16,788 research outputs found
Enhanced emission and light control with tapered plasmonic nanoantennas
We introduce a design of Yagi-Uda plasmonic nanoantennas for enhancing the
antenna gain and achieving control over the angular emission of light. We
demonstrate that tapering of antenna elements allows to decrease spacing
between the antenna elements tenfold also enhancing its emission directivity.
We find the optimal tapering angle that provides the maximum directivity
enhancement and the minimum end-fire beamwidth
The dynamics of vortices on S^2 near the Bradlow limit
The explicit solutions of the Bogomolny equations for N vortices on a sphere
of radius R^2 > N are not known. In particular, this has prevented the use of
the geodesic approximation to describe the low energy vortex dynamics. In this
paper we introduce an approximate general solution of the equations, valid for
R^2 close to N, which has many properties of the true solutions, including the
same moduli space CP^N. Within the framework of the geodesic approximation, the
metric on the moduli space is then computed to be proportional to the Fubini-
Study metric, which leads to a complete description of the particle dynamics.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure
The role of Volatile Anesthetics in Cardioprotection: a systematic review.
This review evaluates the mechanism of volatile anesthetics as cardioprotective agents in both clinical and laboratory research and furthermore assesses possible cardiac side effects upon usage. Cardiac as well as non-cardiac surgery may evoke perioperative adverse events including: ischemia, diverse arrhythmias and reperfusion injury. As volatile anesthetics have cardiovascular effects that can lead to hypotension, clinicians may choose to administer alternative anesthetics to patients with coronary artery disease, particularly if the patient has severe preoperative ischemia or cardiovascular instability. Increasing preclinical evidence demonstrated that administration of inhaled anesthetics - before and during surgery - reduces the degree of ischemia and reperfusion injury to the heart. Recently, this preclinical data has been implemented clinically, and beneficial effects have been found in some studies of patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft surgery. Administration of volatile anesthetic gases was protective for patients undergoing cardiac surgery through manipulation of the potassium ATP (KATP) channel, mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mPTP), reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, as well as through cytoprotective Akt and extracellular-signal kinases (ERK) pathways. However, as not all studies have demonstrated improved outcomes, the risks for undesirable hemodynamic effects must be weighed against the possible benefits of using volatile anesthetics as a means to provide cardiac protection in patients with coronary artery disease who are undergoing surgery
Correlation Clustering with Low-Rank Matrices
Correlation clustering is a technique for aggregating data based on
qualitative information about which pairs of objects are labeled 'similar' or
'dissimilar.' Because the optimization problem is NP-hard, much of the previous
literature focuses on finding approximation algorithms. In this paper we
explore how to solve the correlation clustering objective exactly when the data
to be clustered can be represented by a low-rank matrix. We prove in particular
that correlation clustering can be solved in polynomial time when the
underlying matrix is positive semidefinite with small constant rank, but that
the task remains NP-hard in the presence of even one negative eigenvalue. Based
on our theoretical results, we develop an algorithm for efficiently "solving"
low-rank positive semidefinite correlation clustering by employing a procedure
for zonotope vertex enumeration. We demonstrate the effectiveness and speed of
our algorithm by using it to solve several clustering problems on both
synthetic and real-world data
The effect of substituted benzene dicarboxylic acid linkers on the optical band gap energy and magnetic coupling in manganese trimer metal organic frameworks
We have systematically studied a series of eight metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) in which the secondary building unit is a manganese trimer cluster, and the linkers are differently substituted benzene dicarboxylic acids (BDC). The optical band gap energy of the compounds vary from 2.62 eV to 3.57 eV, and theoretical studies find that different functional groups result in new states in the conduction band, which lie in the gap and lower the optical band gap energy. The optical absorption between the filled Mn 3d states and the ligands is weak due to minimal overlap of the states, and the measured optical band gap energy is due to transitions on the BDC linker. The Mn atoms in the MOFs have local moments of 5 mu B, and selected MOFs are found to be antiferromagnetic, with weak coupling between the cluster units, and paramagnetic above 10 K
Quantitative modeling of \textit{in situ} x-ray reflectivity during organic molecule thin film growth
Synchrotron-based x-ray reflectivity is increasingly employed as an
\textit{in situ} probe of surface morphology during thin film growth, but
complete interpretation of the results requires modeling the growth process.
Many models have been developed and employed for this purpose, yet no detailed,
comparative studies of their scope and accuracy exists in the literature. Using
experimental data obtained from hyperthermal deposition of pentane and
diindenoperylene (DIP) on SiO, we compare and contrast three such models,
both with each other and with detailed characterization of the surface
morphology using ex-situ atomic force microscopy (AFM). These two systems each
exhibit particular phenomena of broader interest: pentacene/SiO exhibits a
rapid transition from rough to smooth growth. DIP/SiO, under the conditions
employed here, exhibits growth rate acceleration due to a different sticking
probability between the substrate and film. In general, \textit{independent of
which model is used}, we find good agreement between the surface morphology
obtained from fits to the \insitu x-ray data with the actual morphology at
early times. This agreement deteriorates at later time, once the root-mean
squared (rms) film roughness exceeds about 1 ML. A second observation is that,
because layer coverages are under-determined by the evolution of a single point
on the reflectivity curve, we find that the best fits to reflectivity data ---
corresponding to the lowest values of --- do not necessarily yield
the best agreement between simulated and measured surface morphologies.
Instead, it appears critical that the model reproduce all local extrema in the
data. In addition to showing that layer morphologies can be extracted from a
minimal set of data, the methodology established here provides a basis for
improving models of multilayer growth by comparison to real systems.Comment: 34 pages (double-spaced, including figures and references), 10
figures, 3 appendice
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