by C. Barry Wired News, 21 Dec 2006 A new solar panel is 100 times thinner and could be significantly cheaper than traditional photovoltaic materials, making it a possible competitor to the silicon-dominated world of solar energy. Building materials such as steel, glass and roofing may soon have embedded solar cells thanks to a thin-film [...]
by W.-C. Mueller et al. arXiv.org E-print Archive, 21 Dec 2006 The inertial-range properties of quasi-stationary hydrodynamic turbulence under solid-body rotation are studied via high-resolution direct numerical simulations. For strong rotation the nonlinear energy cascade exhibits depletion and a pronounced anisotropy with the energy flux proceeding mainly perpendicularly to the rotation axis. This corresponds to [...]
by A. Llor arXiv.org E-print Archive, 22 Dec 2006 In practically all turbulent flows, turbulent energy decay is present and competes with numerous other phenomena. In Kolmogorov’s theory, decay proceeds by transfer from large energy-containing scales towards small viscous scales through the “inertial cascade.” Yet, this description cannot predict an actual decay rate, even in [...]
by M. Peach optics.org, 22 Dec 2006 Researchers have long known that the use of optical instead of electrical signals for transferring data within a computer chip might result in significant performance enhancements since light signals can carry more information faster. Yet, “buffering” or temporarily holding data on the chip is critical in controlling the [...]
University of Washington Press Release, 21 Dec 2006 To your left runs a high-voltage power cable that is worn, but still physically sound. To your right runs a cable that looks identical, but damaged insulation means the cable is vulnerable to a short. Can you tell the difference? Even most power companies don’t know the [...]
by S. Tung et al. Physical Review Letters, 15 Dec 2006 We report the observation of vortex pinning in rotating gaseous Bose-Einstein condensates. Vortices are pinned to columnar pinning sites created by a corotating optical lattice superimposed on the rotating Bose-Einstein condensates. We study the effects of two types of optical lattice: triangular and square. [...]
by S. Funke et al. arXiv.org E-print Archive, 22 Dec 2006 A fundamental class of problems in wireless communication is concerned with the assignment of suitable transmission powers to wireless devices/stations such that the resulting communication graph satisfies certain desired properties and the overall energy consumed is minimized. Many concrete communication tasks in a wireless [...]
by J. Wagner et al. arXiv.org E-print Archive, 22 Dec 2006 In this correspondence the cumulants of the mutual information of the flat Rayleigh fading amplify-and-forward MIMO relay channel without direct link between source and destination are derived in the large array limit. The analysis is based on the replica trick and covers both spatially [...]
by P.R. Ivankov et al. arXiv.org E-print Archive, 22 Dec 2006 A framework for virtual reality of engineering objects has been developed. This framework may simulate different equipment related to virtual reality. It supports 6D dynamics, ordinary differential equations, finite formulas, vector and matrix operations. The framework also supports embedding of external software. Read more
by E. Sundararajan et al. arXiv.org E-print Archive, 25 Dec 2006 The development of Internet wide resources for general purpose parallel computing poses the challenging task of matching computation and communication complexity. A number of parallel computing models exist that address this for traditional parallel architectures, and there are a number of emerging models that [...]