Conventional high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra are usually measured in homogeneous, high magnetic fields (>1 T), which are produced by expensive and immobile superconducting magnets. We show that chemically resolved xenon (Xe) NMR spectroscopy of liquid samples can be measured in the Earth's magnetic field (5 x 10(-5) T) with a continuous flow of hyperpolarized Xe gas. It...

Transport phenomena, including mass, momentum and heat transfer and the coupling of transport and chemical reactions, play a dominant role in chemical engineering processes. For example, a distillation process in a packed column involves fluid flow (momentum transfer) of liquid and vapor phases, mass transfer within a homogeneous phase and on the liquid and vapor interface, and heat transfer wi...

We report here uniform and defect-free homeotropic alignment of nematic liquid crystal having negative dielectric anisotropy (Deo0) on cleaned substrates, which can be changed to bright state (homogeneous alignment) by applying an electric field. However, non-uniformity in the bright state would not be desirable for display devices. Therefore, silane treated and gently rubbed substrates have be...

The nucleation of NAD and NAT from HNO3/H2O and HNO3/H2SO4/H2O solution droplets is investigated both theoretically and experimentally with respect to the formation of polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs). Our analysis shows that homogeneous NAD and NAT nucleation from liquid aerosols is insufficient to explain the number densities of large nitric acid containing particles recently observed in the...

The kinetics and microscopic mechanisms of laser melting and disintegration of thin Ni and Au films irradiated by a short, from 200 fs to 150 ps, laser pulse are investigated in a coupled atomistic-continuum computational model. The model provides a detailed atomic-level description of fast nonequilibrium processes of laser melting and film disintegration and, at the same time, ensures an adequ...

We show that, when a gold nanoparticle is coated by a thin layer of nematic liquid crystal, the nanoparticle surface has a strong effect on the director orientation, but, surprisingly, this deformation can enhance the surface plasmon splitting. We consider three plausible liquid crystal director configurations in zero electric field: boojum pair (north-south pole configuration), baseball (tetra...

The Liquid Xenon Gamma-Ray Imaging Telescope (LXeGRIT) is a balloon born experiment sensitive to γ–rays in the energy band of 0.2–20 MeV. The main detector is a time projection chamber filled with high purity liquid xenon (LXeTPC), in which the three–dimensional location and energy deposit of individual γ–ray interactions are accurately measured in one homogeneous volume. To determine the γ–ray...

We report the observation of optical vortices in a laser beam propagating through the stripe pattern of a cholesteric liquid crystal. The liquid crystal is confined in a cell with homogeneous boundary conditions and forms a diffraction phase grating. Optical vortices are produced by edge dislocations of the cholesteric grating. The vortices show up as spots of zero light intensity in the diffra...

Liquids in contact with solids are submitted to intermolecular forces making liquids heterogeneous and stress tensors are not any more spherical as in homogeneous bulks. The aim of this article is to show that a square-gradient functional representing liquid-vapor interface free energy corrected with a liquid density functional at solid surfaces is a well adapted model to study structures of ve...

1. Introduction The classical Stefan problem is a model for phase transitions in solid-liquid systems and accounts for heat diiusion and exchange of latent heat in a homogeneous medium. The strong formulation of this model corresponds to a moving boundary problem involving a parabolic diiusion equation for each phase and a transmission condition prescribed at the interface separating the phases...