für Naturforschung in cooperation with the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Dieses Werk wurde im Jahr 2013 vom Verlag Zeitschrift für Naturforschung in Zusammenarbeit mit der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V. digitalisiert und unter folgender Lizenz veröffentlicht: Creative Commons Namen...

We study the origin of buoyancy forces acting on a larger particle moving in a granular medium subject to horizontal shaking and its corrections before fluidiza-tion. In the fluid limit Archimedes' law is verified; before the limit memory effects counteract buoyancy, as also found experimentally. The origin of the friction is an excluded volume effect between active particles, which we study mo...

We study linear time dispersive and dissipative systems. Very often such systems are not conservative and the standard spectral theory can not be applied. We develop a mathematically consistent framework allowing (i) to constructively determine if a given time dispersive system can be extended to a conservative one; (ii) to construct that very conservative system – which we show is essentially ...

We consider a particle dragged through a medium at constant temperature as described by a Langevin equation with a time-dependent potential. The time dependence is specified by an external protocol. We give conditions on potential and protocol under which the fluctuations of the dissipative work satisfy an exact symmetry for all times. We also present counterexamples to that fluctuation theorem...

A quantum damped-polariton model is constructed for an inhomogeneous anisotropic linear dielectric with arbitrary dispersion in space and time. The model Hamiltonian is completely diagonalized by determining the creation and annihilation operators for the fundamental polariton modes as specific linear combinations of the basic dynamical variables. Explicit expressions are derived for the time-d...

We study the linearized equations describing the propagation of gravitational waves through dust. In the leading order of the WKB approximation, dust behaves as a nondispersive, non-dissipative medium. Taking advantage of these features, we explore the possibility that a gravitational wave from a distant source gets trapped by the gravitational field of a long filament of galaxies of the kind s...

The peculiar features of the mixing in the neutral pseudoscalar mesonsK0−K0 can be introduced by the analogy to the optical polarization. The time-reversed not-invariant processes and the related phenomenon of CP -nonconservation can be then joined to the dissipative effects which yield a not vanishing imaginary part in the relevant propagation of electromagnetic radiation in a medium. Thus, th...

We report on the first experimental evidence of localized structures (dissipative solitons) in a one-dimensional optical Fabry–Pérot passive Kerr cavity. The Kerr-like medium is a non-instantaneous, diffusive ultra-thin film of liquid crystal inserted in a low-finesse cavity. Solitons with oscillating tails are experimentally observed in this system that can lock together to form complexes of s...

Measurements of electron transfer rates as well as of charge transport characteristics in DNA produced a number of seemingly contradictory results, ranging from insulating behaviour to the suggestion that DNA is an efficient medium for charge transport. Among other factors, environmental effects appear to play a crucial role in determining the effectivity of charge propagation along the double ...