2,157 research outputs found
Information erasure without an energy cost
Landauer argued that the process of erasing the information stored in a
memory device incurs an energy cost in the form of a minimum amount of
mechanical work. We find, however, that this energy cost can be reduced to zero
by paying a cost in angular momentum or any other conserved quantity. Erasing
the memory of Maxwell's demon in this way implies that work can be extracted
from a single thermal reservoir at a cost of angular momentum and an increase
in total entropy. The implications of this for the second law of thermodynamics
are assessed.Comment: 8 pages with 1 figure. Final published versio
Distinguishing the effect of lesion load from tract disconnection in the arcuate and uncinate fasciculi
Brain imaging studies of functional outcomes after white matter damage have quantified the severity of white matter damage in different ways. Here we compared how the outcome of such studies depends on two different types of measurements: the proportion of the target tract that has been destroyed (‘lesion load’) and tract disconnection. We demonstrate that conclusions from analyses based on two examples of these measures diverge and that conclusions based solely on lesion load may be misleading. First, we reproduce a recent lesion-load-only analysis which suggests that damage to the arcuate fasciculus, and not to the uncinate fasciculus, is significantly associated with deficits in fluency and naming skills. Next, we repeat the analysis after replacing the measures of lesion load with measures of tract disconnection for both tracts, and observe significant associations between both tracts and both language skills: i.e. the change increases the apparent relevance of the uncinate fasciculus to fluency and naming skills. Finally we show that, in this dataset, disconnection data explains significant variance in both language skills that is not accounted for by lesion load or volume, but lesion load data explains no unique variance in those skills, once disconnection and lesion volume are taken into account
A randomized, double-blinded trial comparing the effectiveness of tranexamic acid and epsilon-aminocaproic acid in reducing bleeding and transfusion in cardiac surgery
© 2019 Annals of Cardiac Anaesthesia. Objectives: To compare the effectiveness of epsilon aminocaproic acid (EACA) to tranexamic acid (TA) in reducing blood loss and transfusion requirements in patients undergone cardiac surgery under cardiopulmonary bypass. Design: Randomized, double blinded study. Outcome variables collected included; baseline demographic characteristics, type of surgery, amount of 24 hour chest tube drainage, amount of 24 hour blood products administered, 30 day mortality and morbidity and length of stay. We analyzed the data using parametric and non-parametric tests as appropriate. Setting: Single center tertiary-care university hospital setting. Participants: 114 patients who had undergone cardiac surgery under cardiopulmonary bypass. Interventions: Standard dose of intra-operative EACA or TA was compared in patients undergone cardiac surgery under cardiopulmonary bypass. Results: There was no statistically significant difference between groups when analyzing chest tube drainage. However, there was a significant difference in the administration of any transfusion (PRBC\u27s, FFP, platelets) intra-operatively to 24 hours postoperatively, with less transfusion in patients receiving EACA compared to TA (25% vs. 44.8%, respectively P = 0.027). Additionally, there was no significant difference in terms of adverse events during the one month follow up period. Conclusion: The findings of this study suggest that EACA and TA have similar effects on chest tube drainage but EACA is associated with fewer transfusions in CABG alone surgeries. Our results suggest that EACA can be used in a similar fashion to TA which may result in a cost and morbidity advantage
Heat Transfer Operators Associated with Quantum Operations
Any quantum operation applied on a physical system is performed as a unitary
transformation on a larger extended system. If the extension used is a heat
bath in thermal equilibrium, the concomitant change in the state of the bath
necessarily implies a heat exchange with it. The dependence of the average heat
transferred to the bath on the initial state of the system can then be found
from the expectation value of a hermitian operator, which is named as the heat
transfer operator (HTO). The purpose of this article is the investigation of
the relation between the HTOs and the associated quantum operations. Since, any
given quantum operation on a system can be realized by different baths and
unitaries, many different HTOs are possible for each quantum operation. On the
other hand, there are also strong restrictions on the HTOs which arise from the
unitarity of the transformations. The most important of these is the Landauer
erasure principle. This article is concerned with the question of finding a
complete set of restrictions on the HTOs that are associated with a given
quantum operation. An answer to this question has been found only for a subset
of quantum operations. For erasure operations, these characterizations are
equivalent to the generalized Landauer erasure principle. For the case of
