When a liquid is cooled well below its melting temperature at a rate that exceeds the critical cooling rate Rc, the crystalline state is bypassed and a metastable, amorphous glassy state forms instead. Rc (or the corresponding critical casting thickness dc) characterizes the glass-forming ability (GFA) of each material. While silica is an excellent glass-former with small Rc < 10(-2) K/s, pure ...

We report early BVRcIc imaging of the INTEGRAL GRB 041218. The observation started 129 s after the burst and a sequence of exposures in V , Rc, Ic, and B bands were repeated. The optical afterglow is detected in Rc and Ic bands while it was not detected in B and V . We find that the early afterglow deviates from a single power law decay and identify two characteristic timescales (breaks). Such ...

We obtain results on large deviations for a large class of nonuniformly hyperbolic dynamical systems with polynomial decay of correlations 1/nβ, β > 0. This includes systems modelled by Young towers with polynomial tails, extending recent work of M. Nicol and the author which assumed β > 1. As a byproduct of the proof, we obtain slightly stronger results even when β > 1. The results are sharp i...

Up until the Bourgain-Gamburd 2005 breakthrough the only known ways to turn SLd(Fp) into an expander graph (i.e. to find a generating set of small size whose associated Cayley graph has a good spectral gap) was either through property (T ) (as in the Margulis construction) when d > 3 or through the Selberg property (and the dictionary between combinatorial expansion of the Cayley graphs and the...

Taking the frigid outer space as heat sink, a terrestrial body can cool itself to sub-ambient temperature via radiative sky cooling (RC) scheme. However, poor seasonal and regional adaptabilities low power density of RC technology confine its effective applications only in hot seasons regions with RC-friendly ambient conditions. Similarly, solar thermal collector cannot work at night is little ...