The internal energy and the spatiotemporal entropy of excitable systems are investigated with the lattice Boltzmann method. The numerical results show that the breakup of spiral wave is attributed to the inadequate supply of energy, i.e., the internal energy of system is smaller than the energy of self-sustained spiral wave. It is observed that the average internal energy of a regular wave state reduces with its spatiotemporal entropy decreasing. Interestingly, although the energy difference between two regular wave states is very small, the different states can be distinguished obviously due to the large difference between their spatiotemporal entropies. In addition, when the unstable spiral wave converts into the spatiotemporal chaos, the internal energy of system decreases, while the spatiotemporal entropy increases, which behaves as the thermodynamic entropy in an isolated system.
In micro-manipulation, the adhesion force has very important influence on behaviors of micro-objects. Here, a theoretical study on the effects of humidity on the adhesion force is presented between atomic force microscope （AFM） tips and substrate. The analysis shows that the precise tip geometry plays a critical role on humidity depen- dence of the adhesion force, which is the dominant factor in manipulating micro-objects in AFM experiments. For a blunt （paraboloid） tip, the adhesion force versus humidity curves tends to the apparent contrast （peak-to-valley corrugation） with a broad range. This paper demonstrates that the abrupt change of the adhesion force has high correla- tion with probe curvatures, which is mediated by coordinates of solid-liquid-vapor contact lines （triple point） on the probe profiles. The study provides insights for further under- standing nanoscale adhesion forces and the way to choose probe shapes in manipulating micro-objects in AFM experiments.
