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E. Piegari

Publications and source records attributed to E. Piegari.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

A cellular automaton for the factor of safety field in landslides modeling

Landslide inventories show that the statistical distribution of the area of recorded events is well described by a power law over a range of decades. To understand these distributions, we consider a cellular automaton to model a time and position dependent factor of safety. The model is able to reproduce the complex structure of landslide distribution, as experimentally reported. In particular, we investigate the role of the rate of change of the system dynamical variables, induced by an external drive, on landslide modeling and its implications on hazard assessment. As the rate is increased, the model has a crossover from a critical regime with power-laws to non power-law behaviors. We suggest that the detection of patterns of correlated domains in monitored regions can be crucial to identify the response of the system to perturbations, i.e., for hazard assessment.

physics.geo-ph

Finite driving rate and anisotropy effects in landslide modeling

In order to characterize landslide frequency-size distributions and individuate hazard scenarios and their possible precursors, we investigate a cellular automaton where the effects of a finite driving rate and the anisotropy are taken into account. The model is able to reproduce observed features of landslide events, such as power-law distributions, as experimentally reported. We analyze the key role of the driving rate and show that, as it is increased, a crossover from power-law to non power-law behaviors occurs. Finally, a systematic investigation of the model on varying its anisotropy factors is performed and the full diagram of its dynamical behaviors is presented.

physics.geo-ph

Polaron formation for a non-local electron-phonon coupling: A variational wave-function study

We introduce a variational wave-function to study the polaron formation when the electronic transfer integral depends on the relative displacement between nearest-neighbor sites giving rise to a non-local electron-phonon coupling with optical phonon modes. We analyze the ground state properties such as the energy, the electron-lattice correlation function, the phonon number and the spectral weight. Variational results are found in good agreement with analytic weak-coupling perturbative calculations and exact numerical diagonalization of small clusters. We determine the polaronic phase diagram and we find that the tendency towards strong localization is hindered from the pathological sign change of the effective next-nearest-neighbor hopping.

cond-mat.str-el

Effects of an electronic topological transition for anisotropic low-dimensional superconductors

We study the superconducting properties of a two-dimensional superconductor in the proximity to an electronic topological transition (ETT). In contrast to the 3D case, we find that the superconducting gap at T=0, the critical temperature Tc, and the impurity scattering rate are characterized by a nonmonotonic behavior, with maxima occurring close to the ETT. We derive analytical expressions for the value of such maxima both in the s-wave and in the d-wave case. Such expressions are in good qualitative agreement with the phenomenological trend recently observed for Tc^max as a function of the hopping ratio t'/t across several cuprate compounds. We further analyze the effect of an ETT on the Ginzburg-Landau stiffness eta. Instead of vanishing at the ETT, as could be expected, thus giving rise to an increase of the fluctuation effects, in the case of momentum-independent electron-electron interaction, we find eta different from 0, as a result of an integration over the whole Fermi surface.

cond-mat.supr-con

Two-gap model for underdoped cuprate superconductors

Various properties of underdoped superconducting cuprates, including the momentum-dependent pseudogap opening, indicate a behavior which is neither BCS nor Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) like. To explain this issue we introduce a two-gap model. This model assumes an anisotropic pairing interaction among two kinds of fermions with small and large Fermi velocities representing the quasiparticles near the M and the nodal points of the Fermi surface respectively. We find that a gap forms near the M points resulting into incoherent pairing due to strong fluctuations. Instead the pairing near the nodal points sets in with phase coherence at lower temperature. By tuning the momentum-dependent interaction, the model allows for a continuous evolution from a pure BCS pairing (in the overdoped and optimally doped regime) to a mixed boson-fermion picture (in the strongly underdoped regime).

cond-mat.supr-con