The growth of amorphous order in supercooled liquids

in

Close to the glass transition supercooled liquids display an impressive increase of the relaxation time, without any clear sign of growing thermodynamic order, nor correlation length. This is at variance with physical intuition, which suggests that a large relaxation time is always associated to a large correlation length. Even though dynamical length scales were introduced and measured, nothing similar was thought to be possible for thermodynamic lengths.… Read the rest

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Polarons in organic single crystal FET’s

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Organic field effect transistors (OFETs) are providing exciting prospects for potential applications in electronics. The active elements of these devices use “plastic” semiconductors, based on carbon and hydrogen. Among the advantages compared to classical silicon transistors, this new generation of components should combine mechanical flexibility, low weight, transparency and low cost. Enormous progress has been made to improve the performance of these devices through optimising the synthesis processes, drastically reducing the concentration of impurities present.… Read the rest

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Crackling noise: the Barkhausen effect

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The term “crackling noise” refers to the signal that some disordered systems produce as a response to an external driving field smoothly changing in time. Due to the presence of disorder, crackling signals are extremely irregular, despite the steady increase of the external forcing. They are typically characterized by a sequence of pulses of very different sizes and durations, separated by quiescence intervals.… Read the rest

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Dynamic hysteresis in thin and ultra-thin films

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The physics of thin and ultra-thin magnetic films has been extensively studied in the recent past, because of its important implications for applications to high frequency devices. Power losses in ferromagnetic materials generally depend on the frequency of the applied field, a phenomenon referred to as dynamic hysteresis. The problem has great importance from a purely theoretical point of view, for the understanding of the dynamics of disordered magnetic systems, which represents a central issue in non–equilibrium statistical mechanics.… Read the rest

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