In this study, we examined the fine structure of the compound eyes of a household fly and precisely replicated its entire structure using a low-temperature atomic layer deposition technique. The surface of the fly eye is found to be covered by highly packed protuberances, which potentially increases visual efficiency through increased photon capture for a given stimulus. The alumina replica was...

A field-theoretic description of the critical behavior of weakly disordered systems with a p-component order parameter is given. For systems of an arbitrary dimension in the range from three to four, a renormalization group analysis of the effective replica Hamiltonian of the model with an interaction potential without replica symmetry is given in the two-loop approximation. For the case of the...

We review uses of the generalized-ensemble algorithms for free-energy calculations in protein folding. Two of the well-known methods are multicanonical algorithm and replicaexchange method; the latter is also referred to as parallel tempering. We present a new generalized-ensemble algorithm that combines the merits of the two methods; it is referred to as the replica-exchange multicanonical alg...

We use the replica method in order to obtain an expression for the variational free energy of an Ising ferromagnet on a dilute Viana-Bray lattice in the presence of random external fields. Introducing a global order parameter, in the replica-symmetric context, the problem is reduced to the analysis of the solutions of a non linear integral equation. At zero temperature, and under some restricti...

We present a new type of the Hamiltonian replica-exchange method, where the van der Waals radius parameter and not the temperature is exchanged. By decreasing the van der Waals radii, which control spatial sizes of atoms, this Hamiltonian replica-exchange method overcomes the steric restrictions and energy barriers. Furthermore, the simulation based on this method escapes from the local-minimum...

An algorithm is proposed for computing equilibrium averages of Markov chains which su er from metastability – the tendency to remain in one or more subsets of state space for long time intervals. The algorithm, called the parallel replica method (or ParRep), uses many parallel processors to explore these subsets more e ciently. Numerical simulations on a simplemodel demonstrate consistency of t...

Replication is a key factor for improving the availability and reliability of data in a distributed database system. A Major restriction is that replicated copies should behave like a single copy. Many replica control algorithms have been proposed for solving the problem, but the performance of various replica control algorithms has received relatively little attention. In this paper, the perfo...