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Non-Poissonian statistics, aging and "blinking'" quantum dots. (open access)

Non-Poissonian statistics, aging and "blinking'" quantum dots.

This dissertation addresses the delicate problem of aging in complex systems characterized by non-Poissonian statistics. With reference to a generic two-states system interacting with a bath it is shown that to properly describe the evolution of such a system within the formalism of the continuous time random walk (CTRW), it has to be taken into account that, if the system is prepared at time t=0 and the observation of the system starts at a later time ta>0, the distribution of the first sojourn times in each of the two states depends on ta, the age of the system. It is shown that this aging property in the fractional derivative formalism forces to introduce a fractional index depending on time. It is shown also that, when a stationary condition exists, the Onsager regression principle is fulfilled only if the system is aged and consequently if an infinitely aged distribution for the first sojourn times is adopted in the CTRW formalism used to describe the system itself. This dissertation, as final result, shows how to extend to the non-Poisson case the Kubo Anderson (KA) lineshape theory, so as to turn it into a theoretical tool adequate to describe the time evolution of …
Date: August 2004
Creator: Aquino, Gerardo
System: The UNT Digital Library

Random growth of interfaces: Statistical analysis of single columns and detection of critical events.

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The dynamics of growth and formation of surfaces and interfaces is becoming very important for the understanding of the origin and the behavior of a wide range of natural and industrial dynamical processes. The first part of the paper is focused on the interesting field of the random growth of surfaces and interfaces, which finds application in physics, geology, biology, economics, and engineering among others. In this part it is studied the random growth of surfaces from within the perspective of a single column, namely, the fluctuation of the column height around the mean value, which is depicted as being subordinated to a standard fluctuation-dissipation process with friction g. It is argued that the main properties of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang theory are derived by identifying the distribution of return times to y(0) = 0, which is a truncated inverse power law, with the distribution of subordination times. The agreement of the theoretical prediction with the numerical treatment of the model of ballistic deposition is remarkably good, in spite of the finite size effects affecting this model. The second part of the paper deals with the efficiency of the diffusion entropy analysis (DEA) when applied to the studies of stromatolites. In this case …
Date: August 2004
Creator: Failla, Roberto
System: The UNT Digital Library