Recent years have seen a tremendous progress in the microscopic theoretical treatment of surfaces and processes on surfaces. While some decades ago a phenomenological thermodynamic approach was dominant, a variety of surface properties can now be described from first principles, i.e. without invoking any empirical parameters. Consequently, the field of theoretical surface science is no longer l...

We investigate a new research area: we are interested in the ultimate ther-modynamic cost of computing from x to y. Other than its fundamental importance , such research has potential implications in miniaturization of VLSI chips and applications in pattern recognition. It turns out that the theory of thermodynamic cost of computation can be axiomatically developed. Our fundamental theorem conn...

The isotropic-nematic (I-N) phase transition in hard ellipsoid fluids has been studied by computer simulation, using the Gibbs-Duhem integration technique introduced by Kofke; and theoretically, using Onsager theory and the Parsons-Lee improvement. In the simulations, the I-N coexistence line is mapped out in the P -x plane, where P is the pressure and x is the elongation, by numerically integr...

Nearly every model of DNA computation proposed to date depends upon sequence-specific hybridization operations. In order to better predict the binding specificity of arbitrary deoxyoligonucleotides, a simulator named bind is implemented. Bind operates on a single template DNA sequence and a number of shorter primer sequences. For each primer sequence, bind calculates a theoretical melting tempe...

Vertical velocities compatible with climatological heating functions are computed. The physical assumptions in the thermodynamic equation incorporate radiational heating, heat flux from the underlying boundary, and heat of condensation. The computation is performed for the four seasons, and a comparison with other studies indicates that the method gives fairly good results that may be related t...

Nanomagnetic memory and logic circuits are attractive integrated platforms for studying the fundamental thermodynamic limits of computation. Using the stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation, we show by direct calculation that the amount of energy dissipated during nanomagnet erasure approaches Landauer's thermodynamic limit of kTln(2) with high precision when the external magnetic fields a...

The thermodynamic descriptions of the perovskite phase SrZrO3 and the TbBr3-KBr molten salt system were carried out using the available experimental information. Special attention was paid to the structural behavior of SrZrO3 and the decomposition of K3TbBr6 at low temperature, respectively, to illustrate how to select an appropriate thermodynamic model based on crystal structure and chemistry ...

We propose a method to compute a probably approximately correct (PAC) histogram of observations with a refresh rate of Θ(1) time units per histogram sample on a random geometric graph with noise-free links. The delay in computation is Θ( √ n) time units. We further extend our approach to a network with noisy links. While the refresh rate remains Θ(1) time units per sample, the delay increases t...

This study investigates the heat transfer in a simple pure fluid whose temperature is slightly above its critical temperature. We propose an efficient numerical method to predict the heat transfer in such fluids when the gravity can be neglected. The method, based on a simplified thermodynamic approach, is compared with direct numerical simulations of the Navier-Stokes and energy equations perf...