Department of Physics

Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

We study small-scale and high-frequency turbulent fluctuations in three-dimensional flows under Fourier-mode reduction. The Navier-Stokes equations are evolved on a restricted set of modes, obtained as a projection on a fractal or homogeneous Fourier set. We find a strong sensitivity (reduction) of the high-frequency variability of the Lagrangian velocity fluctuations on the degree of mode decimation, similarly to what is already reported for Eulerian statistics. This is quantified by a tendency towards a quasi-Gaussian statistics, i.e., to a reduction of intermittency, at all scales and frequencies. This can be attributed to a strong depletion of vortex filaments and of the vortex stretching mechanism. Nevertheless, we found that Eulerian and Lagrangian ensembles are still connected by a dimensional bridge-relation which is independent of the degree of Fourier-mode decimation. © 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.

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New Journal of Physics

Lagrangian statistics for Navier-Stokes turbulence under Fourier-mode reduction: Fractal and homogeneous decimations

We investigate the action of global noise and local channels, namely, amplitude-damping, phase-damping, and depolarizing channels, on monogamy of quantum correlations, such as negativity and quantum discord, in three-qubit systems. We discuss the monotonic and non-monotonic variation, and robustness of the monogamy scores. By using monogamy scores, we propose a two-step protocol to conclusively identify the noise applied to the quantum system, by using generalized Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger and generalized W states as resource states. We discuss a possible generalization of the results to higher number of parties. © 2016 Elsevier B.V.

Fulltext

Physics Letters, Section A: General, Atomic and Solid State Physics

Conclusive identification of quantum channels via monogamy of quantum correlations

We investigate the static and dynamical patterns of entanglement in an anisotropic XY model with an alternating transverse magnetic field, which is equivalent to a two-component one-dimensional Fermi gas on a lattice, a system realizable with current technology. Apart from the antiferromagnetic and paramagnetic phases, the model possesses a dimer phase which is not present in the transverse XY model. At zero temperature, we find that the first derivative of bipartite entanglement can detect all the three phases. We analytically show that the model has a "factorization line" on the plane of system parameters, in which the zero-temperature state is separable. Along with investigating the effect of temperature on entanglement in a phase plane, we also report a nonmonotonic behavior of entanglement with respect to temperature in the antiferromagnetic and paramagnetic phases, which is surprisingly absent in the dimer phase. Since the time dynamics of entanglement in a realizable physical system plays an important role in quantum information processing tasks, the evolutions of entanglement at small as well as large time are examined. Consideration of large-time behavior of entanglement helps us to prove that in this model, entanglement is always ergodic. We observe that other quantum correlation measures can qualitatively show similar features in zero and finite temperatures. However, unlike nearest-neighbor entanglement, the nearest-neighbor information-theoretic measures can be both ergodic as well as nonergodic, depending on the system parameters. © 2016 American Physical Society.

Physical Review A

Static and dynamical quantum correlations in phases of an alternating-field XY model

Abstract.: Motor-driven intracellular transport is a complex phenomenon where multiple motor proteins simultaneously attached on to a cargo engage in pulling activity, often leading to tug-of-war, displaying bidirectional motion. However, most mathematical and computational models ignore the details of the motor-cargo interaction. A few studies have focused on more realistic models of cargo transport by including elastic motor-cargo coupling, but either restrict the number of motors and/or use purely phenomenological forms for force-dependent hopping rates. Here, we study a generic model in which N motors are elastically coupled to a cargo, which itself is subjected to thermal noise in the cytoplasm and to an additional external applied force. The motor-hopping rates are chosen to satisfy detailed balance with respect to the energy of elastic stretching. With these assumptions, an (N + 1) -variable master equation is constructed for dynamics of the motor-cargo complex. By expanding the hopping rates to linear order in fluctuations in motor positions, we obtain a linear Fokker-Planck equation. The deterministic equations governing the average quantities are separated out and explicit analytical expressions are obtained for the mean velocity and diffusion coefficient of the cargo. We also study the statistical features of the force experienced by an individual motor and quantitatively characterize the load-sharing among the cargo-bound motors. The mean cargo velocity and the effective diffusion coefficient are found to be decreasing functions of the stiffness. While the increase in the number of motors N does not increase the velocity substantially, it decreases the effective diffusion coefficient which falls as 1/N asymptotically. We further show that the cargo-bound motors share the force exerted on the cargo equally only in the limit of vanishing elastic stiffness; as stiffness is increased, deviations from equal load sharing are observed. Numerical simulations agree with our analytical results where expected. Interestingly, we find in simulations that the stall force of a cargo elastically coupled to motors is independent of the stiffness of the linkers. Graphical abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.] © 2016, EDP Sciences, SIF, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

