Coalition Formation in a Legislative Voting Game

We experimentally investigate the Jackson-Moselle (2002) model where legislators bargain over policy proposals and the allocation of private goods. Key comparative static predictions of the model hold as policy proposals shift in the predicted direction with private goods, with the variance in policy outcomes increasing as well. Private goods increase total welfare even after accounting for their cost and help secure legislative compromise. Coalition formations are better characterized by an efficient equal split between coalition partners than the stationary subgame perfect equilibrium prediction

The RD53 Collaboration's SystemVerilog-UVM Simulation Framework and its General Applicability to Design of Advanced Pixel Readout Chips

The foreseen Phase 2 pixel upgrades at the LHC have very challenging requirements for the design of hybrid pixel readout chips. A versatile pixel simulation platform is as an essential development tool for the design, verification and optimization of both the system architecture and the pixel chip building blocks (Intellectual Properties, IPs). This work is focused on the implemented simulation and verification environment named VEPIX53, built using the SystemVerilog language and the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) class library in the framework of the RD53 Collaboration. The environment supports pixel chips at different levels of description: its reusable components feature the generation of different classes of parameterized input hits to the pixel matrix, monitoring of pixel chip inputs and outputs, conformity checks between predicted and actual outputs and collection of statistics on system performance. The environment has been tested performing a study of shared architectures of the trigger latency buffering section of pixel chips. A fully shared architecture and a distributed one have been described at behavioral level and simulated; the resulting memory occupancy statistics and hit loss rates have subsequently been compared.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures (11 figure files), submitted to Journal of Instrumentatio

Discovery of TUG-770: a highly potent free fatty acid receptor 1 (FFA1/GPR40) agonist for treatment of type 2 diabetes

Free fatty acid receptor 1 (FFA1 or GPR40) enhances glucose-stimulated insulin secretion from pancreatic β-cells and currently attracts high interest as a new target for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. We here report the discovery of a highly potent FFA1 agonist with favorable physicochemical and pharmacokinetic properties. The compound efficiently normalizes glucose tolerance in diet-induced obese mice, an effect that is fully sustained after 29 days of chronic dosing

Fracture strength and Young's modulus of ZnO nanowires

The fracture strength of ZnO nanowires vertically grown on sapphire substrates was measured in tensile and bending experiments. Nanowires with diameters between 60 and 310 nm and a typical length of 2 um were manipulated with an atomic force microscopy tip mounted on a nanomanipulator inside a scanning electron microscope. The fracture strain of (7.7 +- 0.8)% measured in the bending test was found close to the theoretical limit of 10% and revealed a strength about twice as high as in the tensile test. From the tensile experiments the Young's modulus could be measured to be within 30% of that of bulk ZnO, contrary to the lower values found in literature.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Stationary and moving breathers in a simplified model of curved alpha--helix proteins

The existence, stability and movability of breathers in a model for alpha-helix proteins is studied. This model basically consists a chain of dipole moments parallel to it. The existence of localized linear modes brings about that the system has a characteristic frequency, which depends on the curvature of the chain. Hard breathers are stable, while soft ones experiment subharmonic instabilities that preserve, however the localization. Moving breathers can travel across the bending point for small curvature and are reflected when it is increased. No trapping of breathers takes place.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure

Complex Line Bundles over Simplicial Complexes and their Applications

Discrete vector bundles are important in Physics and recently found remarkable applications in Computer Graphics. This article approaches discrete bundles from the viewpoint of Discrete Differential Geometry, including a complete classification of discrete vector bundles over finite simplicial complexes. In particular, we obtain a discrete analogue of a theorem of Andr\'e Weil on the classification of hermitian line bundles. Moreover, we associate to each discrete hermitian line bundle with curvature a unique piecewise-smooth hermitian line bundle of piecewise constant curvature. This is then used to define a discrete Dirichlet energy which generalizes the well-known cotangent Laplace operator to discrete hermitian line bundles over Euclidean simplicial manifolds of arbitrary dimension

Theory of Activated Transport in Bilayer Quantum Hall Systems

We analyze the transport properties of bilayer quantum Hall systems at total filling factor $\nu=1$ in drag geometries as a function of interlayer bias, in the limit where the disorder is sufficiently strong to unbind meron-antimeron pairs, the charged topological defects of the system. We compute the typical energy barrier for these objects to cross incompressible regions within the disordered system using a Hartree-Fock approach, and show how this leads to multiple activation energies when the system is biased. We then demonstrate using a bosonic Chern-Simons theory that in drag geometries, current in a single layer directly leads to forces on only two of the four types of merons, inducing dissipation only in the drive layer. Dissipation in the drag layer results from interactions among the merons, resulting in very different temperature dependences for the drag and drive layers, in qualitative agreement with experiment.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure