Nematic elastomers exhibit a rich elastic response to external stresses. Of particular interest is the semisoft response of elastomers with an anisotropy direction (z) frozen in by a double cross-linking process. This response is characterized by a stress-strain curve for stresses along x perpendicular to z that rises initially, exhibits a nearly flat plateau between two critical values of stra...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Mobilization of the colon and dissection of the mesentery are difficult laparoscopic techniques. Traditional methods have been used for this dissection, but often with great difficulty. The ultrasonically activated shears, when introduced in 1993, had the possibility to make this dissection less technically difficult. This is a retrospective review of the use of these ...

For the first time, the Relativistic Mean Field (RMF) model is applied to the shears band recently observed in 84 37Rb. Signals of the appearance of the shears mechanism, such as smooth decreases of the shears angle and of the B(M1)/B(E2) ratio with keeping the nearly constant tilt angle, are well reproduced. Thus it is shown that the microscopic RMF model can nicely describe the shears band in...

There are two types of 3D shears in channel flows: (U(y, z), 0, 0) and (U(y), 0, W (y)). Both are important in organizing the phase space structures of the channel flows. Stability criteria of the type I 3D shears were studied in [Li, 2010]. Here we study the stability criteria of the type II 3D shears. We also provide more support to the idea of resolution of a turbulence paradox, introduced i...

Sommerfeld paradox roughly says that mathematically Couette linear shear is linearly stable for all Reynolds number, but experimentally arbitrarily small perturbations can induce the transition from the linear shear to turbulence when the Reynolds number is large enough. The main idea of our resolution of this paradox is to show that there is a sequence of linearly unstable shears which approac...

Aims. Accurate measurement of gravitational shear from images of distant galaxies is one of the most direct ways of studying the distribution of mass in the universe. We describe an implementation of a technique that is based on the shapelets formalism. Methods. The shapelets technique describes PSF and observed images in terms of Gauss-Hermite expansions (Gaussians times polynomials). It allow...

A tokamak's confinement time is greatly increased by a transport barrier (TB), a region having a high pressure gradient and usually also a strongly sheared plasma flow. The pressure gradient in a TB can be limited by ideal magnetohydrodynamic instabilities with a high toroidal mode number n ("ballooning modes"). Previous studies in the limit n--> infinity showed that arbitrarily small (but nonz...

We used scaled experimental (analog) models with wet clay to investigate how conjugate sets of steeply dipping strike-slip faults affect deformation patterns during a subsequent phase of extension. In all twophase experiments, an initial phase of strike-slip deformation produces a long, wide deformation zone consisting of subvertical Riedel shears; synthetic R-shears and antithetic R'-shears tr...

We present a group of methods for decomposing an arbitrary 3D volume rotation into a sequence of simple shear (i.e., regular shift) operations. We explore different types of shear operations: 2D beam shear, a shear in one coordinate based on the other two coordinates; 2D slice shear, a shear of a volume slice (in two coordinates) according to the third coordinate; and 2D slice–beam shear, the c...