Piezothermal effect in a spinning gas.

A spinning gas, heated adiabatically through axial compression, is known to exhibit a rotation-dependent heat capacity. However, as equilibrium is approached, an effect is identified here wherein the temperature does not grow homogeneously in the radial direction, but develops a temperature differential with the hottest region on axis, at the maximum of the centrifugal potential energy. This phenomenon, which we call a piezothermal effect, is shown to grow bilinearly with the compression rate and the amplitude of the potential. Numerical simulations confirm a simple model of this effect, which can be generalized to other forms of potential energy and methods of heating.

Enhanced efficiency of internal combustion engines by employing spinning gas.

The efficiency of the internal combustion engine might be enhanced by employing spinning gas. A gas spinning at near sonic velocities has an effectively higher heat capacity, which allows practical fuel cycles, which are far from the Carnot efficiency, to approach more closely the Carnot efficiency. A remarkable gain in fuel efficiency is shown to be theoretically possible for the Otto and Diesel cycles. The use of a flywheel, in principle, could produce even greater increases in efficiency.

Reduced compressibility and an inverse problem for a spinning gas.

A spinning ideal gas in a cylinder with a smooth surface is shown to have unusual properties. First, under compression parallel to the axis of rotation, the spinning gas exhibits reduced compressibility because energy can be stored in the rotation. Second, the spinning breaks the symmetry under which partial pressures of a mixture of gases simply add proportional to the constituent number densities. Thus, remarkably, in a mixture of spinning gases, an inverse problem can be formulated such that the gas constituents can be determined through external measurements only.

Ponderomotive acceleration of hot electrons in tenuous plasmas.

The oscillation-center Hamiltonian is derived for a relativistic electron injected with an arbitrary momentum in a linearly polarized laser pulse propagating in tenuous plasma, assuming that the pulse length is smaller than the plasma wavelength. For hot electrons generated by collisions with ions under an intense laser drive, multiple regimes of ponderomotive acceleration are identified, and the laser dispersion is shown to affect the process at plasma densities down to 10(17) cm-3. We consider the regime when the cold plasma is not accelerated, requiring a/gammag<<1, where a is the laser parameter, proportional to the field amplitude, and gammag is the group-velocity Lorentz factor. In this case, the Lorentz factor gamma of hot electrons does not exceed Gamma [triple bond] alpha gammag after acceleration, assuming its initial value also satisfies gamma0