Under the application of a strong electric field, atoms from a metal surface can rupture their bonds and escape, leading to ‘field-evaporation’. We present a firstprinciples description of this phenomenon, taking as an example the evaporation of Al adatoms from an Al(111) surface. The ‘charged-plane’ method [A.Y. Lozovoi and A. Alavi, Phys Rev B 68, 246416 (2003)], has been implemented in the c...

We correlate the experimentally measured fracture toughness of 24 metals and ceramics to their quantum mechanically calculated brittleness parameter. The brittleness parameter is defined as the ratio of the elastic energy density needed to spontaneously break bonds in shear versus in tension, and is a primitive-cell property. Under 300 GPa hydrostatic pressure, the model predicts that diamond h...

Matteo Gatti1,2,3,4 and Francesco Sottile1,2 1Laboratoire des Solides Irradiés, École Polytechnique, CNRS-CEA/DSM, F-91128 Palaiseau, France 2European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility (ETSF) 3Nano-Bio Spectroscopy Group, Departamento Fı́sica de Materiales, Universidad del Paı́s Vasco, Centro de Fı́sica de Materiales CSIC-UPV/EHU-MPC and DIPC, Avenida Tolosa 72, E-20018 San Sebastián, Spain 4Synch...

Clonal selection is the keystone of mainstream immunology and computational systems based on immunological principles. For the latter, clonal selection is often interpreted as an asexual variant of natural selection, and thus, tend to be variations on evolutionary strategies. Retro-fitting immunological sophistication and theoretical rigour onto such systems has proved to be unwieldy. In this p...

Causal Dynamical Triangulations in four dimensions provide a background-independent definition of the sum over space-time geometries in nonperturbative quantum gravity. We show that the macroscopic four-dimensional world which emerges in the Euclidean sector of this theory is a bounce which satisfies a semi-classical equation. After integrating out all degrees of freedom except for a global sca...