319 research outputs found
Classical Theory of Optical Nonlinearity in Conducting Nanoparticles
We develop a classical theory of electron confinement in conducting
nanoparticles. The theory is used to compute the nonlinear optical response of
the nanoparticle to a harmonic external field.Comment: Page margins have been adjusted; otherwise, identical to the previous
versio
The Conquered Banner
Illustration of a woman in a broad-rimmed hat and fur coat.https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/cht-sheet-music/4143/thumbnail.jp
Size-Dependent Surface Plasmon Dynamics in Metal Nanoparticles
We study the effect of Coulomb correlations on the ultrafast optical dynamics
of small metal particles. We demonstrate that a surface-induced dynamical
screening of the electron-electron interactions leads to quasiparticle
scattering with collective surface excitations. In noble-metal nanoparticles,
it results in an interband resonant scattering of d-holes with surface
plasmons. We show that this size-dependent many-body effect manifests itself in
the differential absorption dynamics for frequencies close to the surface
plasmon resonance. In particular, our self-consistent calculations reveal a
strong frequency dependence of the relaxation, in agreement with recent
femtosecond pump-probe experiments.Comment: 8 pages + 4 figures, final version accepted to PR
Landau damping in thin films irradiated by a strong laser field
The rate of linear collisionless damping (Landau damping) in a classical
electron gas confined to a heated ionized thin film is calculated. The general
expression for the imaginary part of the dielectric tensor in terms of the
parameters of the single-particle self-consistent electron potential is
obtained. For the case of a deep rectangular well, it is explicitly calculated
as a function of the electron temperature in the two limiting cases of specular
and diffuse reflection of the electrons from the boundary of the
self-consistent potential. For realistic experimental parameters, the
contribution of Landau damping to the heating of the electron subsystem is
estimated. It is shown that for films with a thickness below about 100 nm and
for moderate laser intensities it may be comparable with or even dominate over
electron-ion collisions and inner ionization.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure
Size-dependent Correlation Effects in Ultrafast Optical Dynamics of Metal Nanoparticles
We study the role of collective surface excitations in the electron
relaxation in small metal particles. We show that the dynamically screened
electron-electron interaction in a nanoparticle contains a size-dependent
correction induced by the surface. This leads to new channels of quasiparticle
scattering accompanied by the emission of surface collective excitations. We
calculate the energy and temperature dependence of the corresponding rates,
which depend strongly on the nanoparticle size. We show that the
surface-plasmon-mediated scattering rate of a conduction electron increases
with energy, in contrast to that mediated by a bulk plasmon. In noble-metal
particles, we find that the dipole collective excitations (surface plasmons)
mediate a resonant scattering of d-holes to the conduction band. We study the
role of the latter effect in the ultrafast optical dynamics of small
nanoparticles and show that, with decreasing nanoparticle size, it leads to a
drastic change in the differential absorption lineshape and a strong frequency
dependence of the relaxation near the surface plasmon resonance. The
experimental implications of our results in ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy
are also discussed.Comment: 29 pages including 6 figure
Petri Nets with Fuzzy Logic (PNFL): Reverse Engineering and Parametrization
Background:
The recent DREAM4 blind assessment provided a particularly realistic and challenging setting for network reverse engineering methods. The in silico part of DREAM4 solicited the inference of cycle-rich gene regulatory networks from heterogeneous, noisy expression data including time courses as well as knockout, knockdown and multifactorial perturbations.
Methodology and Principal Findings:
We inferred and parametrized simulation models based on Petri Nets with Fuzzy Logic (PNFL). This completely automated approach correctly reconstructed networks with cycles as well as oscillating network motifs. PNFL was evaluated as the best performer on DREAM4 in silico networks of size 10 with an area under the precision-recall curve (AUPR) of 81%. Besides topology, we inferred a range of additional mechanistic details with good reliability, e.g. distinguishing activation from inhibition as well as dependent from independent regulation. Our models also performed well on new experimental conditions such as double knockout mutations that were not included in the provided datasets.