European Physical Journal E

Transport of organelles by elastically coupled motor proteins

We have investigated the temperature and magnetic field dependence of magnetization (M), specific heat (Cp), and relative sample length change (ΔL/L0) for understanding the field-induced metamagnetic transitions in quasi-one-dimensional monoclinic (α phase) and triclinic (γ phase) CoV2O6 spin chains. With the application of external magnetic field, a sharp peak emerges in Cp(T) below TN=15K in α phase and a hump-like feature appears above TN=6.5K in γ phase due to the field-induced ferrimagnetic and ferromagnetic transitions, respectively. Strong field dependence of linear thermal expansion and large positive magnetostriction have been observed in α phase. Though magnetization data indicate strong spin-orbit coupling for both phases, other measurements show that this effect is very weak for the γ phase. © 2015 Elsevier B.V.

Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials

Field induced metamagnetic transitions in quasi-one-dimensional Ising spin chain CoV2O6

Small particles in suspension in a turbulent fluid have trajectories that do not follow the pathlines of the flow exactly. We investigate the statistics of the angle of deviation φ between the particle and fluid velocities. We show that, when the effects of particle inertia are small, the probability distribution function (PDF) Pφ of this deviation angle shows a power-law region in which Pφ∼φ-4. We also find that the PDFs of the trajectory curvature κ and modulus θ of the torsion have power-law tails that scale, respectively, as Pκ∼κ-5/2, as κ→∞, and Pθ∼θ-3, as θ→∞: These exponents are in agreement with those previously observed for fluid pathlines. We propose a way to measure the complexity of heavy-particle trajectories by the number NI(t,St) of points (up until time t) at which the torsion changes sign. We present numerical evidence that nI(St)≡limt→∞NI(t,St)t∼St-Δ for large St, with Δ≃0.5. © 2016 American Physical Society.

Physical Review E

Deviation-angle and trajectory statistics for inertial particles in turbulence

We obtain the probability distribution functions (PDFs) of the time that a Lagrangian tracer or a heavy inertial particle spends in vortical or strain-dominated regions of a turbulent flow, by carrying out direct numerical simulations of such particles advected by statistically steady, homogeneous, and isotropic turbulence in the forced, three-dimensional, incompressible Navier-Stokes equation. We use the two invariants, Q and R, of the velocity-gradient tensor to distinguish between vortical and strain-dominated regions of the flow and partition the Q-R plane into four different regions depending on the topology of the flow; out of these four regions two correspond to vorticity-dominated regions of the flow and two correspond to strain-dominated ones. We obtain Q and R along the trajectories of tracers and heavy inertial particles and find out the time tpers for which they remain in one of the four regions of the Q-R plane. We find that the PDFs of tpers display exponentially decaying tails for all four regions for tracers and heavy inertial particles. From these PDFs we extract characteristic time scales, which help us to quantify the time that such particles spend in vortical or strain-dominated regions of the flow. © 2016 American Physical Society.

How long do particles spend in vortical regions in turbulent flows?

We investigate the effect of isotope substitution on the electron-phonon interaction in the multiband superconductor MgB2 using tunable laser-based angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. The kink structure around 70 meV in the σ band, which is caused by electron coupling to the E2g phonon mode, is shifted to higher binding energy by ∼3.5 meV in MgB102 and the shift is not affected by superconducting transition. These results serve as the benchmark for investigations of isotope effects in known, unconventional superconductors and newly discovered superconductors where the origin of pairing is unknown. © 2016 American Physical Society.