Polar Chemoreceptor Clustering by Coupled Trimers of Dimers

Receptors of bacterial chemotaxis form clusters at the cell poles, where clusters act as "antennas" to amplify small changes in ligand concentration. Interestingly, chemoreceptors cluster at multiple length scales. At the smallest scale, receptors form dimers, which assemble into stable timers of dimers. At a large scale, trimers form large polar clusters composed of thousands of receptors. Although much is known about the signaling properties emerging from receptor clusters, it is unknown how receptors localize at the cell poles and what the cluster-size determining factors are. Here, we present a model of polar receptor clustering based on coupled trimers of dimers, where cluster size is determined as a minimum of the cluster-membrane free energy. This energy has contributions from the cluster-membrane elastic energy, penalizing large clusters due to their high intrinsic curvature, and receptor-receptor coupling favoring large clusters. We find that the reduced cluster-membrane curvature mismatch at the curved cell poles leads to large and robust polar clusters in line with experimental observation, while lateral clusters are efficiently suppressed.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, and 1 tabl

Winds and Shocks in Galaxy Clusters: Shock Acceleration on an Intergalactic Scale

We review the possible roles of large scale shocks as particle accelerators in clusters of galaxies. Recent observational and theoretical work has suggested that high energy charged particles may constitute a substantial pressure component in clusters. If true that would alter the expected dynamical evolution of clusters and increase the dynamical masses consistent with hydrostatic equilibrium. Moderately strong shocks are probably common in clusters, through the actions of several agents. The most obvious of these agents include winds from galaxies undergoing intense episodes of starbursts, active galaxies and cosmic inflows, such as accretion and cluster mergers. We describe our own work derived from simulations of large scale structure formation, in which we have, for the first time, explicitly included passive components of high energy particles. We find, indeed that shocks associated with these large scale flows can lead to nonthermal particle pressures big enough to influence cluster dynamics. These same simulations allow us also to compute nonthermal emissions from the clusters. Here we present resulting predictions of gamma-ray fluxes.Comment: 12 pages, uses aipproc.cls and aipproc.sty, to appear in Proc. of the International Symposium on "High Energy Gamma-Ray Astrophysics" (published as a volume of AIP Conference Series) eds. F. Aharonian and H. Voel

Galaxy Clusters: Cosmic High-Energy Laboratories to Study the Structure of Our Universe

This contribution illustrates the study of galaxy clusters as astrophysical laboratories as well as probes for the large-scale structure of the Universe. Using the REFLEX Cluster Survey, the measurement of the statistics of the large-scale structure on scales up to 500 $h^{-1}$ Mpc is illustrated. The results clearly favour a low density Universe. Clusters constitute, in addition, well defined astrophysical laboratory environments in which some very interesting large-scale phenomena can be studied. As an illustration we show some spectacular new XMM X-ray spectroscopic results on the thermal structure of cooling flows and the interaction effects of AGN with this hot intracluster medium. The X-ray observations with XMM-Newton show a lack of spectral evidence for large amounts of cooling and condensing gas in the centers of galaxy clusters believed to harbour strong cooling flows. To explain these findings we consider the heating of the core regions of clusters by jets from a central AGN. We find that the power output the AGN jets is well sufficient. The requirements such a heating model has to fulfill are explored and we find a very promising scenario of self-regulated Bondi accretion of the central black hole.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, Contribution to the MPA/ESO/MPE/USM conference "Lighthouses of the Universe", Sunyaev et al. (eds.), ESO Astrophysics Symposia, Springer Verla

Alignments of the Dominant Galaxies in Poor Clusters

We have examined the orientations of brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) in poor MKW and AWM clusters and find that, like their counterparts in richer Abell clusters, poor cluster BCGs exhibit a strong propensity to be aligned with the principal axes of their host clusters as well as the surrounding distribution of nearby (< 20/h Mpc) Abell clusters. The processes responsible for dominant galaxy alignments are therefore independent of cluster richness. We argue that these alignments most likely arise from anisotropic infall of material into clusters along large-scale filaments.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

The effect of distant large scale structure on weak lensing mass estimates

We quantify the uncertainty in weak lensing mass estimates of clusters of galaxies, caused by distant (uncorrelated) large scale structure along the line of sight. We find that the effect is fairly small for deep observations (20<R<26) of massive clusters (sigma=1000 km/s) at intermediate redshifts, where the bulk of the sources are at high redshifts compared to the cluster redshift. If the lensing signal is measured out to 1.5 h_{50}^{-1} Mpc the typical 1sigma relative uncertainty in the mass is about 6%. However, in other situations the induced uncertainty can be larger. For instance, in the case of nearby clusters, such as the Coma cluster, background structures introduce a considerable uncertainty in the mass, limiting the maximum achievable S/N-ratio to \sim 7, even for deep observations. The noise in the cluster mass estimate caused by the large scale structure increases with increasing aperture size, which will also complicate attempts to constrain cluster mass profiles at large distances from the cluster centre. However, the distant large scale structure studied here can be considered an additional (statistical) source of error, and by averaging the results of several clusters the noise is decreased.Comment: accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics 11 pages, 9 figure