The purpose of physics is to describe nature from elementary particles all the way up to cosmological objects like cluster of galaxies and black holes. Although a unified description for all this spectrum of events is desirable, an one-theory-fits-all would be highly impractical. To not get lost in unnecessary details, effective descriptions are mandatory. Here we analyze what are the dynamics that may emerge from a full quantum description when one does not have access to all the degrees of freedom of a system. More concretely, we describe the properties of the dynamics that arise from quantum mechanics if one has only access to a coarse grained description of the system. We obtain that the effective maps are not necessarily of Kraus form, due to correlations between accessible and non-accessible degrees of freedom, and that the distance between two effective states may increase under the action of the effective map. We expect our framework to be useful for addressing questions such as the thermalization of closed quantum systems, as well as the description of measurements in quantum mechanics.

We study a variant of the classic viscous fingering instability in Hele-Shaw cells where the interface separating the fluids is elastic, and presents a curvature-dependent bending rigidity. By employing a second-order mode-coupling approach we investigate how the elastic nature of the interface influences the morphology of emerging interfacial patterns. This is done by focusing our attention on a conventionally stable situation in which the fluids involved have the same viscosity. In this framework, we show that the inclusion of nonlinear effects plays a crucial role in inducing sizable interfacial instabilities, as well as in determining the ultimate shape of the pattern-forming structures. Particularly, we have found that the emergence of either narrow or wide fingers can be regulated by tuning a rigidity fraction parameter. Our weakly nonlinear findings reinforce the importance of the so-called curvature weakening effect, which favors the development of fingers in regions of lower rigidity.

The centrifugally driven viscous fingering problem arises when two immiscible fluids of different densities flow in a rotating Hele-Shaw cell. In this conventional setting an interplay between capillary and centrifugal forces makes the fluid-fluid interface unstable, leading to the formation of fingered structures that compete dynamically and reach different lengths. In this context, it is known that finger competition is very sensitive to changes in the viscosity contrast between the fluids. We study a variant of such a rotating flow problem where the fluids react and produce a gellike phase at their separating boundary. This interface is assumed to be elastic, presenting a curvature-dependent bending rigidity. A perturbative weakly nonlinear approach is used to investigate how the elastic nature of the interface affects finger competition events. Our results unveil a very different dynamic scenario, in which finger length variability is not regulated by the viscosity contrast, but rather determined by two controlling quantities: a characteristic radius and a rigidity fraction parameter. By properly tuning these quantities one can describe a whole range of finger competition behaviors even if the viscosity contrast is kept unchanged.

A vortex sheet formalism is used to search for equilibrium shapes in the centrifugally driven interfacial elastic fingering problem. We study the development of interfacial instabilities when a viscous fluid surrounded by another of smaller density flows in the confined environment of a rotating Hele-Shaw cell. The peculiarity of the situation is associated to the fact that, due to a chemical reaction, the two-fluid boundary becomes an elastic layer. The interplay between centrifugal and elastic forces leads to the formation of a rich variety of stationary shapes. Visually striking equilibrium morphologies are obtained from the numerical solution of a nonlinear differential equation for the interface curvature (the shape equation), determined by a zero vorticity condition. Classification of the various families of shapes is made via two dimensionless parameters: an effective bending rigidity (ratio of elastic to centrifugal effects) and a geometrical radius of gyration.

No abstract