THE EFFECT OF CRITICAL ELECTRIC FIELDS ON THE ELECTRONIC DISTRIBUTION OF BILAYER ARMCHAIR GRAPHENE NANORIBBONS

We employed tight-binding calculations and Green’s function formalism to investigate the effect of applied electric fields on the energy band and electronic properties of bilayer armchair graphene nanoribbons (BL-AGNRs). The results show that the perpendicular electric field has a strong impact on modifying and controlling the bandgap of BL-AGNRs. At the critical values of this electric field, distortions of energy dispersion in subbands and the formation of new electronic excitation channels occur strongly. These originate from low-lying energies near the Fermi level and move away from the zero-point with the increment of the electric field. Phase transitions and structural changes clearly happen in these materials. The influence of the parallel electric field is less important in changing the gap size, resulting in the absence of the critical voltage over a very wide range [–1.5 V; 1.5 V] for the semiconductor-insulator group. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note the powerful role of the parallel electric field in modifying the energy band and electronic distribution at each energy level. These results contribute to an overall picture of the physics model and electronic structure of BL-AGNRs under stimuli, which can be a pathway to real applications in the future, particularly for electronic devices.

The Occurrence and Prevalence of Time Domain Structures in the Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability at Different Positions Along the Earth’s Magnetospheric Flanks

The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI) is thought to be an important driver for mass, momentum, and energy transfer between the solar wind and magnetosphere. This can occur through global-scale “viscous-like” interactions, as well as through local kinetic processes such as magnetic reconnection and turbulence. An important aspect of these kinetic processes for the dynamics of particles is the electric field parallel to the background magnetic field. Parallel electric field structures that can occur in the KHI include the reconnection electric field of high guide field reconnection, large amplitude ion acoustic waves, as well as time domain structures (TDS) such as double layers and electrostatic solitary waves. In this study, we present a survey of parallel electric field structures observed during three Kelvin Helmholtz events observed by NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS), each at different positions along the magnetosphere’s dusk flank. Using data from MMS’s on-board solitary wave detector (SWD) algorithm, we statistically investigate the occurrence of TDS within the KHI events. We find that early in the KHI development, TDS typically occur in regions with strong field-aligned currents (FACs) on the magnetospheric side of the vortices. Further down the flanks, as the vortices become more rolled up, the prevalence of large electric currents decreases, as well as the prevalence of SWDs. These results suggest that as the instability develops and vortices grow in size along the flanks, kinetic-scale activity becomes less prevalent.

Diagnosing collisionless energy transfer using field–particle correlations: Alfvén-ion cyclotron turbulence

We apply field–particle correlations – a technique that tracks the time-averaged velocity-space structure of the energy density transfer rate between electromagnetic fields and plasma particles – to data drawn from a hybrid Vlasov–Maxwell simulation of Alfvén-ion cyclotron turbulence. Energy transfer in this system is expected to include both Landau and cyclotron wave–particle resonances, unlike previous systems to which the field–particle correlation technique has been applied. In this simulation, the energy transfer rate mediated by the parallel electric field $E_{\Vert }$ comprises approximately 60 % of the total rate, with the remainder mediated by the perpendicular electric field $E_{\bot }$ . The parallel electric field resonantly couples to protons, with the canonical bipolar velocity-space signature of Landau damping identified at many points throughout the simulation. The energy transfer mediated by $E_{\bot }$ preferentially couples to particles with $v_{tp}\lesssim v_{\bot }\lesssim 3v_{tp}$ , where $v_{tp}$ is the proton thermal speed, in agreement with the expected formation of a cyclotron diffusion plateau. Our results demonstrate clearly that the field–particle correlation technique can distinguish distinct channels of energy transfer using single-point measurements, even at points in which multiple channels act simultaneously, and can be used to determine quantitatively the rates of particle energization in each channel.

Effects of collisions on impurity transport driven by electrostatic modes

The turbulence-induced quasi-linear particle flux of a highly charged, collisional impurity species is calculated from the electrostatic gyrokinetic equation including collisions with the bulk ions and the impurities themselves. The equation is solved by an expansion in powers of the impurity charge number $Z$ . In this formalism, the collision operator only affects the impurity flux through the dynamics of the impurities in the direction parallel to the magnetic field. At reactor-relevant collisionality, the parallel dynamics is dominated by the parallel electric field, and collisions have a minor effect on the turbulent particle flux of highly charged, collisional impurities.

Electro-hydrodynamic extraction of DNA from mixtures of DNA and bovine serum albumin

We report separation of genomic DNA (48 kbp) from bovine serum albumin (BSA) by the electro-hydrodynamic coupling between a pressure-driven flow and a parallel electric field.