This paper addresses the issue of longitudinal stiffness within the cochlea. A one-dimensional model of the cochlear partition is presented in which the resonant sections are coupled by longitudinal elastic elements. These elements functionally represent the aggregate mechanical effect of the connective tissue that spans the length of the organ of Corti. With the plate-like morphology of the co...

We investigate several three-dimensional lattice models believed to be in the Ising universality class by means of Monte Carlo methods and finite-size scaling. These models include spin-1 / 2 models with nearest-neighbor interactions on the simple-cubic and on the diamond lattice. For the simple cubic lattice, we also include models with third-neighbor interactions of varying strength, and some...

We analyze two-component spatial optical vortex solitons supported by parametric wave mixing processes in a nonlinear bulk medium. We study two distinct cases of such localized waves, namely, parametric vortex solitons due to phase-matched second-harmonic generation in an optical medium with competing quadratic and cubic nonlinear response, and vortex solitons in the presence of third-harmonic ...

The atomic-scale structure of three nanocrystalline ZrO2 samples obtained by different techniques and possessing a different length of structural coherence has been studied using high-energy X-ray diffraction and the atomic pair distribution function technique. The studies reveal that all samples show a monoclinic-like local atomic ordering. Only when the length of structural coherence exceeds ...

This work compares the performance of three compensation methods for speech recognition in the presence of packet loss. Two methods, cubic interpolation and a novel maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation, aim to restore the feature vector stream in the event of packet loss, while the third technique applies compensation in the decoding stage of recognition through missing feature theory. To impr...

We report on a new type of quantum wells with the width as thin as 10 Å, which are composed of SiC only, and consequently have ideal interfaces. These quantum wells are actually stacking faults in SiC. Certain types of stacking faults in SiC polytypes create small 3C-like regions, where the stacking sequences along the c-axis become locally cubic in the hexagonal host crystals. Since the conduc...

Nature provides impressive examples of chiral photonic crystals, with the notable example of the cubic so-called srs network (the label for the chiral degree-three network modeled on SrSi2) or gyroid structure realized in wing scales of several butterfly species. By a circular polarization analysis of the band structure of such networks, we demonstrate strong circular dichroism effects: The but...

The surface energy is a fundamental property of the different facets of a crystal that is crucial to the understanding of various phenomena like surface segregation, roughening, catalytic activity, and the crystal's equilibrium shape. Such surface phenomena are especially important at the nanoscale, where the large surface area to volume ratios lead to properties that are significantly differen...

The BFW model introduced by Bohman, Frieze, and Wormald [Random Struct. Algorithms, 25, 432 (2004)], and recently investigated in the framework of discontinuous percolation by Chen and D'Souza [Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 115701 (2011)], is studied on the square and simple-cubic lattices. In two and three dimensions, we find numerical evidence for a strongly discontinuous transition. In two dimension...

Microstructural, δ(13)C isotope and C/N ratio investigations were conducted on excavated material from the black Younger Dryas boundary in Lommel, Belgium, aiming for a characterisation of the carbon content and structures. Cubic diamond nanoparticles are found in large numbers. The larger ones with diameters around or above 10 nm often exhibit single or multiple twins. The smaller ones around ...