arXiv subjects

R. Roth

Publications and source records attributed to R. Roth.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2002

Effective forces in colloidal mixtures: from depletion attraction to accumulation repulsion

Computer simulations and theory are used to systematically investigate how the effective force between two big colloidal spheres in a sea of small spheres depends on the basic (big-small and small-small) interactions. The latter are modeled as hard-core pair potentials with a Yukawa tail which can be both repulsive or attractive. For a repulsive small-small interaction, the effective force follows the trends as predicted by a mapping onto an effective non-additive hard-core mixture: both a depletion attraction and an accumulation repulsion caused by small spheres adsorbing onto the big ones can be obtained depending on the sign of the big-small interaction. For repulsive big-small interactions, the effect of adding a small-small attraction also follows the trends predicted by the mapping. But a more subtle ``repulsion through attraction'' effect arises when both big-small and small-small attractions occur: upon increasing the strength of the small-small interaction, the effective potential becomes more repulsive. We have further tested several theoretical methods against our computer simulations: The superposition approximation works best for an added big-small repulsion, and breaks down for a strong big-small attraction, while density functional theory is very accurate for any big-small interaction when the small particles are pure hard-spheres. The theoretical methods perform most poorly for small-small attractions.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2002

Entropic torque

Quantitative predictions are presented of a depletion-induced torque and force acting on a single colloidal hard rod immersed in a solvent of hard spheres close to a planar hard wall. This torque and force, which are entirely of entropic origin, may play an important role for the key-lock principle, where a biological macromolecule (the key) is only functional in a particular orientation with respect to a cavity (the lock).

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2001

Mean-field instability of trapped dilute boson-fermion mixtures

The influence of boson-boson and boson-fermion interactions on the stability of a binary mixture of bosonic and fermionic atoms is investigated. The density profiles of the trapped mixture are obtained from direct numerical solution of a modified Gross-Pitaevskii equation that is self-consistently coupled to the mean-field generated by the interaction with the fermionic species. The fermions which in turn feel the mean-field created by the bosons are treated in Thomas-Fermi approximation. We study the effects of different combinations of signs of the boson-boson and the boson-fermion scattering lengths and determine explicit expressions for critical particle numbers as function of these scattering lengths.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2001

Phase diagram of trapped degenerate Fermi gases including effective s- and p-wave interactions

The influence of s- and p-wave interactions on trapped degenerate one and two-component Fermi gases is investigated. The energy functional of a multicomponent Fermi gas is derived within the Thomas-Fermi approximation including the s- and p-wave terms of an effective contact interaction. On this basis the stability of the dilute gas against mean-field induced collapse due to attractive interactions is investigated and explicit stability conditions in terms of Fermi momentum and s- and p-wave scattering lengths are derived. Furthermore the spatial separation in a two-component Fermi gas is discussed, explicit conditions for the onset of component demixing are given, and the density distributions in the separated phase are calculated. The findings are summarized in a zero-temperature phase diagram for the degenerate two-component Fermi gas. It is shown that the p-wave interaction has significant influence on the phase diagram of the degenerate Fermi gas and causes new phenomena like absolute stabilization against collapse and component separation. It may therefore be useful in the context of the envisioned BCS transition in trapped atomic Fermi gases.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2001

Short-Range Correlations in He-4 Liquid and Small He-4 Droplets described by the Unitary Correlation Operator Method

The Unitary Correlation Operator Method (UCOM) is employed to treat short-range correlations in both, homogeneous liquid and small droplets of bosonic He-4 atoms. The dominating short-range correlations in these systems are described by an unitary transformation in the two-body relative coordinate, applied either to the many-body state or to the Hamiltonian and other operators. It is shown that the two-body correlated interaction can describe the binding energy of clusters of up to 6 atoms very well, the numerical effort consisting only in calculating one two-body matrix element with Gaussian single-particle states. The increasing density of bigger droplets requires the inclusion of correlation effects beyond the two-body order, which are successfully implemented by a density-dependent two-body correlator. With only one adjusted parameter the binding energies and radii of larger droplets and the equation of state of the homogeneous He-4 liquid can be described quantitatively in a physically intuitive and numerically simple way.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2001

