Faculty Bibliography

We study the self-healing process of materials with embedded "glue"-carrying cells, in the regime of the onset of the initial fatigue. Three-dimensional numerical simulations within the percolation-model approach are reported. The main numerical challenge taken up in the present work has been to extend the calculation of the conductance to three-dimensional lattices. Our results confirm the general features of the process: The onset of material fatigue is delayed, by development of a plateaulike time dependence of the material quality. We demonstrate that, in this low-damage regime, the changes in the conductance and thus in similar transport and response properties of the material can be used as measures of the material quality degradation. A new feature found for three dimensions, where it is much more profound than in earlier-studied two-dimensional systems, is the competition between the healing cells. Even for low initial densities of the healing cells, they interfere with each other and reduce each other's effective healing efficiency.

We study the effect of the presence of a regular substrate pattern on the irreversible adsorption of nanosized and colloid particles. Deposition of disks of radius r(0) is considered, with the allowed regions for their center attachment at the planar surface consisting of square cells arranged in a square lattice pattern. We study the jammed state properties of a generalized version of the random sequential adsorption model for different values of the cell size, a , and cell-cell separation, b . The model shows a surprisingly rich behavior in the space of the two dimensionless parameters alpha = a / 2r(0) and beta = b / 2r(0) . Extensive Monte Carlo simulations for system sizes of 500 x 500 square lattice unit cells were performed by utilizing an efficient algorithm, to characterize the jammed state morphology.

The phenomenon of burst nucleation in solution, in which a period of apparent chemical inactivity is followed by a sudden and explosive growth of nucleated particles from a solute species, has been given a widely accepted qualitative explanation by LaMer and co-workers. Here, we present a model with the assumptions of instantaneous re-thermalization below the critical nucleus size and irreversible diffusive growth above the critical size, which for the first time formulates LaMer's explanation of burst nucleation in a manner allowing quantitative calculations. The behavior of the model at large times, t, is derived with the result that the average cluster size, as measured by the number of atoms, grows approximately t, while the width of the cluster distribution grows approximately (sq root)1. We develop an effective numerical scheme to integrate the equations of the model and compare the asymptotic expressions to results from numerical simulation. Finally, we discuss the physical effects which cause real nucleation processes in solution to deviate from the behavior of the model.

This report describes a unique case of prolonged hypoglycemia in a nondiabetic patient with end-stage renal disease and chronic liver disease. Following a less-than-24-hour period of being NPO (nothing per oral), the patient developed hypercapnic respiratory failure. Severe hypoglycemia in such a patient leading to respiratory failure provides major challenges in identification and management of his illness. To our knowledge, this is the first ever reported case of severe hypoglycemia leading to hypercapnic respiratory failure. We believe that the pathogenic basis for this patient's severe hypoglycemia is failure of contribution by the kidneys and liver to glucose production.

We devise an approach to measure the polarization of nuclear spins via conductance measurements. Specifically, we study the combined effect of external magnetic field, nuclear spin polarization, and Rashba spin-orbit interaction on the conductance of a quantum wire. Nonequilibrium nuclear spin polarization affects the electron energy spectrum making it time dependent. Changes in the extremal points of the spectrum result in time dependence of the conductance. The conductance oscillation pattern can be used to obtain information about the amplitude of the nuclear spin polarization and extract the characteristic time scales of the nuclear spin subsystem.

We study the evolution and distribution of nonequilibrium electron spin polarization in n-type semiconductors within the two-component drift-diffusion model in an applied electric field. Propagation of spin-polarized electrons through a boundary between two semiconductor regions with different doping levels is considered. We assume that inhomogeneous spin polarization is created locally and driven through the boundary by the electric field. We show that an initially created narrow region of spin polarization can be further compressed and amplified near the boundary. Since the boundary involves variation of doping but no real interface between two semiconductor materials, no significant spin polarization loss is expected. The proposed mechanism will be therefore useful in designing new spintronic devices.