Relaxation Pathways in Metallic Glasses

At temperatures below the glass transition temperature, physical properties of metallic glasses, such as density, viscosity, electrical resistivity or enthalpy, slowly evolve with time. This is the process of physical aging that occurs among all types of glasses and leads to structural changes at the microscopic level. Even though the relaxation pathways are ruled by thermodynamics as the glass attempts to re-attain thermodynamic equilibrium, they are steered by sluggish kinetics at the microscopic level. Understanding the structural and dynamic pathways of the relaxing glassy state is still one of the grand challenges in materials physics. We review some of the recent experimental advances made in understanding the nature of the relaxation phenomenon in metallic glasses and its implications to the macroscopic and microscopic properties changes of the relaxing glass.     

Using internal domain-specific languages to inherit tool support and modularity for model transformations

Software and Systems Modeling - Model-driven engineering (MDE) has proved to be a useful approach to cope with today’s ever-growing complexity in the development of software systems;...     

House Prices as a Result of Trading Activities: A Patient Trader Model

Computational Economics - We present a new modeling approach for house price movements as a consequence of the trading behavior of market agents. In our modeling approach, all agents are assumed to...     

Dependency solving: A separate concern in component evolution management

Maintenance of component-based software platforms often has to face rapid evolution of software components. Component dependencies, conflicts, and package managers with dependency solving capabilities are the key ingredients of prevalent software maintenance technologies that have been proposed to keep software installations synchronized with evolving component repositories. We review state-of-the-art package managers and their ability to keep up with evolution at the current growth rate of popular component-based platforms, and conclude that their dependency solving abilities are not up to the task.We show that the complexity of the underlying upgrade planning problem is NP-complete even for seemingly simple component models, and argue that the principal source of complexity lies in multiple available versions of components. We then discuss the need of expressive languages for user preferences, which makes the problem even more challenging.We propose to establish dependency solving as a separate concern from other upgrade aspects, and present CUDF as a formalism to describe upgrade scenarios. By analyzing the result of an international dependency solving competition, we provide evidence that the proposed approach is viable.     

Phase-sensitive non-classicality criteria for phase-independent quantum states

A recently introduced hierarchy of necessary and sufficient conditions for non-classicality of a quantum state [Th. Richter and W. Vogel, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 283601 (2002)] is applied to the characterization of phase-insensitive quantum states. Even under such conditions it may be important to analyse the relation between different phase values in the quadrature distributions in order to demonstrate the non-classical nature of the state under study.     

Mechanical material characterization of photosensitive polymers

In addition to the development of materials and technologies for smart HARMST applications the analysis of the thermo-mechanical material properties seems to be necessary to describe the photosensitive polymers applied. To do this, a microtensile analysis system has been developed to determine stress–strain curves, Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio. The results are compared with those of dynamical mechanical thermal analysis and discussed.