Moon-forming impactor as a source of Earth's basal mantle anomalies.

Seismic images of Earth's interior have revealed two continent-sized anomalies with low seismic velocities, known as the large low-velocity provinces (LLVPs), in the lowermost mantle. The LLVPs are often interpreted as intrinsically dense heterogeneities that are compositionally distinct from the surrounding mantle. Here we show that LLVPs may represent buried relics of Theia mantle material (TMM) that was preserved in proto-Earth's mantle after the Moon-forming giant impact.

Complex-time velocity autocorrelation functions for Lennard-Jones fluids with quantum pair-product propagators.

We use the pair-product approximation to the complex-time quantum mechanical propagator to obtain accurate quantum mechanical results for the symmetrized velocity autocorrelation function of a Lennard-Jones fluid at two points on the thermodynamic phase diagram. A variety of tests are performed to determine the accuracy of the method and understand its breakdown at longer times. We report quantitative results for the initial 0.

Optimized Monte Carlo sampling in forward-backward semiclassical dynamics.

Forward-backward semiclassical dynamics (FBSD) provides a rigorous and powerful methodology for calculating time correlation functions in condensed phase systems characterized by substantial quantum mechanical effects associated with zero-point motion, quantum dispersion, or identical particle exchange symmetries. The efficiency of these simulations arises from the use of classical trajectories to capture all dynamical information. However, full quantization of the density operator makes these calculations rather expensive compared to fully classical molecular dynamics simulations.