No abstract available

[en] The Congress covered the entire field of mechanics: analytical, solid, and fluid mechanics, including applications. However, the urge to try new ways and improve the scientific value of such a meeting led the Congress Committee to decide on several changes of earlier policies and the introduction of some new activities. Thus, a few topics were to be selected for special emphasis and furthermore, for the first time, poster-sessions would appear. Three topics were selected for special emphasis, namely marine-structure wave interaction, micromechanics of multicomponent media, development of chaotic behaviour in dynamical systems. There were only two general lectures, the Nobel laureate professor Hannes Alfven (Sweden) was invited to give the opening lecture and professor Joseph Keller (USA) was invited to give the closing lecture. In addition, 16 sectional lecturers were invited. The number of contributed papers submitted to the congress was 787. Of these, 418 were presented, 235 as lectures and 183 as posters. (Auth.)

No abstract available

No abstract available

No abstract available

[en] We present a summary of the presentations and discussions that were made in Working Group 4 during AAC 2008.

No abstract available

[en] The Blazhko effect is a long-term, generally irregular modulation of the light curves that occurs in a sizeable number of RR Lyrae stars. The physical origin of the effect has been a puzzle ever since its discovery over a hundred years ago. We build here upon the recent observational and theoretical work of Szabo et al. on RRab stars who found with hydrodynamical simulations that the fundamental pulsation mode can get destabilized by a 9:2 resonant interaction with the 9th overtone. Alternating pulsation cycles arise, although these remain periodic, i.e., not modulated as in the observations. Here we use the amplitude equation formalism to study this nonlinear, resonant interaction between the two modes. We show that not only does the fundamental pulsation mode break up into a period-two cycle through the nonlinear, resonant interaction with the overtone, but that the amplitudes are modulated, and that in a broad range of parameters the modulations are irregular as in the observations. This irregular behavior is in fact chaotic and arises from a strange attractor in the dynamics.

[en] Implementing the capability to perform fast ignition experiments, as well as, radiography experiments on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) places stringent requirements on the control of each of the beam's pointing and overall wavefront quality. One quad of the NIF beams, 4 beam pairs, will be utilized for these experiments and hydrodynamic and particle-in-cell simulations indicate that for the fast ignition experiments, these beams will be required to deliver 50% (4.0 kJ) of their total energy (7.96 kJ) within a 40 (micro)m diameter spot at the end of a fast ignition cone target. This requirement implies a stringent pointing and overall phase conjugation error budget on the adaptive optics system used to correct these beam lines. The overall encircled energy requirement is more readily met by phasing of the beams in pairs but still requires high Strehl ratios, Sr, and rms tip/tilt errors of approximately one (micro)rad. To accomplish this task we have designed an interferometric adaptive optics system capable of beam pointing, high Strehl ratio and beam phasing with a single pixilated MEMS deformable mirror and interferometric wave-front sensor. We present the design of a testbed used to evaluate the performance of this wave-front sensor below along with simulations of its expected performance level

[en] A simple physical concept of statistical theory is extended, that is a generalized pressure in momentum space conjugate to the usual one. As well as opening the possibility of an alternative method of analysis, an additional hydrodynamic equation is developed, that implies a new physical interpretation of the standard theory by providing a new picture of thermodynamics. It will help the researchers to investigate the manner in which the physical system displays the specifically statistical properties form a different viewpoint. Finally, Bose condensation and Pauli exclusion are considered