The Twist Mode in Atomic Fermi Gases

The quantum-kinetic energy of a finite number of trapped fermionic atoms provides a restoring force for shear motion due to a distortion of the momentum distribution. In analogy to the twist mode of nuclear physics it is proposed that counter-rotating the upper and lower hemisphere of a spherical atomic cloud yields a finite-frequency mode closely related to transverse zero-sound waves in bulk Fermi liquids.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2001

Theory of asymmetric non-additive binary hard-sphere mixtures

We show that the formal procedure of integrating out the degrees of freedom of the small spheres in a binary hard-sphere mixture works equally well for non-additive as it does for additive mixtures. For highly asymmetric mixtures (small size ratios) the resulting effective Hamiltonian of the one-component fluid of big spheres, which consists of an infinite number of many-body interactions, should be accurately approximated by truncating after the term describing the effective pair interaction. Using a density functional treatment developed originally for additive hard-sphere mixtures we determine the zero, one, and two-body contribution to the effective Hamiltonian. We demonstrate that even small degrees of positive or negative non-additivity have significant effect on the shape of the depletion potential. The second virial coefficient $B_2$, corresponding to the effective pair interaction between two big spheres, is found to be a sensitive measure of the effects of non-additivity. The variation of $B_2$ with the density of the small spheres shows significantly different behavior for additive, slightly positive and slightly negative non-additive mixtures. We discuss the possible repercussions of these results for the phase behavior of binary hard-sphere mixtures and suggest that measurements of $B_2$ might provide a means of determining the degree of non-additivity in real colloidal mixtures.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2001

Effective s- and p-Wave Contact Interactions in Trapped Degenerate Fermi Gases

The structure and stability of dilute degenerate Fermi gases trapped in an external potential is discussed with special emphasis on the influence of s- and p-wave interactions. In a first step an Effective Contact Interaction for all partial waves is derived, which reproduces the energy spectrum of the full potential within a mean-field model space. Using the s- and p-wave part the energy density of the multi-component Fermi gas is calculated in Thomas-Fermi approximation. On this basis the stability of the one- and two-component Fermi gas against mean-field induced collapse is investigated. Explicit stability conditions in terms of density and total particle number are given. For the single-component system attractive p-wave interactions limit the density of the gas. In the two-component case a subtle competition of s- and p-wave interactions occurs and gives rise to a rich variety of phenomena. A repulsive p-wave part, for example, can stabilize a two-component system that would otherwise collapse due to an attractive s-wave interaction. It is concluded that the p-wave interaction may have important influence on the structure of degenerate Fermi gases and should not be discarded from the outset.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2001

Generalized effective depletion potentials

We propose that the behavior of asymmetric binary fluid mixtures with a large class of attractive or repulsive interparticle interactions can be understood by mapping onto effective non-additive hard-sphere models. The latter are best analyzed in terms of their underlying depletion potentials which can be exactly scaled onto known additive ones. By tuning the non-additivity, a wide variety of attractive or repulsive generalized depletion potential shapes and associated phase behavior can be ``engineered'', leading, for example, to two ways to stabilize colloidal suspensions by adding smaller particles.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2000

Stability of Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gases Using Effective s- and p-Wave Contact-Interactions

The stability of trapped dilute Fermi gases against collapse towards large densities is studied. A hermitian effective contact-interaction for all partial waves is derived, which is particularly suited for a mean-field description of these systems. Including the s- and p-wave parts explicit stability conditions and critical particle numbers are given as function of the scattering lengths. The p-wave contribution determines the stability of a single-component gas and can substantially modify the stability of a two-component gas. Moreover it may give rise to a novel p-wave stabilized high-density phase.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2000

Depletion potential in hard-sphere mixtures: theory and applications

We present a versatile density functional approach (DFT) for calculating the depletion potential in general fluid mixtures. In contrast to brute force DFT, our approach requires only the equilibrium density profile of the small particles {\em before} the big (test) particle is inserted. For a big particle near a planar wall or a cylinder or another fixed big particle the relevant density profiles are functions of a single variable, which avoids the numerical complications inherent in brute force DFT. We implement our approach for additive hard-sphere mixtures. By investigating the depletion potential for high size asymmetries we assess the regime of validity of the well-known Derjaguin approximation for hard-sphere mixtures and argue that this fails. We provide an accurate parametrization of the depletion potential in hard-sphere fluids which should be useful for effective Hamiltonian studies of phase behavior and colloid structure.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2000

