Connecting dissipation and phase slips in a Josephson junction between fermionic superfluids

We study the emergence of dissipation in an atomic Josephson junction between weakly-coupled superfluid Fermi gases. We find that vortex-induced phase slippage is the dominant microscopic source of dissipation across the BEC-BCS crossover. We explore different dynamical regimes by tuning the bias chemical potential between the two superfluid reservoirs. For small excitations, we observe dissipation and phase coherence to coexist, with a resistive current followed by well-defined Josephson oscillations. We link the junction transport properties to the phase-slippage mechanism, finding that vortex nucleation is primarily responsible for the observed trends of conductance and critical current. For large excitations, we observe the irreversible loss of coherence between the two superfluids, and transport cannot be described only within an uncorrelated phase-slip picture. Our findings open new directions for investigating the interplay between dissipative and superfluid transport in strongly correlated Fermi systems, and general concepts in out-of-equlibrium quantum systems.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures + Supplemental Materia

Evaluation of hypophysectomy for treatment of hypersomatotropism in 25 cats

Background: Successful treatment of cats with hypersomatotropism by transsphenoidal hypophysectomy is described in small numbers of cats. Objectives: To describe the endocrine profile, survival, and remission rates of hypersomatotropism and diabetes mellitus in a cohort of cats with hypersomatotropism that underwent hypophysectomy between 2008 and 2020. Animals: Twenty-five client-owned cats with spontaneous hypersomatotropism. Methods: Retrospective study. Diagnosis of hypersomatotropism was based on clinical signs, plasma insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) concentration, and imaging of the pituitary gland. Growth hormone (GH) and IGF-1 concentrations were measured repeatedly after surgery. Survival times were calculated based on follow-up information from owners and referring veterinarians. Results: Median postoperative hospital stay was 7 days (range, 3-18 days). One cat died within 4 weeks of surgery. Median plasma GH concentration decreased significantly from 51.0 ng/mL (range, 5.0-101.0 ng/mL) before surgery to 3.8 ng/mL (range, 0.6-13.0 ng/mL) at 5 hours after surgery. Remission of hypersomatotropism, defined as normalization of plasma IGF-1 concentration, occurred in 23/24 cats (median, 34 ng/mL; range, 14-240 ng/mL) and 22/24 cats entered diabetic remission. Median survival time was 1347 days (95% confidence interval, 900-1794 days; range, 11-3180 days) and the overall 1-, 2-, and 3-year all-cause survival rates were 76%, 76%, and 52%, respectively. Conclusions and Clinical Importance: This study shows the beneficial outcome of hypophysectomy in cats with hypersomatotropism, marked by low death rate and a high percentage of diabetic remission and definitive cure

Il sistema T.Arc.H.N.A. : per una nuova accessibilit\ue0 al patrimonio culturale

This paper presents the preliminary results of the Project T.Arc.H.N.A., Towards Archaeological Heritage New Accessibility, partially funded by the European Union, as part of the Culture 2000 Programme. Tarchna is the Etruscan name of the ancient city of Tarquinia and T.Arc.H.N.A. the name of a model of virtual Museum. Thanks to the use of modern technology, combined with a deep knowledge of history and archaeology, it has been possible to create a tool useful for both scholars and the wider public, which is also available for other situations. Through the cooperation of experts from two different fields \u2013 Computer Science and Archaeology \u2013 an innovative system of accessibility to the Cultural Heritage in the field of research, education and dissemination has been designed and implemented. One of the first results of the project is the restoration of the original unity of the Tarquinian Heritage much of which is scattered all over the world, lacking in contexts and anthropological meanings. Scholars are thus enabled to deal with this Cultural Heritage as a whole and to bring the single document from the environment that produced it, to the environment of the modern user, thus filling the gap between the document and its interpretation. In this way the public can learn the main features of the Etruscan culture and comprehend the research of scholars

Tuning of dipolar interactions and evaporative cooling in a three-dimensional molecular quantum gas

Ultracold polar molecules possess long-range, anisotropic and tunable dipolar interactions, providing opportunities to probe quantum phenomena that are inaccessible with existing cold gas platforms. However, experimental progress has been hindered by the dominance of two-body loss over elastic interactions, which prevents efficient evaporative cooling. Although recent work has demonstrated controlled interactions by confining molecules to a two-dimensional geometry, a general approach for tuning molecular interactions in a three-dimensional stable system has been lacking. Here we demonstrate tunable elastic dipolar interactions in a bulk gas of ultracold 40K87Rb molecules in three dimensions, facilitated by an electric field-induced shielding resonance that suppresses the reactive loss by a factor of 30. This improvement in the ratio of elastic to inelastic collisions enables direct thermalization. The thermalization rate depends on the angle between the collisional axis and the dipole orientation controlled by an external electric field, a direct manifestation of the anisotropic dipolar interaction. We achieve evaporative cooling mediated by the dipolar interactions in three dimensions. This work demonstrates full control of a long-lived bulk quantum gas system with tunable long-range interactions, paving the way for the study of collective quantum many-body physics

Contact with migrants and perceived school climate as correlates of bullying toward migrants classmates.

