Smartphone use during the leisure theme park visit experience: The role of contextual factors

Recent studies indicate the increasingly important role of smartphones in the customer experience. This research proposes and empirically validates a conceptual framework capturing the influence of five contextual factors on the types and intensity of smartphone use and therefore on the leisure experience during a theme park visit. A mixed research protocol combining an ethnographic approach, leisure experience narratives, and phenomenological interviews is constructed. Because of the secluded nature of theme parks, smartphones play a key role during downtime periods and thus allow visitors to enhance their leisure experience through relational and hedonic use.     

Stability of bipolarons in conjugated polymers

The bipolarons appear to be the main entity for charge collection in conducting polymers. But their existence is challenged by the Coulomb repulsion. We study the stability of a bipolaron (BP) as a function of the strength of the long range Coulomb interaction U with and without impurities for both weak and strong electron-phonon coupling (). We find that in a free state the BP is stable only for small values of U for the weak coupling limit but stays stable until relatively large U in the strong coupling case. Being bound to a dopant, the bipolaron becomes stable in a wide range of U. Free BPs near the metal-polymer contact also are stabilized due to a screening by image charges. These results are important for charge injection at polymer-metal interfaces in the context of organic light-emitting diodes.     

Reconstruction of the Charge Density Wave State Under the Applied Electric Field

Charge density wave (CDW) under an applied electric field in constraint geometry experience stresses, which can easily exceed a plastic threshold. The stress is resolved by the ground state reconstruction which proceed via creation of topological defects like solitons and dislocations??the CDW vortices. These states can be observed experimentally either in average at macroscopic scales of X-ray and multijunction space resolved studies, at mesoscopic scales of coherent X-ray micro-diffraction and nano-junctions or individually as by the STM. Here, we report numerical modeling taking into account multiple fields in their mutual nonlinear interactions: the phase and the amplitude of the CDW order parameter, distributions of the electric field, of the density and the current of normal carriers. Following events of creation and the subsequent evolution of dislocations, we find that vortices are formed in the junction when the voltage across, or the current through, exceed a threshold. The number of vortices remnant in the reconstructed ground state increases stepwise??in agreement with experiments. The vortex core concentrates the voltage drop across the junction giving rise to observed peaks of the interlayer tunneling. The studied reconstruction in junctions of CDWs may be relevant to modern efforts of the field-effect transformations in other correlated electronic systems.     

Ferroelectricity in synthetic metals: Reality and hypotheses

Ferroelectricity is one of the demanded effects in fundamental and applied solid state physics. Till now, the ferroelectrics were available mostly in the inorganic world. The breakthrough of 2000s was an unexpected discovery of the ferroelectricity related to the charge ordering in quasi-1D organic conductors (TMTTF)₂X, and in some layered compounds. The achieved understanding of underlying mechanisms allows to speculate on synthesis of a would-be ferroelectric polymer: it must possess a combination of dimerizations of sites and bonds, one of which must be build-in and another spontaneous. The theory of these “combined Peierls states” predicts an existence of solitons (dimerization kinks) with non-integer variable charges—they are the walls separating domains with opposite electric polarization. The physics of these exotic solitons will serve to describe transient processes in ferroelectric polymers, linking optical- and low-frequency properties. The promising example of such an (AB)_x conjugated polymer has already appeared but was not yet tested for ferroelectricity. A wide chemical search is necessary because of a problematic competition of an anti-ferroelectric phase, whose occurrence depends on complicated details of the interchain coupling.     

Excitonic Mechanism of Local Phase Transformations by Optical Pumping

Transformations of cooperative electronic states by impacts of optical pumping and/or electrostatic doping is a new mainstream in physics of correlated systems. Here we present a semi-phenomenological modeling of spatio-temporal effects in a system where the light absorption goes through a channel creating the excitons—intra-molecular ones or bound electron–hole pairs—and finally the condensate of optical excitons feeds and stimulates phase transformations. Interacting with a near-critical order parameter and deformations, the excitons are subject to self-trapping. That locally enhances their density which can surpass a critical value to trigger the phase transformation, even if the mean density is below the required threshold. The model can be used e.g. as a simplified version of optically induced neutral-ionic transitions in organic chain compounds.