Biomedical subjects

Tomas Bohr

Publications and source records attributed to Tomas Bohr.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Polygons on a rotating fluid surface.

We report a novel and spectacular instability of a fluid surface in a rotating system. In a flow driven by rotating the bottom plate of a partially filled, stationary cylindrical container, the shape of the free surface can spontaneously break the axial symmetry and assume the form of a polygon rotating rigidly with a speed different from that of the plate. With water, we have observed polygons with up to 6 corners. It has been known for many years that such flows are prone to symmetry breaking, but apparently the polygonal surface shapes have never been observed. The creation of rotating internal waves in a similar setup was observed for much lower rotation rates, where the free surface remains essentially flat [J. M. Lopez, J. Fluid Mech. 502, 99 (2004). We speculate that the instability is caused by the strong azimuthal shear due to the stationary walls and that it is triggered by minute wobbling of the rotating plate.

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PubMed2005

Shape and stability of a viscous thread.

When a viscous fluid, like oil or syrup, streams from a small orifice and falls freely under gravity, it forms a long slender thread, which can be maintained in a stable, stationary state with lengths up to several meters. We discuss the shape of such liquid threads and their surprising stability. The stationary shapes are discussed within the long-wavelength approximation and compared to experiments. It turns out that the strong advection of the falling fluid can almost outrun the Rayleigh-Plateau instability. The asymptotic shape and stability are independent of viscosity and small perturbations grow with time as exp (C t(1/4)), where the constant is independent of viscosity. The corresponding spatial growth has the form exp [(z/L)(1/8)], where z is the down stream distance and L approximately Q(2) sigma(-2) g and where sigma is the surface tension divided by density, g is the gravity, and Q is the flux. We also show that a slow spatial increase of the gravitational field can make the thread stable.

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PubMed2003

Influence of solitons on the transition to spatiotemporal chaos in coupled map lattices.

We study the transition from laminar to chaotic behavior in deterministic chaotic coupled map lattices and in an extension of the stochastic Domany-Kinzel cellular automaton [E. Domany and W. Kinzel, Phys. Rev. Lett. 53, 311 (1984)]. For the deterministic coupled map lattices, we find evidence that "solitons" can change the nature of the transition: for short soliton lifetimes it is of second order, while for longer but finite lifetimes, it is more reminiscent of a first-order transition. In the second-order regime, the deterministic model behaves like directed percolation with infinitely many absorbing states; we present evidence obtained from the study of bulk properties and the spreading of chaotic seeds in a laminar background. To study the influence of the solitons more specifically, we introduce a soliton including variant of the stochastic Domany-Kinzel cellular automaton. Similar to the deterministic model, we find a transition from second- to first-order behavior due to the solitons, both in a mean-field analysis and in a numerical study of the statistical properties of this stochastic model. Our study illustrates that under the appropriate mapping some deterministic chaotic systems behave like stochastic models; but it is hard to know precisely which degrees of freedom need to be included in such description.

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PubMed1996

Chaotic particle motion under linear surface waves.

We investigate the motion of infinitesimal particles in the flow field inside the fluid under a traveling surface wave. It is shown that, even for two-dimensional waves, a superposition of two or more traveling harmonic waves is enough to generate chaotic particle motion, i.e., Lagrangian chaos. (c) 1996 American Institute of Physics.

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PubMed1993

Critical properties of lattices of diffusively coupled quadratic maps.

We study the critical properties of lattices of coupled logistic maps in the regime where the individual maps are closely above the onset of chaos. We discuss both spatial and temporal characteristics and especially the link between them. We show that the mutual information function between two points on the lattice decays exponentially with distance. In this way we find support for the relation xi approximately lambda(-1/2) between the coherence length xi and the largest Lyapunov exponent lambda which is further corroborated by a detailed study of the spreading of small perturbations. Finally we study the structure function of the lattice field variable. It shows that at the onset of chaos the lattice remains smooth.

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