Regulation of autoimmunity and donor cell engraftment by recipient Lyt-2+ cells during the graft-versus-host reaction.

When lymphocytes from DBA/2 mice are transferred to (C57BL X DBA/2)F1 (BDF1) mice, the ensuing graft-vs.-host reaction (GVHR) causes an autoimmune illness resembling human SLE. To examine the role of recipient T cells in this process, BDF1 mice were depleted of L3T4+ or Lyt-2+ cells by thymectomy followed by treatment with mAbs to L3T4 or Lyt-2. This produced sustained depletion of these T cell subsets. Subsequent grafting with parental DBA/2 lymphocytes produced autoimmune disease in mice depleted of L3T4+ cells and controls but not in mice depleted of Lyt-2+ cells. Analysis of blood lymphocytes 4 wk after donor cell transfer demonstrated that BDF1 recipients depleted of Lyt-2+ cells were virtually repopulated with donor T lymphocytes, compared with less than or equal to 35% donor cell engraftment in all other groups. Thus, recipient Lyt-2+ cells influence both host cell engraftment and autoimmunity during the parent-into-F1 GVHR

A Minimization Method for Relativistic Electrons in a Mean-Field Approximation of Quantum Electrodynamics

We study a mean-field relativistic model which is able to describe both the behavior of finitely many spin-1/2 particles like electrons and of the Dirac sea which is self-consistently polarized in the presence of the real particles. The model is derived from the QED Hamiltonian in Coulomb gauge neglecting the photon field. All our results are non-perturbative and mathematically rigorous.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure

4-dimensional BF Gravity on the Lattice

We propose the lattice version of $BF$ gravity action whose partition function leads to the product of a particular form of 15-$j$ symbol which corresponds to a 4-simplex. The action is explicitly constructed by lattice $B$ field defined on triangles and link variables defined on dual links and is shown to be invariant under lattice local Lorentz transformation and Kalb-Ramond gauge transformation. We explicitly show that the partition function is Pachner move invariant and thus topological. The action includes the vanishing holonomy constraint which can be interpreted as a gauge fixing condition. This formulation of lattice $BF$ theory can be generalized into arbitrary dimensions.Comment: LaTeX2e, 45 pages, 55 eps figure

Properties of superconductor/ferromagnet structures with spin-dependent scattering

We investigate superconductor/ferromagnet (S/F) hybrid structures in the dirty limit, described by the Usadel equations. More precisely, the oscillations of the critical temperature and critical current with the thickness of the ferromagnetic layers are studied. We show that spin-flip and spin-orbit scattering lead to the decrease of the decay length and the increase of the oscillation period. The critical current decay is more sensitive to these pair-breaking mechanisms than that of the critical temperature. These two scattering mechanisms should be taken into account to get a better agreement between experimental results and theoretical descriptions. We also study the influence of the interface transparency on the properties of S/F structures