Subtraction of Newtonian Noise Using Optimized Sensor Arrays

Fluctuations in the local Newtonian gravitational field present a limit to high precision measurements, including searches for gravitational waves using laser interferometers. In this work, we present a model of this perturbing gravitational field and evaluate schemes to mitigate the effect by estimating and subtracting it from the interferometer data stream. Information about the Newtonian noise is obtained from simulated seismic data. The method is tested on causal as well as acausal implementations of noise subtraction. In both cases it is demonstrated that broadband mitigation factors close to 10 can be achieved removing Newtonian noise as a dominant noise contribution. The resulting improvement in the detector sensitivity will substantially enhance the detection rate of gravitational radiation from cosmological sources.Comment: 29 pages, 11 figure

Effect of Irrigation and Potash Levels on Keeping Quality of Potato

Irrigation and fertilizer are the most dominating factors, in deciding the keeping quality of potato. It is, therefore, essential to formulate the efficient, reliable and economically viable irrigation management strategy with the use of potassium nutrient in order to produce better keeping quality. The investigation comprising four levels of irrigation (25, 30, 35 and 40 mm CPE (Cumulative pan evaporation) and four levels of potash (0, 100, 125 and 150 kg/ha) was carried out at Research Farm of the Department of Vegetable Science, CCS Haryana Agricultural University, (Haryana) Hisar, India during two years to find out the optimum level of irrigation and potash for obtaining higher yield of potatoes with better keeping quality at ambient room temperature. The potato variety used for the investigation was Kufri Bahar. The treatments were laid out in a split plot design with three replications. The increasing levels of irrigation and potash showed significant improvement in keeping quality parameters of potato. Likewise, the values for physiological loss in weight and decay loss of potato tubers (%) at 15, 30, 45 and 60 days after harvest were the lowest with irrigation level 40 mm CPE and application of potash @ 150 kg/ha. The two years results suggest that the irrigation level 40 mm CPE along with potash @ 150 kg/ha has shown the best treatment combination for the storage of potato at ambient room temperature under semiarid conditions of Hisar (Haryana)

Farmers' management of rice varietal diversity in the mid-hills of Nepal: implications for on-farm conservation and crop improvement

Season-long monitoring of on-farm rice (Oryza sativa, L.) plots in Nepal explored farmers' decision-making process on the deployment of varieties to agroecosystems, application of production inputs to varieties, agronomic practices and relationship between economic return and area planted per variety. Farmers deploy varieties [landraces (LRs) and modern varieties (MVs)] to agroecosystems based on their understanding of characteristics of varieties and agroecosystems, and the interaction between them. In marginal growing conditions, LRs can compete with MVs. Within an agroecosystem, economic return and area planted to varieties have positive relationship, but this is not so between agroecosystems. LRs are very diverse on agronomic and economic traits; therefore, they cannot be rejected a priori as inferior materials without proper evaluation. LRs have to be evaluated for useful traits and utilized in breeding programmes to generate farmer-preferred materials for marginal environments and for their conservation on-farm

Pseudo-scalar Higgs Boson Production at Threshold N3^3LO and N3^3LL QCD

We present the first results on the production of pseudo-scalar through gluon fusion at the LHC to N$^3$LO in QCD taking into account only soft gluon effects. We have used the effective Lagrangian that describes the coupling of pseudo-scalar with the gluons in the large top quark mass limit. We have used recently available quantities namely the three loop pseudo-scalar form factor and the third order universal soft function in QCD to achieve this. Along with the fixed order results, we also present the process dependent resummation coefficient for threshold resummation to N$^3$LL in QCD. Phenomenological impact of these threshold N$^3$LO corrections to pseudo-scalar production at the LHC is presented and their role to reduce the renormalisation scale dependence is demonstrated.Comment: 34 pages, 17 figure

The Cellular and Molecular Dynamics of the Queuosine Modification in Transfer RNA: Definition, Modulation, Deficiencies and Effect of the Queuosine Modification System

