8,710 research outputs found

    On self-protecting singlets in cuprate superconductors

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    The basal area (Cu-Cu grid) of the cuprate superconductors not only tends to shrink on hole doping, as expected from single electron quantum chemistry, but exhibits also an electronically incompressible "hump'' around optimum doping n_opt = 0.16. The hump collapses near critical doping n_crit = 0.19. We analyze the origin of the hump in terms of a classical liquid of interacting incompressible particles in a container with antiferromagnetic walls. Oxygen holes interacting with the wall form singlets, protect themselves against other holes by an incompressible "spin fence'', and thus interact also with the lattice. Occupation of the CuO_2 lattice with holes must therefore follow a non-double-occupant constraint also for the oxygen cage enclosing the copper hole. Closest packing of self-protecting singlets is found to occur around critical doping; closest packing of paired self-protecting singlets around optimum doping. These singlet-states are bosonic, but are not magnetic polarons.Comment: reviewed version, 7 pages, 10 figure

    Extracellular polymeric bacterial coverages as minimal area surfaces

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    Surfaces formed by extracellular polymeric substances enclosing individual and some small communities of {\it Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans} on plates of hydrophobic silicon and hydrophilic mica are analyzed by means of atomic force microscopy imaging. Accurate nanoscale descriptions of such coverage surfaces are obtained. The good agreement with the predictions of a rather simple but realistic theoretical model allows us to conclude that they correspond, indeed, to minimal area surfaces enclosing a given volume associated with the encased bacteria. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first shape characterization of the coverage formed by these biomolecules, with potential applications to the study of biofilms.Comment: 4 pages, 9 figures. v2: minor changes. v3: Terminology changes and extra references included. v4: Final versio

    Approximation algorithms for multi-facility location

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    This thesis deals with the development and implementation of efficient algorithms to obtain acceptable solutions for the location of several facilities to serve customer sites. The general version of facility location problem is known to be NP-hard; For locating multiple facilities we use Voronoi diagram of initial facility locations to partition the customer sites into k clusters. On each Voronoi region, solutions for single facility problem is obtained by using both Weizfield\u27s algorithm and Center of Gravity. The customer space is again partitioned by using the newly computed locations. This iteration is continued to obtain a better solution for multi-facility location problem. We call the resulting algorithm: Voronoi driven k-median algorithm ; We report experimental results on several test data that include randomly distributed customers and distinctly clustered customers. The observed results show that the proposed approximation algorithm produces good results

    Minimum-Width Double-Strip and Parallelogram Annulus

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    In this paper, we study the problem of computing a minimum-width double-strip or parallelogram annulus that encloses a given set of n points in the plane. A double-strip is a closed region in the plane whose boundary consists of four parallel lines and a parallelogram annulus is a closed region between two edge-parallel parallelograms. We present several first algorithms for these problems. Among them are O(n^2) and O(n^3 log n)-time algorithms that compute a minimum-width double-strip and parallelogram annulus, respectively, when their orientations can be freely chosen
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