Multiwavelength Raman spectroscopy analysis of a large sampling of disordered carbons extracted from the Tore Supra tokamak

Disordered carbon often exhibit a complex Raman spectrum, with four to six components. Here, a large variety of disordered carbons, forming a collection of samples with a great variety of structures, are analysed using multi-wavelength Raman microscopy (325.0, 514.5, 785.0 nm). They allow us to extend Raman behaviour known for nano-crystalline graphite to amorphous carbons, (dependence with the excitation wavelength) and other known for amorphous carbons to nano-crystalline graphite, (differentiation of the smallest cluster size probed using different excitation wavelengths). Experimental spectra were compared to simulated spectra, built using known laws, to evidence a new source of broadening

Renormalization of myoglobin-ligand binding energetics by quantum many-body effects

We carry out a first-principles atomistic study of the electronic mechanisms of ligand binding and discrimination in the myoglobin protein. Electronic correlation effects are taken into account using one of the most advanced methods currently available, namely a linear-scaling density functional theory (DFT) approach wherein the treatment of localized iron 3d electrons is further refined using dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). This combination of methods explicitly accounts for dynamical and multi-reference quantum physics, such as valence and spin fluctuations, of the 3d electrons, whilst treating a significant proportion of the protein (more than 1000 atoms) with density functional theory. The computed electronic structure of the myoglobin complexes and the nature of the Fe-O2 bonding are validated against experimental spectroscopic observables. We elucidate and solve a long standing problem related to the quantum-mechanical description of the respiration process, namely that DFT calculations predict a strong imbalance between O2 and CO binding, favoring the latter to an unphysically large extent. We show that the explicit inclusion of many body-effects induced by the Hund's coupling mechanism results in the correct prediction of similar binding energies for oxy- and carbonmonoxymyoglobin.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2014). For the published article see http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/09/1322966111.abstrac

Entropy of stationary nonequilibrium measures of boundary driven symmetric simple exclusion processes: Entropy of nonequilibrium stationary measures

International audienceWe examine the entropy of stationary nonequilibrium measures of boundary driven symmetric simple exclusion processes. In contrast with the Gibbs--Shannon entropy \cite{B, DLS2}, the entropy of nonequilibrium stationary states differs from the entropy of local equilibrium states

The chromising process: a novel development

The industrial application of the chromising process started in about 1935. It enjoyed a steady growth until about 1975 but has since declined in importance, being replaced by novel CVD and PVD processes. Its use for corrosion and oxidisation resistance is very small but there are some applications for wear resistance which exploit the high hardness of chromium carbide. A chance observation in the wear pattern and performance of chromised automotive timing chain link-pins, led to the identification of a diffusion coating structure which had not been previously recognised as having enhanced wear resistance. It was the purpose of this research to examine the nature of this novel structure, to determine how it was occurring in practice and to develop a chromising process which could consistently reproduce the desired end product. [Continues.

Understanding the Siphon: An Example of the Development of Pedagogical Content Knowledge Using Textbooks and the Writings of Early Scientists

A general explanatory principle for determining whether fluid will flow or will not flow from a siphon is developed and discussed after a consideration of the explanations provided by textbooks and the writings of Blaise Pascal

The Distance and Median Problems in the Single-Cut-Or-Join Model with Single-Gene Duplications

Background. In the field of genome rearrangement algorithms, models accounting for gene duplication lead often to hard problems. For example, while computing the pairwise distance is tractable in most duplication-free models, the problem is NP-complete for most extensions of these models accounting for duplicated genes. Moreover, problems involving more than two genomes, such as the genome median and the Small Parsimony problem, are intractable for most duplication-free models, with some exceptions, for example the Single-Cut-or-Join (SCJ) model. Results. We introduce a variant of the SCJ distance that accounts for duplicated genes, in the context of directed evolution from an ancestral genome to a descendant genome where orthology relations between ancestral genes and their descendant are known. Our model includes two duplication mechanisms: single-gene tandem duplication and the creation of single-gene circular chromosomes. We prove that in this model, computing the directed distance and a parsimonious evolutionary scenario in terms of SCJ and single-gene duplication events can be done in linear time. We also show that the directed median problem is tractable for this distance, while the rooted median problem, where we assume that one of the given genomes is ancestral to the median, is NP-complete. We also describe an Integer Linear Program for solving this problem. We evaluate the directed distance and rooted median algorithms on simulated data. Conclusion. Our results provide a simple genome rearrangement model, extending the SCJ model to account for single-gene duplications, for which we prove a mix of tractability and hardness results. For the NP-complete rooted median problem, we design a simple Integer Linear Program. Our publicly available implementation of these algorithms for the directed distance and median problems allow to solve efficiently these problems on large instances