128 research outputs found
Microbial reductions and physical characterization of chitosan flocs when using chitosan acetate as a cloth filter aid in water treatment
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates 2.1 billion people lack access to safely managed water. Cloth filtration is often employed in rural and developing communities of South Asia for point-of-use water treatment, but bacteria and viruses are too small for efficient removal by this filtration method. Chitosan is a biodegradable, cationic, organic polymer derived from the chemical treatment of chitin that acts as a coagulant and flocculant of contaminant of microbes and other particles in water, thereby facilitating filtration of microbes. This research 1) evaluated the use of chitosan acetate as a pre-treatment coagulation-flocculation process followed by cloth filtration for microbial reductions and 2) assessed floc particle size under three stirring conditions. E. coli KO11 bacteria and MS2 coliphage virus removals were quantified using culture-based methods. Chitosan acetate coagulation-flocculation pre-treatment of water, followed by cloth filtration, met or exceeded the protective (2-star) WHO performance levels for bacteria (2 log10 reduction) and viruses (3 log10 reduction), and filtrate turbidity was consistently reduced to < 1 NTU, meeting United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and WHO targets
SELF-DUAL ANYONS IN UNIFORM BACKGROUND FIELDS
We study relativistic self-dual Chern-Simons-Higgs systems in the presence of
uniform background fields that explicitly break CTP. A rich, but discrete
vacuum structure is found when the gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken,
while the symmetric phase can have an infinite vacuum degeneracy at tree level.
The latter is due to the proliferation of neutral solitonic states that cost
zero energy. Various novel self-dual solitons, such as these, are found in both
the symmetric and the asymmetric phases. Also by considering a similar system
on a two-sphere and the subsequent large sphere limit, we isolate sensible and
finite expressions for the conserved angular and linear momenta, which satisfy
anomalous commutation relations. We conclude with a few remarks on unresolved
issues.Comment: LaTeX, 20 pages, 4 uuencoded figures included
Long-lived oscillons from asymmetric bubbles
The possibility that extremely long-lived, time-dependent, and localized
field configurations (``oscillons'') arise during the collapse of asymmetrical
bubbles in 2+1 dimensional phi^4 models is investigated. It is found that
oscillons can develop from a large spectrum of elliptically deformed bubbles.
Moreover, we provide numerical evidence that such oscillons are: a) circularly
symmetric; and b) linearly stable against small arbitrary radial and angular
perturbations. The latter is based on a dynamical approach designed to
investigate the stability of nonintegrable time-dependent configurations that
is capable of probing slowly-growing instabilities not seen through the usual
``spectral'' method.Comment: RevTeX 4, 9 pages, 11 figures. Revised version with a new approach to
stability. Accepted to Phys. Rev.
Vortex Interactions and Thermally Induced Crossover from Type-I to Type-II Superconductivity
We have computed the effective interaction between vortices in the
Ginzburg-Landau model from large-scale Monte-Carlo simulations, taking thermal
fluctuations of matter fields and gauge fields fully into account close to the
critical temperature. We find a change, in the form of a crossover, from
attractive to repulsive effective vortex interactions in an intermediate range
of Ginzburg-Landau parameters upon increasing
the temperature in the superconducting state. This corresponds to a thermally
induced crossover from \typeI to \typeII superconductivity around a temperature
, which we map out in the vicinity of the
metal-to-superconductor transition. In order to see this crossover, it is
essential to include amplitude fluctuations of the matter field, in addition to
phase-fluctuations and gauge-field fluctuations. We present a simple physical
picture of the crossover, and relate it to observations in \metal{Ta} and
\metal{Nb} elemental superconductors which have low-temperature values of
in the relevant range.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in Physical Review
Superfluidity of a perfect quantum crystal
In recent years, experimental data were published which point to the
possibility of the existence of superfluidity in solid helium. To investigate
this phenomenon theoretically we employ a hierarchy of equations for reduced
density matrices which describes a quantum system that is in thermodynamic
equilibrium below the Bose-Einstein condensation point, the hierarchy being
obtained earlier by the author. It is shown that the hierarchy admits solutions
relevant to a perfect crystal (immobile) in which there is a frictionless flow
of atoms, which testifies to the possibility of superfluidity in ideal solids.
The solutions are studied with the help of the bifurcation method and some
their peculiarities are found out. Various physical aspects of the problem,
among them experimental ones, are discussed as well.Comment: 24 pages with 2 figures, version accepted for publication in
Eur.Phys.J.
FERMION ZERO MODES AND BLACK-HOLE HYPERMULTIPLETS WITH RIGID SUPERSYMMETRY
The gravitini zero modes riding on top of the extreme Reissner-Nordstrom
black-hole solution of N=2 supergravity are shown to be normalizable. The
gravitini and dilatini zero modes of axion-dilaton extreme black-hole solutions
of N=4 supergravity are also given and found to have finite norms. These norms
are duality invariant. The finiteness and positivity of the norms in both cases
are found to be correlated with the Witten-Israel-Nester construction; however,
we have replaced the Witten condition by the pure-spin-3/2 constraint on the
gravitini. We compare our calculation of the norms with the calculations which
provide the moduli space metric for extreme black holes.
The action of the N=2 hypermultiplet with an off-shell central charge
describes the solitons of N=2 supergravity. This action, in the
Majumdar-Papapetrou multi-black-hole background, is shown to be N=2 rigidly
supersymmetric.Comment: 18 pages, LaTe
A Coulomb gas approach to the anisotropic one-dimensional Kondo lattice model at arbitrary filling
We establish a mapping of a general spin-fermion system in one dimension into
a classical generalized Coulomb gas. This mapping allows a renormalization
group treatment of the anisotropic Kondo chain both at and away from
half-filling. We find that the phase diagram contains regions of paramagnetism,
partial and full ferromagnetic order. We also use the method to analyze the
phases of the Ising-Kondo chain.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figure
Identification of common genetic risk variants for autism spectrum disorder
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a highly heritable and heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental phenotypes diagnosed in more than 1% of children. Common genetic variants contribute substantially to ASD susceptibility, but to date no individual variants have been robustly associated with ASD. With a marked sample-size increase from a unique Danish population resource, we report a genome-wide association meta-analysis of 18,381 individuals with ASD and 27,969 controls that identified five genome-wide-significant loci. Leveraging GWAS results from three phenotypes with significantly overlapping genetic architectures (schizophrenia, major depression, and educational attainment), we identified seven additional loci shared with other traits at equally strict significance levels. Dissecting the polygenic architecture, we found both quantitative and qualitative polygenic heterogeneity across ASD subtypes. These results highlight biological insights, particularly relating to neuronal function and corticogenesis, and establish that GWAS performed at scale will be much more productive in the near term in ASD.Peer reviewe
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