For several decades, energy-transfer upconversion (ETU) in rare-earth-ion doped systems [1,2] has attracted much attention, firstly, because of the fundamental interest in the physical nature of this process and, secondly, because of very practical considerations, namely the demonstration of near-infrared pumped visible light sources and, in reverse, the detrimental influence of ETU on the effi...

Initial distributions of metastable antiprotonic (4)He and (3)He atoms over principal (n) and angular momentum (l) quantum numbers have been deduced using laser spectroscopy experiments. The regions n = 37-40 and n = 35-38 in the two atoms account for almost all of the observed fractions [(3.0 +/- 0.1)% and (2.4 +/- 0.1)%] of antiprotons captured into metastable states.

This paper reviews the theory of metastable defect formation in compensated n-type silicon. By means of minority carrier lifetime measurements before and after defect activation we investigate the impact of 3 potential metastable defects relevant to the solar industry: Iron-boron pairs, chromium-boron pairs and the boron-oxygen defect.

Noise-induced escape from a metastable potential is considered on timescales preceding the formation of quasi-equilibrium within the metastable part of the potential. It is shown that the escape flux may then depend exponentially strongly, and in a complicated manner, on time and friction.

We consider a class of quantum dissipative systems governed by a one parameter completely positive maps on a von-Neumann algebra. We introduce a notion of recurrent and metastable projections for the dynamics and prove that the unit operator can be decomposed into orthogonal projections where each projections are recurrent or metastable for the dynamics.

The peak effect in weakly pinned superconductors is accompanied by metastable vortex states. Each metastable vortex configuration is characterized by a different critical current density Jc, which mainly depends on the past thermomagnetic history of the superconductor. A recent model [G. Ravikumar et al, Phys. Rev. B 61, R6479 (2000)] proposed to explain the

We propose a new definition of metastability of Markov processes on countable state spaces. We obtain sufficient conditions for a sequence of processes to be metastable. In the reversible case these conditions are expressed in terms of the capacity and of the stationary measure of the metastable states.

A recently developed spectral method for identifying metastable states in Markov chains is used to analyze the conformational dynamics of a four-residue peptide valine-proline-alanine-leucine. We compare our results to empirically defined conformational states and show that the found metastable states correctly reproduce the conformational dynamics of the system.

We study random transitions between two metastable states that appear below a critical temperature in a one-dimensional self-gravitating Brownian gas with a modified Poisson equation experiencing a second order phase transition from a homogeneous phase to an inhomogeneous phase [P. H. Chavanis and L. Delfini, Phys. Rev. E 81, 051103 (2010)]. We numerically solve the N-body Langevin equations an...

Low temperature plasma assisted nit riding treatments of 316 stainless steel produce a complex layer constituted by tow different metastable f.c.c. solid solution denoted ( γ N1 and γ N2 ). About the formation of these double layers, different hypothesis was proposed in the literature. For verifying these hypotheses, the effects of differentes conditions such as nit riding temperature, cleaning...