348 research outputs found
Prevalence of Listeria Monocytogenes in a Bovine Associated Environment
Listeria monocytogenes has emerged into the realm of disease causing bacteria as a pathogen of public health importance. Its opportunistic and ubiquitous nature has led to an ever increasing number of case reports implicating this organism in human and animal disease. Following its discovery Listeria has been observed in many countries from the tropics to the arctic (6). In addition to human subjects, Listeria has been found with a very wide host range which includes 37 mammals, 17 fowls, ticks, fish, crustaceans, silage, soil, dust, slaughter house waste, stream water, sewage and mud
Aggregates of two-dimensional vesicles: Rouleaux and sheets
Using both numerical and variational minimization of the bending and adhesion
energy of two-dimensional lipid vesicles, we study their aggregation, and we
find that the stable aggregates include an infinite number of vesicles and that
they arrange either in a columnar or in a sheet-like structure. We calculate
the stability diagram and we discuss the modes of transformation between the
two types of aggregates, showing that they include disintegration as well as
intercalation.Comment: 4 figure
Smectic Phases with Cubic Symmetry: The Splay Analog of the Blue Phase
We report on a construction for smectic blue phases, which have quasi-long
range smectic translational order as well as long range cubic or hexagonal
order. Our proposed structures fill space with a combination of minimal surface
patches and cylindrical tubes. We find that for the right range of material
parameters, the favorable saddle-splay energy of these structures can stabilize
them against uniform layered structures.Comment: 4 pages, 4 eps figures, RevTe
Computation of equilibrium foam structure using the Surface Evolver
The Surface Evolver has been used to minimise the surface area of various ordered structures for monodisperse foam. Additional features have enabled its application to foams of arbitrary liquid fraction. Early results for the case of dry foam (negligible liquid fraction) produced a structure haveing lower surface area, or energy, than Kelvin\u27s 1887 minimal tetrakaidecahedron. The calculations reported here show that this remains the case when the liquid fraction is finite, up to about 11%, at which point an f.c.c arrangement of the cells becomes preferable
Capillary interactions in Pickering emulsions
The effective capillary interaction potentials for small colloidal particles
trapped at the surface of liquid droplets are calculated analytically. Pair
potentials between capillary monopoles and dipoles, corresponding to particles
floating on a droplet with a fixed center of mass and subjected to external
forces and torques, respectively, exhibit a repulsion at large angular
separations and an attraction at smaller separations, with the latter
resembling the typical behavior for flat interfaces. This change of character
is not observed for quadrupoles, corresponding to free particles on a
mechanically isolated droplet. The analytical results for quadrupoles are
compared with the numerical minimization of the surface free energy of the
droplet in the presence of ellipsoidal particles.Comment: twocolumn, 8 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.
Willmore minimizers with prescribed isoperimetric ratio
Motivated by a simple model for elastic cell membranes, we minimize the
Willmore functional among two-dimensional spheres embedded in R^3 with
prescribed isoperimetric ratio
Diffusive transport of light in three-dimensional disordered Voronoi structures
The origin of diffusive transport of light in dry foams is still under
debate. In this paper, we consider the random walks of photons as they are
reflected or transmitted by liquid films according to the rules of ray optics.
The foams are approximately modeled by three-dimensional Voronoi tessellations
with varying degree of disorder. We study two cases: a constant intensity
reflectance and the reflectance of thin films. Especially in the second case,
we find that in the experimentally important regime for the film thicknesses,
the transport-mean-free path does not significantly depend on the topological
and geometrical disorder of the Voronoi foams including the periodic Kelvin
foam. This may indicate that the detailed structure of foams is not crucial for
understanding the diffusive transport of light. Furthermore, our theoretical
values for transport-mean-free path fall in the same range as the experimental
values observed in dry foams. One can therefore argue that liquid films
contribute substantially to the diffusive transport of light in {dry} foams.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure
Inverse lift: a signature of the elasticity of complex fluids?
To understand the mechanics of a complex fluid such as a foam we propose a
model experiment (a bidimensional flow around an obstacle) for which an
external sollicitation is applied, and a local response is measured,
simultaneously. We observe that an asymmetric obstacle (cambered airfoil
profile) experiences a downards lift, opposite to the lift usually known (in a
different context) in aerodynamics. Correlations of velocity, deformations and
pressure fields yield a clear explanation of this inverse lift, involving the
elasticity of the foam. We argue that such an inverse lift is likely common to
complex fluids with elasticity.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, revised version, submitted to PR
A Model for the Elasticity of Compressed Emulsions
We present a new model to describe the unusual elastic properties of
compressed emulsions. The response of a single droplet under compression is
investigated numerically for different Wigner-Seitz cells. The response is
softer than harmonic, and depends on the coordination number of the droplet.
Using these results, we propose a new effective inter-droplet potential which
is used to determine the elastic response of a monodisperse collection of
disordered droplets as a function of volume fraction. Our results are in
excellent agreement with recent experiments. This suggests that anharmonicity,
together with disorder, are responsible for the quasi-linear increase of
and observed at .Comment: RevTeX with psfig-included figures and a galley macr
Deformation of Small Compressed Droplets
We investigate the elastic properties of small droplets under compression.
The compression of a bubble by two parallel plates is solved exactly and it is
shown that a lowest-order expansion of the solution reduces to a form similar
to that obtained by Morse and Witten. Other systems are studied numerically and
results for configurations involving between 2 and 20 compressing planes are
presented. It is found that the response to compression depends on the number
of planes. The shear modulus is also calculated for common lattices and the
stability crossover between f.c.c.\ and b.c.c.\ is discussed.Comment: RevTeX with psfig-included figures and a galley macr
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