1,000 research outputs found
Testing excitation models of rapidly oscillating Ap stars with interferometry
Rapidly oscillating Ap stars are unique objects in the potential they offer
to study the interplay between a number of important physical phenomena, in
particular, pulsations, magnetic fields, diffusion, and convection.
Nevertheless, the simple understanding of how the observed pulsations are
excited in these stars is still in progress. In this work we perform a test to
what is possibly the most widely accepted excitation theory for this class of
stellar pulsators. The test is based on the study of a subset of members of
this class for which stringent data on the fundamental parameters are available
thanks to interferometry. For three out of the four stars considered in this
study, we find that linear, non-adiabatic models with envelope convection
suppressed around the magnetic poles can reproduce well the frequency region
where oscillations are observed. For the fourth star in our sample no agreement
is found, indicating that a new excitation mechanism must be considered. For
the three stars whose observed frequencies can be explained by the excitation
models under discussion, we derive the minimum angular extent of the region
where convection must be suppressed. Finally, we find that the frequency
regions where modes are expected to be excited in these models is very
sensitive to the stellar radius. This opens the interesting possibility of
determining this quantity and related ones, such as the effective temperature
or luminosity, from comparison between model predictions and observations, in
other targets for which these parameters are not well determined.Comment: Accepted for publication in the MNRA
Orofacial manifestations in outpatients with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa focusing on the vomiting behavior
Objective: This case-control study aims to evaluate the oral health status and orofacial problems in a group of outpatients with eating disorders (ED)—either anorexia nervosa (AN) or bulimia nervosa (BN)—further focusing on the influence of vomit.
Materials and methods: Fifty-five women outpatients with AN or BN diagnosis were invited to participate, of which 33 agreed. ED outpatients and matched controls were submitted to a questionnaire and clinical oral examination.
Results: Multivariate analysis identified a significantly higher incidence of teeth-related complications (i.e., tooth decay, dental erosion, and self-reported dentin hypersensitivity), periodontal disease, salivary alterations (i.e., hyposalivation and xerostomia), and oral mucosa-related complications in ED outpatients. Dental erosion, self-reported dentin hypersensitivity, hyposalivation, xerostomia, and angular cheilitis were found to be highly correlated with the vomiting behavior.
Conclusions: ED outpatients were found to present a higher incidence of oral-related complications and an inferior oral health status, compared to gender- and age-matched controls. Alterations verified within outpatients were acknowledged to be quite similar to those previously reported within inpatients, in both of nature and severity, thus sustaining that the cranio-maxillofacial region is significantly affected by ED, even in the early/milder forms of the condition, as expectedly verified within outpatients.The work was supported by the Faculty of Dental Medicine, U. Porto
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Annular elastolytic giant cell granuloma: a "visible" diagnosis
Annular elastolytic giant cell granuloma (AEGCG) is a rare granulomatous skin disease of undetermined cause, characterized by annular plaques with raised erythematous borders in sun-exposed skin. The typical histologic features are dermal infiltration by multinucleated giant cells, elastin degeneration, and elastophagocytosis. The authors describe a clinical case of AEGCG, which exhibited an excellent response to hydroxycloroquine.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Measuring the extent of convective cores in low-mass stars using Kepler data: towards a calibration of core overshooting
Our poor understanding of the boundaries of convective cores generates large
uncertainties on the extent of these cores and thus on stellar ages. Our aim is
to use asteroseismology to consistently measure the extent of convective cores
in a sample of main-sequence stars whose masses lie around the mass-limit for
having a convective core. We first test and validate a seismic diagnostic that
was proposed to probe in a model-dependent way the extent of convective cores
using the so-called ratios, which are built with and
modes. We apply this procedure to 24 low-mass stars chosen among Kepler targets
to optimize the efficiency of this diagnostic. For this purpose, we compute
grids of stellar models with both the CESAM2k and MESA evolution codes, where
the extensions of convective cores are modeled either by an instantaneous
mixing or as a diffusion process. Among the selected targets, we are able to