generic quantum operations however, it appears that the HTOs obey further
restrictions which cannot be obtained from the entropic restrictions of the
generalized Landauer erasure principle.Comment: A significant revision is made; 33 pages with 2 figure
Thermodynamical Cost of Accessing Quantum Information
Thermodynamics is a macroscopic physical theory whose two very general laws
are independent of any underlying dynamical laws and structures. Nevertheless,
its generality enables us to understand a broad spectrum of phenomena in
physics, information science and biology. Recently, it has been realised that
information storage and processing based on quantum mechanics can be much more
efficient than their classical counterpart. What general bound on storage of
quantum information does thermodynamics imply? We show that thermodynamics
implies a weaker bound than the quantum mechanical one (the Holevo bound). In
other words, if any post-quantum physics should allow more information storage
it could still be under the umbrella of thermodynamics.Comment: 3 figure
Stochastic Energetics of Quantum Transport
We examine the stochastic energetics of directed quantum transport due to
rectification of non-equilibrium thermal fluctuations. We calculate the quantum
efficiency of a ratchet device both in presence and absence of an external load
to characterize two quantifiers of efficiency. It has been shown that the
quantum current as well as efficiency in absence of load (Stokes efficiency) is
higher as compared to classical current and efficiency, respectively, at low
temperature. The conventional efficiency of the device in presence of load on
the other hand is higher for a classical system in contrast to its classical
counterpart. The maximum conventional efficiency being independent of the
nature of the bath and the potential remains the same for classical and quantum
systems.Comment: To be published in Phys. Rev.
Correlation functions of eigenvalues of multi-matrix models, and the limit of a time dependent matrix
We consider the correlation functions of eigenvalues of a unidimensional
chain of large random hermitian matrices. An asymptotic expression of the
orthogonal polynomials allows to find new results for the correlations of
eigenvalues of different matrices of the chain. Eventually, we consider the
limit of the infinite chain of matrices, which can be interpreted as a time
dependent one-matrix model, and give the correlation functions of eigenvalues
at different times.Comment: Tex-Harvmac, 27 pages, submitted to Journ. Phys.
Designing optimal discrete-feedback thermodynamic engines
Feedback can be utilized to convert information into useful work, making it
an effective tool for increasing the performance of thermodynamic engines.
Using feedback reversibility as a guiding principle, we devise a method for
designing optimal feedback protocols for thermodynamic engines that extract all
the information gained during feedback as work. Our method is based on the
observation that in a feedback-reversible process the measurement and the
time-reversal of the ensuing protocol both prepare the system in the same
probabilistic state. We illustrate the utility of our method with two examples
of the multi-particle Szilard engine.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, submitted to New J. Phy
Sand as Maxwell's demon
We consider a dilute gas of granular material inside a box, kept in a
stationary state by shaking. A wall separates the box into two identical
compartments, save for a small hole at some finite height . As the gas is
cooled, a second order phase transition occurs, in which the particles
preferentially occupy one side of the box. We develop a quantitative theory of
this clustering phenomenon and find good agreement with numerical simulations
Emergent heterogeneity in putative mesenchymal stem cell colonies: Single-cell time lapsed analysis
Grant No. 1122374Bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs) include a subset of stem cells that are considered promising for developmental studies and therapeutic applications. While it is appreciated generally that BMSC populations can exhibit morphological and functional heterogeneity upon in vitro culture expansion, the potential for heterogeneity within a single colony forming unit–generated ostensibly from a single mother cell–is less explored but is critical to design of both fundamental studies and cell therapy production. Here we observed BMSC colony formation in real time via time lapsed optical imaging and analysis, to quantify whether and how heterogeneity emerged over multiple cell divisions spanning the duration of a typical colony formation unit assay. These analyses demonstrate that such colonies are neither homogeneous subpopulations of stem cells nor necessarily derived from single originating cells. While the mechanisms for and causes of this intracolony heterogeneity are not understood fully, we further demonstrate that extensive cell-cell contacts do not correlate with senescence, but that media exchange was concurrent with diversification in even the most uniform single-cell-derived colonies. These direct quantitative observations and visualizations of colony formation provide new insights that are motivated by significant implications for both basic research and stem cell-based therapies.publishersversionpublishe
- …