The stationary response of ferromagnetic nanoparticles with mixed uniaxial and cubic anisotropy to superimposed external ac and dc bias fields of arbitrary strength is investigated using Brown's ...continuous diffusion of orientations model W. F. Brown Jr., Phys. Rev. 130, 1677 (1963). The susceptibility and dynamic magnetic hysteresis (DMH) loops of an individual nanoparticle are calculated in extensive ranges of the superimposed fields, their orientation, damping, temperature, and specific mixed anisotropy parameter. The DMH loops and nonlinear dynamic susceptibility strongly depend on the dc and ac field strengths, the polar angle between the easy axis of the particle and the external field vectors, as well as the temperature and damping, simultaneously displaying a marked dependence on the mixed anisotropy parameter.
Thermal fluctuations of nanomagnets driven by spin-polarized currents are treated via the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation as generalized to include both the random thermal noise field and ...Slonczewski spin-transfer torque terms. The magnetization reversal time of such a nanomagnet is then evaluated for wide ranges of damping by using a method which generalizes the solution of the so-called Kramers turnover problem for mechanical Brownian particles, thereby bridging the very low damping and intermediate damping Kramers escape rates, to the analogous magnetic turnover problem. The reversal time is then evaluated for a nanomagnet with the free energy density given in the standard form of superimposed easy-plane and in-plane easy-axis anisotropies with the dc bias field along the easy axis.
Generating quasi-monochromatic, femtosecond γ-ray pulses via Thomson scattering (TS) demands exceptional electron beam (e-beam) quality, such as percent-scale energy spread and five-dimensional ...brightness over 1016 A m-2. We show that near-GeV e-beams with these metrics can be accelerated in a cavity of electron density, driven with an incoherent stack of Joule-scale laser pulses through a mm-size, dense plasma (n0 ∼ 1019 cm−3). Changing the time delay, frequency difference, and energy ratio of the stack components controls the e-beam phase space on the femtosecond scale, while the modest energy of the optical driver helps afford kHz-scale repetition rate at manageable average power. Blue-shifting one stack component by a considerable fraction of the carrier frequency makes the stack immune to self-compression. This, in turn, minimizes uncontrolled variation in the cavity shape, suppressing continuous injection of ambient plasma electrons, preserving a single, ultra-bright electron bunch. In addition, weak focusing of the trailing component of the stack induces periodic injection, generating, in a single shot, a train of bunches with controllable energy spacing and femtosecond synchronization. These designer e-beams, inaccessible to conventional acceleration methods, generate, via TS, gigawatt γ-ray pulses (or multi-color pulse trains) with the mean energy in the range of interest for nuclear photonics (4-16 MeV), containing over 106 photons within a microsteradian-scale observation cone.
Photoionization by a femtosecond, terawatt laser pulse generates a plasma column in a neutral ambient gas. Velocity of electrons, pushed by the laser ponderomotive force along the column surface, ...couples to the the radial density gradient at the column boundary, generating an azimuthally polarized THz rotational current (RC). The same mechanism produces the low-frequency RC in a leaky plasma channel. Applying external voltage to the channel induces a radially non-uniform electron flow (direct current) and a constant, azimuthally polarized magnetic field. Coupling them to the electron density perturbations adds two more terms to the RC. The surface RC in the plasma column supports a broadband, evanescent THz signal accompanying the wake. A few millimeters away from the column, rapid evanescence of high-frequency components turns this THz signal into a radially polarized, single-cycle pulse.
Annular quasimonoenergetic electron beams with a mean energy in the range 200-400 MeV and charge on the order of several picocoulombs were generated in a laser wakefield accelerator and subsequently ...accelerated using a plasma afterburner in a two-stage gas cell. Generation of these beams is associated with injection occurring on the density down ramp between the stages. This well-localized injection produces a bunch of electrons performing coherent betatron oscillations in the wakefield, resulting in a significant increase in the x-ray yield. Annular electron distributions are detected in 40% of shots under optimal conditions. Simultaneous control of the pulse duration and frequency chirp enables optimization of both the energy and the energy spread of the annular beam and boosts the radiant energy per unit charge by almost an order of magnitude. These well-defined annular distributions of electrons are a promising source of high-brightness laser plasma-based x rays.
