The elastic-plastic behavior of the material is considered to analyze the effect of an external circumferential crack on a pipe with thickness transition and double slopes. Using the extended finite element method (XFEM), the J-integral of 3D cracks were investigated and compared between straight pipes and pipes with thickness transition and different slopes. Considering internal press...

In their quest to optimise treatment strategies, neonatologists may sometimes be tempted to extrapolate results obtained during the care of very immature to more mature neonates, assuming that what is right in the former, most fragile infants cannot be wrong in the latter. A study from Tokyo, however, highlights the potential risks associated with such generalisations: in an audit of neonatal c...

State-transition modeling is an intuitive, flexible, and transparent approach of computer-based decision-analytic modeling including both Markov model cohort simulation and individual-based (first-order Monte Carlo) microsimulation. Conceptualizing a decision problem in terms of a set of (health) states and transitions among these states, state-transition modeling is one of the most widespread ...

Considering a temperature dependent two-level quantum system, we have numerically solved the Landau-Zener transition problem. The method includes the incorporation of temperature effect as a thermal noise added Schrödinger equation for the construction of the Hamiltonian. Here, the obtained results which describe the changes in the system including the quantum states and the transition pro...

We introduce an approximation to calculate the gravitational radiation produced by the collision of true-vacuum bubbles that is simple enough to allow the simulation of a phase transition by the collision of hundreds of bubbles. This “envelope approximation” neglects the complicated “overlap” regions of colliding bubbles and follows only the evolution of the bubble walls. The approximation accu...

Many methods have been proposed for making use of multiple experts to predict uncertain events such as election outcomes, ranging from simple averaging of individual predictions to complex collaborative structures such as prediction markets or structured group decision making processes. We used a panel of more than 2,000 forecasters to systematically compare the performance of four different co...

The morphological phase transition between sessile and lenticular shapes of a droplet placed in a nanochannel is observed upon increasing the droplet volume. The phase diagram for this system is discussed within both macroscopic and mesoscopic approaches. On the mesoscopic level, the van der Waals forces are taken into account via the effective interface potential acting between the channel wal...

First-order phase transitions typically exhibit a significant hysteresis resulting for instance in boiling retardation and supercooling. The hysteresis arises, because nucleation of the new phase is activated. The free-energy change is positive until the nucleus reaches a critical size beyond which further growth is downhill. In practice, the barrier is often circumvented by the presence of het...

We study the production of cosmological axions in the standard scenario in which a global string network forms at the Peccei-Quinn phase transition. We make detailed calculations of the axions produced by string loops, comparing these with estimates of other contributions from long strings and domain walls. We delineate key uncertainties in string network evolution, the chief of which is the ma...