Engineering directed excitonic energy transfer

We provide an intuitive platform for engineering exciton transfer dynamics. We show that careful consideration of the spectral density, which describes the system-bath interaction, leads to opportunities to engineer the transfer of an exciton. Since excitons in nanostructures are proposed for use in quantum information processing and artificial photosynthetic designs, our approach paves the way for engineering a wide range of desired exciton dynamics. We carefully describe the validity of the model and use experimentally relevant material parameters to show counter-intuitive examples of a directed exciton transfer in a linear chain of quantum dots

Transverse rectification of disorder-induced fluctuations in a driven system

We study numerically the overdamped motion of particles driven in a two dimensional ratchet potential. In the proposed design, of the so-called geometrical-ratchet type, the mean velocity of a single particle in response to a constant force has a transverse component that can be induced by the presence of thermal or other unbiased fluctuations. We find that additional quenched disorder can strongly enhance the transverse drift at low temperatures, in spite of reducing the transverse mobility. We show that, under general conditions, the rectified transverse velocity of a driven particle fluid is equivalent to the response of a one dimensional flashing ratchet working at a drive-dependent effective temperature, defined through generalized Einstein relations.Comment: 4.5 pages, 3 fig

Biology of recently discovered cytokines: Discerning the pro- and anti-inflammatory properties of interleukin-27

IL-27 is a recently identified heterodimeric cytokine produced in response to microbial and host derived inflammatory cues. Initial studies indicated that IL-27 promotes the generation of Th1 responses required for resistance to intracellular infection and unveiled the molecular mechanisms mediating this effect. However, subsequent work uncovered a role for IL-27 in the suppression of Th1 and Th2 responses. Thus, by discussing its pleotropic functions in the context of infection-induced immunity and by drawing parallels to fellow IL-6/IL-12 family cytokines, this review will attempt to reconcile the pro- and anti-inflammatory effects of IL-27

Study of Polarization in B -> VT Decays

In this paper, we examine B -> VT decays (V is a vector and T is a tensor meson), whose final-state particles can have transverse or longitudinal polarization. Measurements have been made of B -> \phi K_2^*, and it is found that fT/fL is small, where fT (fL) is the fraction of transverse (longitudinal) decays. We find that the standard model (SM) naively predicts that fT/fL << 1. The two extensions of the naive SM which have been proposed to explain the large fT/fL in B -> \phi K^* -- penguin annihilation and rescattering -- make no firm predictions for the polarization in B -> \phi K_2^*. The two new-physics scenarios, which explain the data in B -> \pi K and the \phi (\rho) K^* polarization measurements, can reproduce the fT/fL data in B -> \phi K_2^* only if the B -> T form factors obey a certain hierarchy. Finally, we present the general angular analysis which can be used to get helicity information using two- and three-body decays.Comment: 15 pages, latex, 3 figures (enclosed), several changes made, conclusions unchanged, publication info adde

Effective potential at finite temperature in a constant magnetic field I: Ring diagrams in a scalar theory

We study symmetry restoration at finite temperature in the theory of a charged scalar field interacting with a constant, external magnetic field. We compute the finite temperature effective potential including the contribution from ring diagrams. We show that in the weak field case, the presence of the field produces a stronger first order phase transition and that the temperature for the onset of the transition is lower, as compared to the case without magnetic field.Comment: Expanded comments, 4 figures added. Conclusions unchanged. Version to match published pape