127 research outputs found
Arago (1810): the first experimental result against the ether
95 years before Special Relativity was born, Arago attempted to detect the
absolute motion of the Earth by measuring the deflection of starlight passing
through a prism fixed to the Earth. The null result of this experiment gave
rise to the Fresnel's hypothesis of an ether partly dragged by a moving
substance. In the context of Einstein's Relativity, the sole frame which is
privileged in Arago's experiment is the proper frame of the prism, and the null
result only says that Snell's law is valid in that frame. We revisit the
history of this premature first evidence against the ether theory and calculate
the Fresnel's dragging coefficient by applying the Huygens' construction in the
frame of the prism. We expose the dissimilar treatment received by the ray and
the wave front as an unavoidable consequence of the classical notions of space
and time.Comment: 16 pages. To appear in European Journal of Physic
Interference with polarized light beams: Generation of spatially varying polarization
Using a scheme based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, we propose an analysis
of the superposition of polarized laser beams at a given angle. The focus of
our study is the spatially varying polarization state of the resulting field,
also known as a polarization grating, generated by this setup. Our proposal
combines a theoretical description of the resulting field in terms of its
Stokes parameters with an experimental demonstration of the existence of such a
polarization grating due to the effects of polarization on beam interference
experiments.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure
Reduction of the ATPase inhibitory factor 1 (IF1) leads to visual impairment in vertebrates
In vertebrates, mitochondria are tightly preserved energy producing organelles, which sustain nervous system development and function. The understanding of proteins that regulate their homoeostasis in complex animals is therefore critical and doing so via means of systemic analysis pivotal to inform pathophysiological conditions associated with mitochondrial deficiency. With the goal to decipher the role of the ATPase inhibitory factor 1 (IF1) in brain development, we employed the zebrafish as elected model reporting that the Atpif1aâ/â zebrafish mutant, pinotage (pnttq209), which lacks one of the two IF1 paralogous, exhibits visual impairment alongside increased apoptotic bodies and neuroinflammation in both brain and retina. This associates with increased processing of the dynamin-like GTPase optic atrophy 1 (OPA1), whose ablation is a direct cause of inherited optic atrophy. Defects in vision associated with the processing of OPA1 are specular in Atpif1â/â mice thus confirming a regulatory axis, which interlinks IF1 and OPA1 in the definition of mitochondrial fitness and specialised brain functions. This study unveils a functional relay between IF1 and OPA1 in central nervous system besides representing an example of how the zebrafish model could be harnessed to infer the activity of mitochondrial proteins during development
Resonant microwave transmission from a double layer of subwavelength metal square arrays: Evanescent handedness
Copyright © 2012 American Physical SocietyA double layer of identical subwavelength metal patch arrays is experimentally shown to be electromagnetically chiral due to the evanescent coupling of the near fields between nonchiral layersâit exhibits âevanescent handedness.â Despite each layer being intrinsically isotropic in the plane with four mirror planes orthogonal to the plane of the structure, circular dichroism, leading to significant polarization rotation, is found in the resonant microwave transmission for any incident linear polarization
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