Binary hard-sphere fluids near a hard wall

By using the Rosenfeld density functional we determine the number density profiles of both components of binary hard-sphere fluids close to a planar hard wall as well as the corresponding excess coverage and surface tension. The comparison with published simulation data demonstrates that the Rosenfeld functional, both its original version and sophistications thereof, is superior to previous approaches and exhibits the same excellent accuracy as known from studies of the corresponding one-component system.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv1999

Understanding depletion forces beyond entropy

The effective interaction energy of a colloidal sphere in a suspension containing small amounts of non-ionic polymers and a flat glass surface has been measured and calculated using total internal reflection microscopy (TIRM) and a novel approach within density functional theory (DFT), respectively. Quantitative agreement between experiment and theory demonstrates that the resulting repulsive part of the depletion forces cannot be interpreted entirely in terms of entropic arguments but that particularly at small distances ($\lesssim$ 100 nm) attractive dispersion forces have to be taken into account.

cond-mat↗

arXiv1999

Realistic Interactions and Configuration Mixing in Fermionic Molecular Dynamics

In Fermionic Molecular Dynamics the occurrence of multifragmentation depends strongly on the intrinsic structure of the many-body state. Slater determinants with narrow single-particle states and a cluster substructure show multifragmentation in heavy-ion collisions while those with broad wave functions, which resemble more a shell-model picture, deexcite by particle emission. Which of the two type of states occurs as the ground state minimum or as a local minimum in the energy depends on the effective interaction. Both may equally well reproduce binding energy and radii of nuclei. This ambiguity led us to reinvestigate the derivation of the effective interaction from realistic nucleon-nucleon potentials by means of a unitary correlation operator which is much more suited for dynamical calculations than the G-matrix or the Jastrow method. First results of mixing many Slater determinants are also presented.

nucl-th↗

arXiv1999

Depletion potential in hard sphere fluids

A versatile new approach for calculating the depletion potential in a hard sphere mixture is presented. This is valid for any number of components and for arbitrary densities. We describe two different routes to the depletion potential for the limit in which the density of one component goes to zero. Both routes can be implemented within density functional theory and simulation. We illustrate the approach by calculating the depletion potential for a big hard sphere in a fluid of small spheres near a planar hard wall. The density functional results are in excellent agreement with simulations.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv1999

Depletion forces near curved surfaces

Based on density functional theory the influence of curvature on the depletion potential of a single big hard sphere immersed in a fluid of small hard spheres with packing fraction η_s either inside or outside of a hard spherical cavity of radius R_c is calculated. The relevant features of this potential are analyzed as function of η_s and R_c. There is a very slow convergence towards the flat wall limit R_c \to \infty. Our results allow us to discuss the strength of depletion forces acting near membranes both in normal and lateral directions and to make contact with recent experimental results.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv1998

Frustrated antiferromagnetic quantum spin chains for spin length S > 1

We investigate frustrated antiferromagnetic Heisenberg quantum spin chains at T=0 for S=3/2 and S=2 using the DMRG method. We localize disorder and Lifshitz points, confirming that quantum disorder points can be seen as quantum remnants of classical phase transitions. Both in the S=3/2 and the S=2 chain, we observe the disappearance of effectively free S=1/2 and S=1 end spins respectively. The frustrated spin chain is therefore a suitable system for clearly showing the existence of free end spins S'=[S/2] also in half-integer antiferromagnetic spin chains with S>1/2. We suggest that the first order transition found for S=1 in our previous work is present in all frustrated spin chains with S>1/2, characterized by the disappearance of effectively free end spins with S'=[S/2].

cond-mat↗

arXiv1998

Fermionic Molecular Dynamics and short range correlations

Fermionic Molecular Dynamics (FMD) models a system of fermions by means of many-body states which are composed of antisymmetrized products of single-particle states. These consist of one or several Gaussians localized in coordinate and momentum space. The parameters specifying them are the dynamical variables of the model. As the repulsive core of the nucleon-nucleon interaction induces short range correlations which cannot be accommodated by a Slater determinant, a novel approach, the unitary correlation operator method (UCOM), is applied. The unitary correlator moves two particles away from each other whenever their relative distance is within the repulsive core. The time-dependent variational principle yields the equations of motion for the variables. Energies of the stationary ground states are calculated and compared to exact many-body results for nuclei up to Ca 48. Time-dependent solutions are shown for collisions between nuclei.

nucl-th↗