The presence of the queuosine modification in the wobble position of tRNAasn, tRNasp, tRNAhis, and tRNAtyr is associated with a decrease in cellular growth rate, an increase in the ability to withstand environmental stress, and differentiation of pleuripotent cells into mature phenotypes. The loss of this normal modification is strongly correlated with neoplastic transformation and tumor progression of a wide variety of cancers. The normal system for formation of the queuosine modification in tRNA was studied in human fibroblast cell cultures and in mouse, rat and human liver tissues. The queuosine modification system is shown to be made up of three distinct mechanisms: uptake of the queuine base across the plasma membrane; incorporation of this base into cytoplasmic tRNA; and salvage of the base from products of normal tRNA degradation. The queuine membrane transporter and incorporation enzyme are activated via phosphorylation by protein kinase C and inactivated by the action of a phosphatase. This regulation by phosphorylation integrates the queuosine modification system into a very sensitive eukaryotic cellular switching mechanism already known to produce phenotypic alterations with strong correlations to changes in queuosine levels. A comparative study of two abnormal human adenocarcinoma cell-lines (colon and breast) was performed to assess their queuosine levels and determine the malfunctioning system step(s) for the cause of the observed deficiencies. The 100% queuosine-deficient colon tumor cell-line possessed a null mutation for the queuosine incorporation enzyme, while the 50-60% queuosine-deficient breast tumor cell-line exhibited a strong deficiency in the queuine salvage mechanism. These results demonstrate the potential for determination of even multiple sites of lesions in the modification system that would yield queuosine-deficient tRNA characteristic of tumors. Computational modeling was utilized to determine the biological function for the queuosine modification. Steric, electrostatic, and structural differences were observed for queuosine, queuosine-analogues and guanosine, the nucleosides incorporated into tRNAasp anticodon stem/loop structures, and in triad complexes of tRNAasp with mRNA and tRNAphe. The results of this research identify indistinguishable energetic parameters for complexes of queuosine-modified anticodon loops when paired with an mRNA containing cytosine- or a uridine-ending codon. However, guanosine-containing anticodon loops demonstrate much stronger energetic stability with cytosine-ending codons. The difference in codon bias is shown to be due to the restriction of anticodon loop flexibility by a queuosine-induced extended intraloop hydrogen bonding network and only minimally due to a shift in hydrogen bonding pattern produced by an intraresidue hydrogen bond. A key difference in the physiology of normal and neoplastic cells is in the increased expression of oncodevelopmental genes with respect to those housekeeping genes needed for survival. Sequence analysis of several oncodevelopmental and housekeeping transcripts suggests the presence of a contrasting bias in the usage of queuosine-related codons which end in cytosine or either cytosine or uridine, respectively. In combination with the mechanism proposed for tRNAasp decoding preferences, this codon usage bias suggests a potentially influential role for the queuosine modification system in the translational control of oncodevelopmental gene expression

Adjunctive strategies in the management of resistant, 'undilatable' coronary lesions after successfully crossing a CTO with a guidewire.

Successful revascularisation of chronic total occlusions (CTOs) remains one of the greatest challenges in the era of contemporary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Such lesions are encountered with increasing frequency in current clinical practice. A predictable increase in the future burden of CTO management can be anticipated given the ageing population, increased rates of renal failure, graft failure and diabetes mellitus. Given recent advances and developments in CTO PCI management, successful recanalisation can be anticipated in the majority of procedures undertaken at high-volume centres when performed by expert operators. Despite advances in device technology, the management of resistant, calcific lesions remains one of the greatest challenges in successful CTO intervention. Established techniques to modify calcific lesions include the use of high-pressure non-compliant balloon dilation, cutting-balloons, anchor balloons and high speed rotational atherectomy (HSRA). Novel approaches have proven to be safe and technically feasible where standard approaches have failed. A step-wise progression of strategies is demonstrated, from well-recognised techniques to techniques that should only be considered when standard manoeuvres have proven unsuccessful. These methods will be described in the setting of clinical examples and include use of very high-pressure non-compliant balloon dilation, intentional balloon rupture with vessel dissection or balloon assisted micro-dissection (BAM), excimer coronary laser atherectomy (ECLA) and use of HSRA in various 'offlabel' settings

Soil quality of Bhilwara District (Rajasthan) in relation to pisciculture

The present paper deals with the physico-chemical data of 13 rainfed and drainable dry bundhs of Bhilwara District (India). All the dry bundhs studied showed a slightly alkaline pH ranging from 7.5 to 8.5. Electrical conductivity ranged from 2 to 8 millimhos/cm. Organic carbon in sediment fluctuated from 0.30 to 0.75%. Nitrogen, phosphate and potassium levels were fairly good, at 30 to 50 and 24 to 36 mg/100 g of soil respectively. Based on these data it was inferred that these dry bundhs were highly productive and suitable for freshwater fish culture

Geometric discord and Measurement-induced nonlocality for well known bound entangled states

We employ geometric discord and measurement induced nonlocality to quantify non classical correlations of some well-known bipartite bound entangled states, namely the two families of Horodecki's ($2\otimes 4$, $3\otimes 3$ and $4\otimes 4$ dimensional) bound entangled states and that of Bennett etal's in $3\otimes 3$ dimension. In most of the cases our results are analytic and both the measures attain relatively small value. The amount of quantumness in the $4\otimes 4$ bound entangled state of Benatti etal and the $2\otimes 8$ state having the same matrix representation (in computational basis) is same. Coincidently, the $2m\otimes 2m$ Werner and isotropic states also exhibit the same property, when seen as $2\otimes 2m^2$ dimensional states.Comment: V2: Title changed, one more state added; 11 pages (single column), 2 figures, accepted in Quantum Information Processin

Fluctuation relations for heat engines in time-periodic steady states

A fluctuation relation for heat engines (FRHE) has been derived recently. In the beginning, the system is in contact with the cooler bath. The system is then coupled to the hotter bath and external parameters are changed cyclically, eventually bringing the system back to its initial state, once the coupling with the hot bath is switched off. In this work, we lift the condition of initial thermal equilibrium and derive a new fluctuation relation for the central system (heat engine) being in a time-periodic steady state (TPSS). Carnot's inequality for classical thermodynamics follows as a direct consequence of this fluctuation theorem even in TPSS. For the special cases of the absence of hot bath and no extraction of work, we obtain the integral fluctuation theorem for total entropy and the generalized exchange fluctuation theorem, respectively. Recently microsized heat engines have been realized experimentally in the TPSS. We numerically simulate the same model and verify our proposed theorems.Comment: 9 page