We use calorimetry and dilatometry under hydrostatic pres7 sure, X-ray powder diffraction and available literature data in a series 8 of composition-related orientationally disordered (plastic) crystals to 9 characterize both the plastic and melting transitions and investigate 10 relationships between associated thermodynamic properties. First, gen11 eral common trends are identified: (i) The t...

Degree-of-freedom of a general mechanical system is defined as the minimum number of independent variables required to describe its configuration completely. The set of variables (dependent or independent) used to describe a system are termed as the configuration variables. For a mechanism, these can be either Cartesian coordinates of certain points on the mechanism, or the joint angles of the ...

This paper studies the sensitivity to the observations of the block/group Lasso solution to an overdetermined linear regression model. Such a regularization is known to promote sparsity patterns structured as nonoverlapping groups of coefficients. Our main contribution provides a local parameterization of the solution with respect to the observations. As a byproduct, we give an unbiased estimat...

We present a heuristic approach to the geometric motion-planning problem with the aim to quickly solve intuitively simple problems. It is based on a divide -and-conquer path search strategy, which makes inquiries about feasible paths, an efficient collision detection scheme is developed that handles translations and rotations of polyhedral to compute all times of collision. The whole algorithm ...

The collective description of the octupole degrees of freedom has been a long standing problem in nuclear physics @1#. The phenomenological description of low-energy vibrational states @2,3# discussed them in terms of simple ‘‘surface modes’’ thus allowing for the description of the octupole degrees of freedom in terms of seven collective variables a3m @2,4#. In the 1980s, theoretical calculati...

We study how some recently proposed noncontextuality tests based on quantum interferometry are affected if the test particles propagate as open systems in presence of a gaussian stochastic background. We show that physical consistency requires the resulting markovian dissipative time-evolution to be completely positive.

We show that local diff-invariant free field theories in four spacetime dimensions do not have local degrees of freedom. PACS number(s): 04.20.Cv, 04.20.Fy