Petawatt, picosecond laser pulses offer rich opportunities in generating synchrotron x-rays. This paper concentrates on the regimes accessible with the PETAL laser, which is a part of the Laser ...Megajoule (LMJ) facility. We explore two physically distinct scenarios through Particle-in-Cell simulations. The first one realizes in a dense plasma, such that the period of electron Langmuir oscillations is much shorter than the pulse duration. Hallmarks of this regime are longitudinal breakup (“self-modulation”) of the picosecond-scale laser pulse and excitation of a rapidly evolving broken plasma wake. It is found that electron beams with a charge of several tens of nC can be obtained, with a quasi-Maxwellian energy distribution extending to a few-GeV level. In the second scenario, at lower plasma densities, the pulse is shorter than the electron plasma period. The pulse blows out plasma electrons, creating a single accelerating cavity, while injection on the density downramp creates a nC quasi-monoenergetic electron bunch within the cavity. This bunch accelerates without degradation beyond 1 GeV. The x-ray sources in the self-modulated regime offer a high number of photons (∼1012 ) with the slowly decaying energy spectra extending beyond 60 keV. In turn, quasimonoenergetic character of the electron beam in the blowout regime results in the synchrotron-like spectra with the critical energy around 10 MeV and a number of photons >109 . Yet, much smaller source duration and transverse size increase the x-ray brilliance by more than an order of magnitude against the self-modulated case, also favoring high spatial and temporal resolution in x-ray imaging. In all explored cases, accelerated electrons emit synchrotron x-rays of high brilliance, B>1020photons/s/mm2/mrad2/0.1%BW . Synchrotron sources driven by picosecond kilojoule lasers may thus find an application in x-ray diagnostics on such facilities such as the LMJ or National Ignition Facility (NIF).
The perturbation theory approach via the Smoluchowski equation to the nonlinear dielectric relaxation of noninteracting permanent electric dipoles (Coffey and Paranjape, Proc R Ir Acad A 78:17,
1978
...) and the analogous Brownian magnetic relaxation of ferrofluids where Néel relaxation is ignored is revisited for the particular case of a strong dc bias field superimposed on a
strong
ac field. Unlike weak ac and strong bias dc fields, a frequency-dependent dc term now appears in the response as well as additional nonlinear terms at the fundamental and second harmonic frequencies. These may be experimentally observable particularly in the ferrofluid application. The corresponding results for the dc term for anomalous relaxation based on the fractional Smoluchowski equation are also given.
Thermal fluctuations of nanomagnets driven by spin-polarized currents are treated via the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation generalized to include both the random thermal noise field and the ...Slonczewski spin-transfer torque term. By averaging this stochastic (Langevin) equation over its realizations, the explicit infinite hierarchy of differential-recurrence relations for statistical moments (averaged spherical harmonics) is derived for arbitrary demagnetizing factors and magnetocrystalline anisotropy for the generic nanopillar model of a spin-torque device comprising two ferromagnetic strata representing the free and fixed layers and a nonmagnetic conducting spacer all sandwiched between two ohmic contacts. The influence of thermal fluctuations and spin-transfer torques on relevant switching characteristics, such as the stationary magnetization, the magnetization reversal time, etc., is calculated by solving the hierarchy for wide ranges of temperature, damping, external magnetic field, and spin-polarized current, indicating new spin-torque effects in the thermally assisted magnetization reversal comprising several orders of magnitude. In particular, a pronounced dependence of the switching characteristics on the directions of the external magnetic field and the spin polarization exists.
Spin transfer torque and bias field effects on the magnetization reversal time of a nanoscale ferromagnet are investigated in the very-low-damping regime via the energy-controlled diffusion equation. ...That equation is rooted in a generalization of the Kramers escape rate theory for point Brownian particles in a potential to the magnetic relaxation of a macrospin. Using the mean first-passage method, the reversal time is then evaluated in closed integral form for a nanomagnet with the free-energy density given in the standard form of superimposed easy-plane and in-plane easy-axis anisotropies with the dc bias field along the easy axis. The results completely agree with those yielded by independent numerical methods.
The fragmentation of the Isoscalar Giant Quadrupole Resonance (ISGQR) in 40Ca has been investigated in high energy-resolution experiments using proton inelastic scattering at Ep=200 MeV. Fine ...structure is observed in the region of the ISGQR and its characteristic energy scales are extracted from the experimental data by means of a wavelet analysis. The experimental scales are well described by Random Phase Approximation (RPA) and second-RPA calculations with an effective interaction derived from a realistic nucleon–nucleon interaction by the Unitary Correlation Operator Method (UCOM). In these results characteristic scales are already present at the mean-field level pointing to their origination in Landau damping, in contrast to the findings in heavier nuclei and also to SRPA calculations for 40Ca based on phenomenological effective interactions, where fine structure is explained by the coupling to two-particle–two-hole (2p–2h) states.