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Notes: A coarse-grained model for surfactant chain molecules at interfaces in the high density regime is studied using an off-lattice Monte Carlo technique. The surfactant molecules are modeled as chains consisting of a small number (e.g., seven) of effective monomers. For the modeling of lipid monolayers, each effective monomer is thought to represent several CH2 groups of the alkane chain, but applications of the model to other polymers end grafted at solid surfaces also should be possible. The head segments are restricted to move in the adsorption plane, but otherwise do not differ from the effective monomers, which all interact with Lennard-Jones potentials. Bond angle and bond length potentials take into account chain connectivity and chain stiffness. The advantage of this crude model is that its phase diagram can be studied in detail. Temperature scans show two phase transitions, a tilting transition at low temperatures between a tilted and an untilted phase, and a melting transition at high temperatures where the lattice of head groups loses its crystalline order. © 1995 American Institute of Physics.

Notes: Continuum Monte Carlo simulations at constant pressure are performed on short chain molecules at surfaces. The rodlike chains, consisting of seven effective monomers, are attached at one end to a flat two dimensional substrate. It is found that the model exhibits phases similar to the liquid condensed and liquid expanded phases of Langmuir monolayers. The model is investigated here for a wide range of pressures and temperatures using a special form of constant pressure simulation compatible with the symmetry breaking during tilting transitions in the liquid condensed phases. At low pressures, the chains undergo a tilting transition exhibiting tilt directions towards nearest and also next nearest neighbors depending on temperature. At elevated temperatures and low pressure the film enters a fluidlike phase similar to the liquid expanded phase observed in experiment. © 1996 American Institute of Physics.

Notes: Tokamaks exhibit several types of relaxation oscillations such as sawteeth, fishbones and Edge Localized Modes (ELMs) under appropriate conditions. Several authors have introduced model nonlinear dynamic systems with a small number of degrees of freedom which can illustrate the generic characteristics of such oscillations. In these models, one focuses on physically "relevant" degrees of freedom, without attempting to simulate all the myriad details of the fundamentally nonlinear tokamak phenomena. Such degrees of freedom often involve the plasma macroscopic quantities such as pressure or density and also some measure of the plasma turbulence, which is thought to control transport. In addition, "coherent" modes may be involved in the dynamics of relaxation, as well as radial electric fields, sheared flows, etc. In the present work, an extension of an earlier sawtooth model (which involved only two degrees of freedom) due to the authors is presented. The dynamical consequences of a pressure-driven "coherent" mode, which interacts with the turbulence in a specific manner, are investigated. Varying only the two parameters related to the coherent mode, the bifurcation properties of the system have been studied. These turn out to be remarkably rich and varied and qualitatively similar to the behavior found experimentally in actual tokamaks. The dynamic model presented involves only continuous nonlinearities and is the simplest known to the authors that can yield features such as sawteeth, "compound sawteeth" with partial crashes, "monster" sawteeth, metastability, intermittency, chaos, periodic and "grassy" ELMing in appropriate regions of parameter space. The results suggest that linear stability analysis of systems, while useful in elucidating instability drives, can be misleading in understanding the dynamics of nonlinear systems over time scales much longer than linear growth times and states far from stable equilibria. © 1999 American Institute of Physics.

Notes: This Brief Communication investigates the influence of toroidal effects (due to the coupling of various poloidal harmonics) on the nonlinear saturation of the m=1 island. Bounds are obtained relating the aspect ratio, the shear at the q=1 surface, and the saturated island width. Provided these bounds are satisfied, it is then found that the cylindrical m=1 island theory of Thyagaraja and Haas [Phys. Fluids B 3, 580 (1991)] is valid for toroidal geometry.

Notes: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible relationships between transport properties such as thermal diffusivity and resistivity on the one hand, and the magnetic properties such as q profile and toroidal flux change on the other, in tokamaks that exist under macroscopically quasistationary conditions. It is experimentally well established that when the sources are held constant over times long compared with energy and particle confinement times, tokamak discharges can exist in a quasistationary state with or without periodic sawteeth superposed on the basic equilibrium.The principal aim of this study is to provide qualitative physical insight into the nature of such states. For simplicity, single-fluid equations are assumed and the analysis is restricted to a cylinder model. The complete set of conservation equations comprising continuity, pressure balance, Ohm's law, and energy balance are used along with appropriate sources. The conductive energy loss is assumed to occur due to an anomalous thermal diffusivity. Following earlier time-dependent studies of tokamak transport phenomenology due to the authors [Haas and Thyagaraja, Plasma Phys. Controlled Fusion 28, 1093 (1986)], the friction force in the generalized Ohm's law is assumed to be described by an effective resistivity tensor with its principal axes in the poloidal and toroidal directions. The toroidal resistivity is taken to be of order Spitzer while the poloidal component ηθ is assumed to be anomalously large compared with ηz. A range of phenomena involving Ohmic discharges, auxiliary heated discharges, and noninductively driven currents is investigated. Attention is drawn to the joint implications of the conservation laws and the general forms of the constitutive relations for the structure of the profiles and conditions for the existence of equilibria. In particular, it is shown that βp〉1 is achievable in macroscopically steady conditions, only if a sufficiently strong particle source is present in addition to an energy source. It also follows from the analysis that low βp discharges require an anomalous thermal force type term in Ohm's law, in addition to the anomalous poloidal resistivity.Recent experimental results on sawtoothing discharges are used to extend the theoretical considerations from strictly steady discharges to those involving sawteeth. A simple nonlinear dynamical model of sawtoothing is constructed and used to illustrate some of the features of sawtooth oscillations. The paper is intended to complement fuller numerical studies. It may help in understanding transport and large-scale relaxation processes like the sawtooth in tokamaks by providing a set of theoretical relations that can be subjected to a direct experimental test. It is a feature of the results that they are independent of the details of the turbulent dynamics, which are ultimately thought to be responsible both for the form and scaling of the constitutive properties considered.

Notes: A general representation of finite-volume-preserving maps induced by solenoidal vector fields in periodic cylinders is derived. An important special case is the area preserving Hamiltonian maps which include the standard mapping. Applications to computational problems in plasma physics are briefly indicated.