A microscopic model is developed to describe statistical properties of a nematic phase consisting of semiflexible dimers. The effect of the spacer chain bonding the two mesogens is described by the local conditional probability in terms of a bare stiffness parameter Q +J EB /kT and a bare equilibrium angle bo between mesogenic monomers. In the framework of a molecular field approximation, takin...

The paper investigates the spontaneous breaking of gauge symmetries in gauge theories from a philosophical angle. Local gauge symmetry itself cannot break spontaneously in quantized gauge theories according to Elitzur’s theorem—even though the notion of a spontaneously broken local gauge symmetry is widely employed in textbook expositions of the Higgs mechanism, the standard account of mass gen...

The quantum anomaly that breaks the symmetry, for example the parity and the chirality, in the quantization leads to a physical quantity with a topological Chern invariant. We report the observation of a Chern structure in the Bose-insulating phase of Sr2RuO4 nanofilms by employing electric transport. We observed the superconductor-to-insulator transition by reducing the thickness of Sr2RuO4 si...

The second- and fourth-order apparent orientational order parameters of the core part of the molecule P2 (app) and P4 (app) , have been measured by polarized vibrational Raman spectroscopy for a homogeneously aligned ferroelectric smectic liquid crystal with three dimethyl siloxane groups in the achiral terminal chain, which shows de Vries-type phenomena, i.e., very large electroclinic effect i...

This article proposes a fast and robust technique for instantaneous phase angle estimation of three-phase voltage systems under unbalanced distorted conditions. It mainly relies on the Clarke transformation, Teager energy operator, delayed signal cancellation (DSC) approach. Unlike an adaptive DSC-based synchronous-reference frame phase-locked loop (PLL), proposed avoids interdependent loops, t...

– Considering recent results revealing the existence of multi-scale rigid clusters of grains embedded in granular surface flows, i.e. flows down an erodible bed, we describe here the surface flows rheology through a non-local constitutive law. The predictions of the resulting model are compared quantitatively to experimental results: The model succeeds to account for the counter-intuitive shape...

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the differences of kinetic and kinematic variables in middle-aged women with genu varum and normal knee angle during walking and running. Methods: Eight middle-aged women with genu varum (age: 45.12 ±12.74 y, height: 160.62 ± 5.26 cm, weight: 71.75 ± 16.38 kg, right tibiofemoral angle: -4 ± 3.9, left tibiofemoral angle: -5.1 ± 4.6) and 7 wi...

Dragonflies achieve agile maneuverability by flapping four wings independently. Different phase angles between the flapping forewing and hindwing have been observed during various flight modes. The aerodynamic performance depends on phase angle control, as exemplified by an artificial flying ornithopter. Here, we present a dragonfly-like ornithopter whose phase angle was designed to vary accord...

In a vehicular sensor network (VSN), the key design issue is how to organize vehicles effectively, such that the local network topology can be stabilized quickly. In this work, each vehicle with on-board sensors can be considered as a local controller associated with a group of communication members. In order to balance the load among the nodes and govern the local topology change, a group form...