In the present thesis, a thermodynamic theory is developed for driven soft matter systems like polymer solutions and colloidal suspensions. Within this theory, notions like the work applied to the system externally and the heat dissipated into a heat reservoir will be defined consistently. Going beyond mean values, all quantities are defined along a single trajectory. This thermodynamic approac...

It is well known that the complex structure of the QCD vacuum can, in some regimes, be parametrized by local vacuum condensates, i.e. the expectation values of operators where all the perturbative vacuum fluctuations are taken out at the best of our ability . The first attempt to calculate the effect of non-perturbative vacuum condensates on the energy levels of heavy quarkonia was performed in...

BACKGROUND A fluctuating blood glucose level is one of the risks of chronic complications in diabetes. Previous studies indicated that hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) values apparently improved after initiation of self-monitoring blood glucose (SMBG). The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the frequency of SMBG, long-term fluctuatation of HbA1c, and risks of chronic complic...

Heating Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) system can be viewed as elastic load to provide demand response. Existing work usually used HVAC to do the load following or load shaping based on given control signals or objectives. However, optimal external control signals may not always be available. Without such control signals, how to make a tradeoff between the fluctuation of non-renewable ...

A loudness measurement which takes account of the spectral and temporal structure of a sound event, better than the A-weighted SPL, has advantages. Nevertheless, it is not universally accepted because the loudness measurement does not allow a complete judgment of complex sound events comparable to human hearing. In addition to loudness, there are other psychoacoustic parameters such as sharpnes...

Quantum fluctuations play a critical role in determining the steady-state and transient response of a laser when there is a small number of particles in the system. These fluctuations, and the fact that a lowest energy state of the system exists, can suppress lasing and enhance spontaneous emission around threshold. Dynamic switching between two characteristic system states can dominate the flu...

Networks of excitatory and inhibitory neurons display asynchronous irregular (AI) states, where the activities of the two populations are balanced. At the single cell level, it was shown that neurons subject to balanced and noisy synaptic inputs can display enhanced responsiveness. We show here that this enhanced responsiveness is also present at the network level, but only when single neurons ...

Based on the dual-superconductor picture, we study the confinement physics in QCD in terms of the monopole in the maximally abelian (MA) gauge using the SU(2) lattice QCD. In the MA gauge, the off-diagonal gluon component is forced to be small, and hence microscopic abelian dominance on the link variable is observed in the lattice QCD for the whole region of β. ¿From the gluon-propagator analys...

Fluctuations associated with stretched E2 transitions from high spin levels in nuclei around 168 Yb are investigated by a cranked shell model extended to include residual two-body interactions. It is found that the gamma-ray energies behave like random variables and the energy spectra show the Poisson fluctuation, in the cranked mean field model without the residual interaction. With two-body r...

We show that trial-to-trial variability in sensory detection of a weak visual stimulus is dramatically diminished when rather than presenting a fixed stimulus contrast, fluctuations in a subject's judgment are matched by fluctuations in stimulus contrast. This attenuation of fluctuations does not involve a change in the subject's psychometric function. The result is consistent with the interpre...