Lipid Coated Gold Nanoparticle Cores: Synthesis and Characterization

Including environmental, industrial, and biomedical sciences, applications of gold nanoparticles are on the forefront of research in many areas. By altering the surface treatment of spherical gold nanoparticle cores, particularly those smaller than 100 nm (nanometers), one can influence their potential use in a number of ways. Lipid coated nanoparticles with specifically selected surface ligands can be used for multiple biomedical functions, including medical imaging, for use as colorimetric and plasmonic sensors within the body, and as cell or organelle specific targets for therapeutic drug delivery or cancer treatment. Here, spherical gold nanoparticles ranging in size from 8-40 nm (avg. diameter 23-48 nm) have been synthesized and coated with poly(allylamine hydrochloride) (PAH) and a mixed lipid solution of 1:1 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phospho-L-serine (POPS) and lysophosphatidylcholine (LPC), two of the four major types of lipids found in the human body. Characterization was performed using a NanoSight LM10HS particle sizer, and shows a gradual increase in size after each step in the coating process for nanoparticle cores ranging in size from 16-27 nm. The thickness of these purified and lipid coated nanoparticles was consistently 2-3 times that of the PAH coated sample it was layered onto, suggesting a successful, multi-layered coat that ranges in size based on the PAH coated core size. UV-Vis spectroscopy shows a slight red shift, indicating an increase in size and change in refractive index, which supports the presence of lipid coating on the PAH coated gold nanoparticle cores

Can Money Change Who We Are? Estimating the Effects of Unearned Income on Measures of Incentive-Enhancing Personality Traits

The importance of noncognitive childhood skills in predicting higher wages is well documented in economics. This paper studies the reverse. Using surveys of lottery winners, we analyze the effects of unearned income on the Big Five personality traits. After correcting for potential endogeneity problems from prize sizes, we find that unearned income improves traits that predict pro-social and cooperative behaviors, preferences for social contact, empathy, and gregariousness, and reduces individuals' tendency toward negative emotional states: known in economics literature as incentive-enhancing personality traits. Our results support the possibility of scope for later interventions to improve the personality traits of adults.noncognitive skills, personality traits, lottery winners, instrumental variables, unearned income

Error mitigated quantum circuit cutting

We investigate an error mitigated tomographic approach to the quantum circuit cutting problem in the presence of gate and measurement noise. We explore two tomography specific error mitigation techniques; readout error mitigated conditional fragment tomography, which uses knowledge of readout errors on all cut and conditional qubit measurements in the tomography reconstruction procedure; and dominant eigenvalue truncation (DEVT), which aims to improve the performance of circuit cutting by performing truncation of the individual conditional tomography fragments used in the reconstruction. We find that the performance of both readout error mitigated tomography and DEVT tomography are comparable for circuit cutting in the presence of symmetric measurement errors. For gate errors our numerical results show that probability estimates for the original circuit obtained using DEVT outperforms general circuit cutting for measurement, depolarization and weakly biased Pauli noise models, but does not improve performance for amplitude damping and coherent errors, and can greatly decrease performance for highly biased Pauli noise. In cases where DEVT was effective, it as also found to improve performance of partial tomographic reconstruction using at least 50% of the full tomographic data with a conditional least-squares tomographic fitter, while linear inversion tomography with or without DEVT mitigation was found to perform poorly with with partial data.Comment: 15+2 pages, double colum

Improved Log(gf) Values for Lines of Ti I and Abundance Determinations in the Photospheres of the Sun and Metal-Poor Star HD 84937 (Accurate Transition Probabilities for Ti I)

New atomic transition probability measurements for 948 lines of Ti I are reported. Branching fractions from Fourier transform spectra and from spectra recorded using a 3 m echelle spectrometer are combined with published radiative lifetimes from laser-induced fluorescence measurements to determine these transition probabilities. Generally good agreement is found in comparisons to the NIST Atomic Spectra Database. The new Ti I data are applied to re-determine the Ti abundance in the photospheres of the Sun and metal-poor star HD 84937 using many lines covering a range of wavelength and excitation potential to explore possible non-local thermal equilibrium effects. The variation of relative Ti/Fe abundance with metallicity in metal-poor stars observed in earlier studies is supported in this study.NSF AST-1211055, AST-0908978, AST-1211585NSF REU grant AST-1004881ESO Science Archive Facility 073.D-0024, 266.D-5655NASA NAS 5-26555Astronom