Casimir effect | EPFL Graph Search

In quantum field theory, the Casimir effect (or Casimir force) is a physical force acting on the macroscopic boundaries of a confined space which arises from the quantum fluctuations of a field. It is named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir, who predicted the effect for electromagnetic systems in 1948. In the same year, Casimir together with Dirk Polder described a similar effect experienced by a neutral atom in the vicinity of a macroscopic interface, which is called the Casimir–Polder force. Their result is a generalization of the London–van der Waals force and includes retardation due to the finite speed of light. The fundamental principles leading to the London–van der Waals force, the Casimir force, and the Casimir–Polder force can be formulated on the same footing. It was not until 1997 that a direct experiment by Steven K. Lamoreaux quantitatively measured the Casimir force to within 5% of the value predicted by the theory.

Effect of alkali hydroxide on calcium silicate hydrate (C-S-H)

Barbara Lothenbach, Karen Scrivener, Yu Yan, Sheng-Yu Yang

This paper investigates the effect of KOH and NaOH on C-S-H structure and solubility. Both KOH and NaOH have a similar effect, they increase pH values and silicon concentrations, and decrease calcium concentrations. At higher alkali hydroxide concentrations, more portlandite precipitates, while amorphous silica dissolves. This increases the Ca/SiC-S-H at low Ca/Si-target but lowers the maximum Ca/Si(C-S-H )from 1.5 to 1.2 in 1 M KOH/NaOH. The amount of alkalis bound in C-S-H increases with increasing alkali hydroxide concentrations and is higher at low Ca/SiC-S-H. KOH/NaOH lead to a structural rearrangement in C-S-H, increasing the interlayer distance, number of layers stacked in c direction and shortening the silica chains. The mean chain lengths (MCL) estimated from FTIR and Raman spectroscopy agree well with the trends from Si-29 NMR. Comparison with the independently developed CASH+ thermodynamic model showed a good agreement between the observed and modelled changes, including the shortening of the MCL.

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2022

Unleashing the power of semantic text analysis: a complex systems approach

Andrea Martini

In the present information era, a huge amount of machine-readable data is available regarding scientific publications. Such unprecedented wealth of data offers the opportunity to investigate science itself as a complex interacting system by means of quantitative approaches. These kind of studies have the potential to provide new insights on the large-scale organization of science and the driving mechanisms underlying its evolution. A particularly important aspect of these data is the semantic information present within publications as it grants access to the concepts used by scientists to describe their findings. Nevertheless, the presence of the so-called buzzwords, \ie terms that are not specific and are used indistinctly in many contexts, hinders the emerging of the thematic organization of scientific articles. In this Thesis, I resume my original contribution to the problem of leveraging the semantic information contained in a corpus of documents. Specifically, I have developed an information-theoretic measure, based on the maximum entropy principle, to quantify the information content of scientific concepts. This measure provides an objective and powerful way to identify generic concepts acting as buzzwords, which increase the noise present in the semantic similarity between articles. I prove that the removal of generic concepts is beneficial in terms of the sparsity of the similarity network, thus allowing the detection of communities of articles that are related to more specific themes. The same effect is observed when describing the corpus of articles in terms of topics, namely clusters of concepts that compose the papers as a mixture. Moreover, I applied the method to a collection of web documents obtaining a similar effect despite their differences with scientific articles. Regarding the scientific knowledge, another important aspect I examine is the temporal evolution of the concept generality, as it may potentially describe typical patterns in the evolution of concepts that can highlight the way in which they are consumed over time.

EPFL2018

Vacuum Stability in Supersymmetric Effective Theories

Leonardo Brizi

The main topics discussed in this thesis are supersymmetric low-energy effective theories and metastability conditions in generic non-renormalizable models with global and local supersymmetry. In the first part we discuss the conditions under which the low-energy expansion in space-time derivatives preserves supersymmetry implying that heavy multiplets can be more efficiently integrated out directly at the superfield level. These conditions translate into the requirements that also fermions and auxiliary fields should be small compared to the heavy mass scale. They apply not only to the matter sector, but also to the gravitational one if present, and imply in that case that the gravitino mass should be small. We finally give a simple prescription to integrate out heavy chiral and vector superfields consisting respectively in imposing stationarity of the superpotential and of the Kähler potential; the procedure holds in the same form both for global and local supersymmetry. In the second part we study general criteria for the existence of metastable vacua which break global supersymmetry in models with local gauge symmetries. In particular we present a strategy to define an absolute upper bound on the mass of the lightest scalar field which depends on the geometrical properties of the Kähler target manifold. This bound can be saturated by properly tuning the superpotential and its positivity therefore represents a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of metastable vacua. It is derived by looking at the subspace of all those directions in field space for which an arbitrary supersymmetric mass term is not allowed and scalar masses are controlled by supersymmetry-breaking splitting effects. This subspace includes not only the direction of supersymmetry breaking, but also the directions of gauge symmetry breaking and the lightest scalar is in general a linear combination of fields spanning all these directions. Our purpose is to show that the largest value for the lightest mass is in general achieved when the lightest scalar is a combination of the Goldstone and the Goldstino partners. We conclude by computing the effects induced by the integration of heavy multiplets on the light masses. In particular we focus on the sGoldstino partners and we show that heavy chiral multiplets induce a negative level-repulsion effect that tends to compromise vacuum stability, whereas heavy vector multiplets in general induce a positive-definite contribution. Our results find application in the context of string-inspired supergravity models, where metastability conditions can be used to discriminate among different compactification scenarios and supersymmetric effective theories can be used to face the problem of moduli stabilization.