unambiguously detect convective cores in eight stars and we obtain seismic
measurements of the extent of the mixed core in these targets with a good
agreement between the CESAM2k and MESA codes. By performing optimizations using
the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, we then obtain estimates of the amount of
extra-mixing beyond the core that is required in CESAM2k to reproduce seismic
observations for these eight stars and we show that this can be used to propose
a calibration of this quantity. This calibration depends on the prescription
chosen for the extra-mixing, but we find that it should be valid also for the
code MESA, provided the same prescription is used. This study constitutes a
first step towards the calibration of the extension of convective cores in
low-mass stars, which will help reduce the uncertainties on the ages of these
stars.Comment: 27 pages, 15 figures, accepted in A&
Entanglement and Bell's inequality violation above room temperature in metal carboxylates
In the present work we show that a special family of materials, the metal
carboxylates, may have entangled states up to very high temperatures. From
magnetic susceptibility measurements, we have estimated the critical
temperature below which entanglement exists in the cooper carboxylate
\{Cu(OCH)\}\{Cu(OCH)(2-methylpyridine)\}, and we have
found this to be above room temperature ( K). Furthermore, the
results show that the system remains maximally entangled until close to K and the Bell's inequality is violated up to nearly room temperature
( K)
Faithful Squashed Entanglement
Squashed entanglement is a measure for the entanglement of bipartite quantum
states. In this paper we present a lower bound for squashed entanglement in
terms of a distance to the set of separable states. This implies that squashed
entanglement is faithful, that is, strictly positive if and only if the state
is entangled. We derive the bound on squashed entanglement from a bound on
quantum conditional mutual information, which is used to define squashed
entanglement and corresponds to the amount by which strong subadditivity of von
Neumann entropy fails to be saturated. Our result therefore sheds light on the
structure of states that almost satisfy strong subadditivity with equality. The
proof is based on two recent results from quantum information theory: the
operational interpretation of the quantum mutual information as the optimal
rate for state redistribution and the interpretation of the regularised
relative entropy of entanglement as an error exponent in hypothesis testing.
The distance to the set of separable states is measured by the one-way LOCC
norm, an operationally-motivated norm giving the optimal probability of
distinguishing two bipartite quantum states, each shared by two parties, using
any protocol formed by local quantum operations and one-directional classical
communication between the parties. A similar result for the Frobenius or
Euclidean norm follows immediately. The result has two applications in
complexity theory. The first is a quasipolynomial-time algorithm solving the
weak membership problem for the set of separable states in one-way LOCC or
Euclidean norm. The second concerns quantum Merlin-Arthur games. Here we show
that multiple provers are not more powerful than a single prover when the
verifier is restricted to one-way LOCC operations thereby providing a new
characterisation of the complexity class QMA.Comment: 24 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. Due to an error in the published
version, claims have been weakened from the LOCC norm to the one-way LOCC
nor
A Generalization of Quantum Stein's Lemma
We present a generalization of quantum Stein's Lemma to the situation in
which the alternative hypothesis is formed by a family of states, which can
moreover be non-i.i.d.. We consider sets of states which satisfy a few natural
properties, the most important being the closedness under permutations of the
copies. We then determine the error rate function in a very similar fashion to
quantum Stein's Lemma, in terms of the quantum relative entropy.
Our result has two applications to entanglement theory. First it gives an
operational meaning to an entanglement measure known as regularized relative
entropy of entanglement. Second, it shows that this measure is faithful, being
strictly positive on every entangled state. This implies, in particular, that
whenever a multipartite state can be asymptotically converted into another
entangled state by local operations and classical communication, the rate of
conversion must be non-zero. Therefore, the operational definition of
multipartite entanglement is equivalent to its mathematical definition.Comment: 30 pages. (see posting by M. Piani arXiv:0904.2705 for a different
proof of the strict positiveness of the regularized relative entropy of
entanglement on every entangled state). published version
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