105,624 research outputs found
Mapping vesicle shapes into the phase diagram: A comparison of experiment and theory
Phase-contrast microscopy is used to monitor the shapes of micron-scale
fluid-phase phospholipid-bilayer vesicles in aqueous solution. At fixed
temperature, each vesicle undergoes thermal shape fluctuations. We are able
experimentally to characterize the thermal shape ensemble by digitizing the
vesicle outline in real time and storing the time-sequence of images. Analysis
of this ensemble using the area-difference-elasticity (ADE) model of vesicle
shapes allows us to associate (map) each time-sequence to a point in the
zero-temperature (shape) phase diagram. Changing the laboratory temperature
modifies the control parameters (area, volume, etc.) of each vesicle, so it
sweeps out a trajectory across the theoretical phase diagram. It is a
nontrivial test of the ADE model to check that these trajectories remain
confined to regions of the phase diagram where the corresponding shapes are
locally stable. In particular, we study the thermal trajectories of three
prolate vesicles which, upon heating, experienced a mechanical instability
leading to budding. We verify that the position of the observed instability and
the geometry of the budded shape are in reasonable accord with the theoretical
predictions. The inability of previous experiments to detect the ``hidden''
control parameters (relaxed area difference and spontaneous curvature) make
this the first direct quantitative confrontation between vesicle-shape theory
and experiment.Comment: submitted to PRE, LaTeX, 26 pages, 11 ps-fi
Revisiting Complex Moments For 2D Shape Representation and Image Normalization
When comparing 2D shapes, a key issue is their normalization. Translation and
scale are easily taken care of by removing the mean and normalizing the energy.
However, defining and computing the orientation of a 2D shape is not so simple.
In fact, although for elongated shapes the principal axis can be used to define
one of two possible orientations, there is no such tool for general shapes. As
we show in the paper, previous approaches fail to compute the orientation of
even noiseless observations of simple shapes. We address this problem. In the
paper, we show how to uniquely define the orientation of an arbitrary 2D shape,
in terms of what we call its Principal Moments. We show that a small subset of
these moments suffice to represent the underlying 2D shape and propose a new
method to efficiently compute the shape orientation: Principal Moment Analysis.
Finally, we discuss how this method can further be applied to normalize
grey-level images. Besides the theoretical proof of correctness, we describe
experiments demonstrating robustness to noise and illustrating the method with
real images.Comment: 69 pages, 20 figure
Optimal bispectrum constraints on single-field models of inflation
We use WMAP 9-year bispectrum data to constrain the free parameters of an 'effective field theory' describing fluctuations in single-field inflation. The Lagrangian of the theory contains a finite number of operators associated with unknown mass scales. Each operator produces a fixed bispectrum shape, which we decompose into partial waves in order to construct a likelihood function. Based on this likelihood we are able to constrain four linearly independent combinations of the mass scales. As an example of our framework we specialize our results to the case of 'Dirac-Born-Infeld' and 'ghost' inflation and obtain the posterior probability for each model, which in Bayesian schemes is a useful tool for model comparison. Our results suggest that DBI-like models with two or more free parameters are disfavoured by the data by comparison with single parameter models in the same class
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