A new potential radiosensitizer: ammonium persulfate modified WCNTs

Radiotherapy plays a very important role in cancer treatment. Radiosensitizers have been widely used to enhance the radiosensitivity of cancer cells at given radiations. Here we fabricate multi-walled carbon nanotubes with ammonium persulfate, and get very short samples with 30-50 nanometer length. Cell viability assay show that f-WCNTs induce cell death significantly. We hypothesize that free radicals originated from hydroxyl and carbonyl groups on the surface of f-WCNTs lead cell damage

Sexual size dimorphism in anurans: roles of mating system and habitat types

BACKGROUND: Sexual size dimorphism (SSD) is widespread and variable among animals. Sexual selection, fecundity selection and ecological divergence between males and females are the major evolutionary forces of SSD. However, the influences of mating system and habitat types on SSD have received little attention. Here, using phylogenetic comparative methods, we at first examine the hypotheses to that mating system (intensity of sexual selection) and habitat types affect significantly variation in SSD in anurans (39 species and 18 genera). RESULTS: Our data set encompass 39 species with female-biased SSD. We provide evidence that the effects of mating system and habitat types on SSD were non-significant across species, also when the analyses were phylogenetically corrected. CONCLUSIONS: Contrast to the hypotheses, our findings suggest that mating system and habitat types do not play an important role in shaping macro-evolutionary patterns of SSD in anurans. Mating system and habitat types cannot explain the variation in SSD when correcting for phylogenetic effects

Stationary Light Pulses in Cold Atomic Media

Stationary light pulses (SLPs), i.e., light pulses without motion, are formed via the retrieval of stored probe pulses with two counter-propagating coupling fields. We show that there exist non-negligible hybrid Raman excitations in media of cold atoms that prohibit the SLP formation. We experimentally demonstrate a method to suppress these Raman excitations and realize SLPs in laser-cooled atoms. Our work opens the way to SLP studies in cold as well as in stationary atoms and provides a new avenue to low-light-level nonlinear optics.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Tunable Quantum Beam Splitters for Coherent Manipulation of a Solid-State Tripartite Qubit System

Coherent control of quantum states is at the heart of implementing solid-state quantum processors and testing quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level. Despite significant progress made in recent years in controlling single- and bi-partite quantum systems, coherent control of quantum wave function in multipartite systems involving artificial solid-state qubits has been hampered due to the relatively short decoherence time and lacking of precise control methods. Here we report the creation and coherent manipulation of quantum states in a tripartite quantum system, which is formed by a superconducting qubit coupled to two microscopic two-level systems (TLSs). The avoided crossings in the system's energy-level spectrum due to the qubit-TLS interaction act as tunable quantum beam splitters of wave functions. Our result shows that the Landau-Zener-St\"{u}ckelberg interference has great potential in the precise control of the quantum states in the tripartite system.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figure

Remote information concentration and multipartite entanglement in multilevel systems

Remote information concentration (RIC) in $d$-level systems (qudits) is studied. It is shown that the quantum information initially distributed in three spatially separated qudits can be remotely and deterministically concentrated to a single qudit via an entangled channel without performing any global operations. The entangled channel can be different types of genuine multipartite pure entangled states which are inequivalent under local operations and classical communication. The entangled channel can also be a mixed entangled state, even a bound entangled state which has a similar form to the Smolin state, but has different features from the Smolin state. A common feature of all these pure and mixed entangled states is found, i.e., they have $d^2$ common commuting stabilizers. The differences of qudit-RIC and qubit-RIC ($d=2$) are also analyzed.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure