees of the vortex, coupling which is responsible for at least 2 phenomena that we study in detail in this Thesis: 1. the switching or flipping of the vortex polarization (for negative field frequency), and 2. the formation of stable orbits of the vortex center around the center of the system driven by the rotating field (for positive frequency). It was known to us that the polarization can change abruptly its sign under the action of a field rotating in the XY-plane, for p omega < 0 and appropriate field amplitudes. In the Chapter 4 we have investigated the possible underlying mechanisms for this phenomenon. Our main results can be summarized as follows: a) The flipping times do not depend essentially on the size of the system, provided that the lattice is large enough (radius L >~ 36 lattice constants). In other words, the switching of the vortex polarization is not much affected by the presence of boundaries. b) In our numerical simulations we observed a clear correlation between the core magnetization dynamics (the oscillations of the core spins in the out-of-plane direction) and the velocity of the vortex center in the plane of the lattice. c) A diagram of flipping events as a function of the field parameters, from extensive numerical simulations with an OP vortex in a rotating magnetic field, was presented. We found out that in the (omega, h) parameters space there is no well-defined curve which separates the regime where the flips do not occur from the regime where they do. We found intervals ("windows'') of intermittent flip and non-flip events. d) The switching of the vortex polarization can be achieved also by applying a static magnetic field with both in-plane (IP) and out-of-plane (OP) components. The IP component of the field sets the vortex into translational movement in the XY-plane, while the OP component breaks the vertical symmetry favoring one of the two possible orientations. e) The switching dynamics may be described in terms of a core model which takes into account a coupling between the vortex polarization dynamics and the motion of the vortex center. We showed that a reduced core model, which is valid near the threshold of the IP-OP vortex instability (lambda ~ lambda c), can be mapped to a generalized Thiele equation with an inertial term. f) It is plausible that the phenomenon of switching we described will not be essentially affected by the inclusion of a dipole-dipole interaction. The experimental works on nanodisks mentioned in the Introduction of this Thesis reported the observation of vortices in either of two polarization states, and the switching between them was forced by means of static fields perpendicular to the plane of the disks. Rotating magnetic fields might be used as well static fields with both IP and OP components to make this switching more favorable. In the Chapter 5 we turned to the study of the movement of the vortex in the XY plane, in the presence of the IP rotating field. Attention was directed to the existence of stable orbits, where the vortex stays inside the system in a stationary movement, forming circular limit cycles. We discussed then the failure of the conventional Thiele approach to describe this phenomenon, and this motivated us to formulate an extended collective coordinate Theory, which leads to a qualitative agreement with the results of the simulations. A diagram of the different types of trajectories, as a function of the field parameters, showed the presence of non-monotonous effects and "windows'', like in the case of the switching diagram. We are led to conclude that for some regions of the field parameters space, the system exhibits chaos -which is typical for many-body systems-, though no particular tool of the chaos theory was used to study our discrete and collective coordinate models, from this viewpoint. Our theoretical work qualitatively suggests that it would be interesting to apply in the experiments weak rotating fields like those used here, to control both the mean position of a vortex in larger magnetic dots (where the vortex center could show dynamics) and at the same time the sign of the out-of-plane core magnetization. Future directions of this work may include the use of inhomogeneous fields, particularly with a gaussian localization in a small region of the lattice or "spot'', as a model of the field of a laser beam.
