We investigate the relaxation of homogeneous Ising ferromagnets on finite lattices with zero-temperature spin-flip dynamics. On the square lattice, a frozen two-stripe state is apparently reached approximately 3/10 of the time, while the ground state is reached otherwise. The asymptotic relaxation is characterized by two distinct time scales with the longer stemming from the influence of a long...

The duration of reach-to-grasp movements is influenced by the size of the contact surfaces, such that grasping objects with smaller contact surface areas takes longer. But what is the influence of asymmetric contact surfaces? In Experiment 1a, participants reached-to-lift wooden blocks off a table top, with the contact locations for the thumb and index finger varying in surface size. The time t...

The zero-temperature physics of interacting quantum dots attached to superconducting leads is now well understood. overall qualitative picture obtained from the static mean-field approximation. situation drastically changes at non-zero temperatures. No reliable solutions apart numerical simulations exist there. We show that any approximation fails temperatures since magnetic fluctuations induce...

Semiconductor nanowires are a promising candidate for next-generation solar cells. However, the optical response of nanowires is, due to diffraction effects, complicated to optimize. Here, we optimize through optical modeling the absorption in a dual-junction nanowire-array solar cell in terms of the Shockley-Quessier detailed balance efficiency limit. We identify efficiency maxima that origina...

Assuming that the population remains small, one can truncate at given values of n1 and n2 to yield a finite set of differential equations. For an initial condition, we take the population to be zero, that is, ρ1,1,1,1 = 1 with all other elements of the density matrix set to zero. Eq. A.6 can then be solved numerically (we used the Adams-Moulton-Bashforth procedure) until a steady state is reach...