Conclusions:
The inference of biological networks substantially benefits from methods that are expressive enough to deal with diverse datasets in a unified way. At the same time, overly complex approaches could generate multiple different models that explain the data equally well. PNFL appears to strike the balance between expressive power and complexity. This also applies to the intuitive representation of PNFL models combining a straightforward graphical notation with colloquial fuzzy parameters
Controlling the shape of a quantum wavefunction
The ability to control the shape and motion of quantum states(1,2) may lead to methods for bond-selective chemistry and novel quantum technologies, such as quantum computing. The classical coherence of laser light has been used to guide quantum systems into desired target states through interfering pathways(3-5). These experiments used the control of target properties-such as fluorescence from a dye solution(6), the current in a semiconductor(7,8) 8 Or the dissociation fraction of an excited molecule(9)-to infer control over the quantum state. Here we report a direct approach to coherent quantum control that allows us to actively manipulate the shape of an atomic electron's radial wavefunction, We use a computer-controlled laser to excite a coherent state in atomic caesium. The shape of the wavefunction is then measured(10) and the information fed back into the laser control system, which reprograms the optical field. The process is iterated until the measured shape of the wavefunction matches that of a target wavepacket, established at the start of the experiment. We find that, using a variation of quantum holography(11) to reconstruct the measured wavefunction, the quantum state can be reshaped to match the target within two iterations of the feedback loop.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/62625/1/397233a0.pd
An HDG Method for Dirichlet Boundary Control of Convection Dominated Diffusion PDE
We first propose a hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method to
approximate the solution of a \emph{convection dominated} Dirichlet boundary
control problem. Dirichlet boundary control problems and convection dominated
problems are each very challenging numerically due to solutions with low
regularity and sharp layers, respectively. Although there are some numerical
analysis works in the literature on \emph{diffusion dominated} convection
diffusion Dirichlet boundary control problems, we are not aware of any existing
numerical analysis works for convection dominated boundary control problems.
Moreover, the existing numerical analysis techniques for convection dominated
PDEs are not directly applicable for the Dirichlet boundary control problem
because of the low regularity solutions. In this work, we obtain an optimal a
priori error estimate for the control under some conditions on the domain and
the desired state. We also present some numerical experiments to illustrate the
performance of the HDG method for convection dominated Dirichlet boundary
control problems
Likely Role of APOBEC3G-Mediated G-to-A Mutations in HIV-1 Evolution and Drug Resistance
The role of APOBEC3 (A3) protein family members in inhibiting retrovirus infection and mobile element retrotransposition is well established. However, the evolutionary effects these restriction factors may have had on active retroviruses such as HIV-1 are less well understood. An HIV-1 variant that has been highly G-to-A mutated is unlikely to be transmitted due to accumulation of deleterious mutations. However, G-to-A mutated hA3G target sequences within which the mutations are the least deleterious are more likely to survive selection pressure. Thus, among hA3G targets in HIV-1, the ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous changes will increase with virus generations, leaving a footprint of past activity. To study such footprints in HIV-1 evolution, we developed an in silico model based on calculated hA3G target probabilities derived from G-to-A mutation sequence contexts in the literature. We simulated G-to-A changes iteratively in independent sequential HIV-1 infections until a stop codon was introduced into any gene. In addition to our simulation results, we observed higher ratios of nonsynonymous to synonymous mutation at hA3G targets in extant HIV-1 genomes than in their putative ancestral genomes, compared to random controls, implying that moderate levels of A3G-mediated G-to-A mutation have been a factor in HIV-1 evolution. Results from in vitro passaging experiments of HIV-1 modified to be highly susceptible to hA3G mutagenesis verified our simulation accuracy. We also used our simulation to examine the possible role of A3G-induced mutations in the origin of drug resistance. We found that hA3G activity could have been responsible for only a small increase in mutations at known drug resistance sites and propose that concerns for increased resistance to other antiviral drugs should not prevent Vif from being considered a suitable target for development of new drugs
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