Topological insulators (superconductors) are materials that host symmetry-protected metallic edge states in an insulating (superconducting) bulk. Although they are well understood, a thermodynamic description of these materials remained elusive, firstly because the edges yield a non-extensive contribution to the thermodynamic potential, and secondly because topological field theories involve no...

We consider the thermodynamics of adsorption of gases in porous solids from both the perspective of absolute properties which appear naturally in theoretical studies and that of excess properties which are measured in experiments. Our thermodynamic description starts by treating the gas (or gas mixture) plus porous solid system as a mixture to which we can apply solution thermodynamics. We show...

Liquid water confined between hydrophobic objects of sufficient size becomes metastable with respect to its vapor at separations smaller than a critical drying distance. Macroscopic thermodynamic arguments predicting this distance have been restricted to the limit of perfectly rigid confining materials. However, no material is perfectly rigid and it is of interest to account for this fact in th...

About fifty years ago, the Turing instability demonstrated that even simple reactiondiffusion systems might lead to spatial order and differentiation, while the Rayleigh-Bénard instability showed that the maintenance of nonequilibrium might be the source of order in fluids subjected to a thermodynamic force above a critical value. Therefore, distance from global equilibrium in the form of magni...

The ability of purified multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) to adsorb diclofenac and triclosan in aqueous solutions was examined by equilibrium, kinetic, and thermodynamic parameters. The results of SEM image, BET specific surface area, XRD, TGA, and FTIR spectra indicated that the characteristics of MWCNTs were improved after purification with nitric acid. Batch experiments illustrated that...

The standard formulation of tunneling transport rests on an open-boundary modeling. There, conserving approximations to nonequilibrium Green function or quantum statistical mechanics provide consistent but computational costly approaches; alternatively, the use of density-dependent ballistic-transport calculations (e.g., Lang 1995 Phys. Rev. B 52 5335), here denoted 'DBT', provides computationa...