This study investigates whether the quantity and quality of contact with migrants and perceiving that cultural diversity is accepted at school (as a dimension of the perceived school climate) are associated with perpetrating bullying toward migrant classmates. Quantity and quality of contact are also examined as moderators of the association between perceived cultural acceptance at school and bullying toward migrant students. One hundred and sixtysix adolescents (Mage = 16.26; SD = 1.53) belonging to the societal majority group answered a battery of self-report measures. Bullying migrant peers was associated with more negative quality of the contact. Bullying migrants was also associated with lower perceived acceptance of cultural diversity at school for the adolescents reporting higher levels of contact with migrants at school. The role of contact in explaining bullying toward migrant peers is also discussed in light of possible interventions

Active safety systems for powered two-wheelers: A systematic review

Objective: Active safety systems, of which antilock braking is a prominent example, are going to play an important role to improve powered two-wheeler (PTW) safety. This paper presents a systematic review of the scientific literature on active safety for PTWs. The aim was to list all systems under development, identify knowledge gaps and recognize promising research areas that require further efforts. Methods: A broad search using "safety" as the main keyword was performed on Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar, followed by manual screening to identify eligible papers that underwent a full-text review. Finally, the selected papers were grouped by general technology type and analyzed via structured form to identify the following: specific active safety system, study type, outcome type, population/sample where applicable, and overall findings. Results: Of the 8,000 papers identified with the initial search, 85 were selected for full-text review and 62 were finally included in the study, of which 34 were journal papers. The general technology types identified included antilock braking system, autonomous emergency braking, collision avoidance, intersection support, intelligent transportation systems, curve warning, human machine interface systems, stability control, traction control, and vision assistance. Approximately one third of the studies considered the design and early stage testing of safety systems (n. 22); almost one fourth (n.15) included evaluations of system effectiveness. Conclusions: Our systematic review shows that a multiplicity of active safety systems for PTWs were examined in the scientific literature, but the levels of development are diverse. A few systems are currently available in the series production, whereas other systems are still at the level of early-stage prototypes. Safety benefit assessments were conducted for single systems, however, organized comparisons between systems that may inform the prioritization of future research are lacking. Another area of future analysis is on the combined effects of different safety systems, that may be capitalized for better performance and to maximize the safety impact of new technologies

Altered multisensory temporal integration in obesity

Eating is a multisensory behavior. The act of placing food in the mouth provides us with a variety of sensory information, including gustatory, olfactory, somatosensory, visual, and auditory. Evidence suggests altered eating behavior in obesity. Nonetheless, multisensory integration in obesity has been scantily investigated so far. Starting from this gap in the literature, we seek to provide the first comprehensive investigation of multisensory integration in obesity. Twenty male obese participants and twenty male healthy-weight participants took part in the study aimed at describing the multisensory temporal binding window (TBW). The TBW is defined as the range of stimulus onset asynchrony in which multiple sensory inputs have a high probability of being integrated. To investigate possible multisensory temporal processing deficits in obesity, we investigated performance in two multisensory audiovisual temporal tasks, namely simultaneity judgment and temporal order judgment. Results showed a wider TBW in obese participants as compared to healthy-weight controls. This holds true for both the simultaneity judgment and the temporal order judgment tasks. An explanatory hypothesis would regard the effect of metabolic alterations and low-grade inflammatory state, clinically observed in obesity, on the temporal organization of brain ongoing activity, which one of the neural mechanisms enabling multisensory integration

The second data release from the European Pulsar Timing Array: IV. Implications for massive black holes, dark matter, and the early Universe

The European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) and Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) collaborations have measured a low-frequency common signal in the combination of their second and first data releases, respectively, with the correlation properties of a gravitational wave background (GWB). Such a signal may have its origin in a number of physical processes including a cosmic population of inspiralling supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs); inflation, phase transitions, cosmic strings, and tensor mode generation by the non-linear evolution of scalar perturbations in the early Universe; and oscillations of the Galactic potential in the presence of ultra-light dark matter (ULDM). At the current stage of emerging evidence, it is impossible to discriminate among the different origins. Therefore, for this paper, we consider each process separately, and investigated the implications of the signal under the hypothesis that it is generated by that specific process. We find that the signal is consistent with a cosmic population of inspiralling SMBHBs, and its relatively high amplitude can be used to place constraints on binary merger timescales and the SMBH-host galaxy scaling relations. If this origin is confirmed, this would be the first direct evidence that SMBHBs merge in nature, adding an important observational piece to the puzzle of structure formation and galaxy evolution. As for early Universe processes, the measurement would place tight constraints on the cosmic string tension and on the level of turbulence developed by first-order phase transitions. Other processes would require non-standard scenarios, such as a blue-tilted inflationary spectrum or an excess in the primordial spectrum of scalar perturbations at large wavenumbers. Finally, a ULDM origin of the detected signal is disfavoured, which leads to direct constraints on the abundance of ULDM in our Galaxy