Excitons in a Photosynthetic Light-Harvesting System: A Combined Molecular Dynamics/Quantum Chemistry and Polaron Model Study

The dynamics of pigment-pigment and pigment-protein interactions in light-harvesting complexes is studied with a novel approach which combines molecular dynamics (MD) simulations with quantum chemistry (QC) calculations. The MD simulations of an LH-II complex, solvated and embedded in a lipid bilayer at physiological conditions (with total system size of 87,055 atoms) revealed a pathway of a water molecule into the B800 binding site, as well as increased dimerization within the B850 BChl ring, as compared to the dimerization found for the crystal structure. The fluctuations of pigment (B850 BChl) excitation energies, as a function of time, were determined via ab initio QC calculations based on the geometries that emerged from the MD simulations. From the results of these calculations we constructed a time-dependent Hamiltonian of the B850 exciton system from which we determined the linear absorption spectrum. Finally, a polaron model is introduced to describe quantum mechanically both the excitonic and vibrational (phonon) degrees of freedom. The exciton-phonon coupling that enters into the polaron model, and the corresponding phonon spectral function are derived from the MD/QC simulations. It is demonstrated that, in the framework of the polaron model, the absorption spectrum of the B850 excitons can be calculated from the autocorrelation function of the excitation energies of individual BChls, which is readily available from the combined MD/QC simulations. The obtained result is in good agreement with the experimentally measured absorption spectrum.Comment: REVTeX3.1, 23 pages, 13 (EPS) figures included. A high quality PDF file of the paper is available at http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Publications/Papers/PDF/DAMJ2001/DAMJ2001.pd

Lambda production in 40 A GeV/c Pb-Au collisions

During the 1999 lead run, CERES has measured hadron and electron-pair production at 40 A GeV/c beam momentum with the spectrometer upgraded by the addition of a radial TPC. Here the analysis of lambda and antilambda will be presented.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. 6th International Conference on Strange Quarks in Matter, Frankfurt 200

New Results on Pb-Au Collisions at 40 AGeV from the CERES/NA45 Experiment

In 1999 the CERES/NA45 ran at the CERN SPS with a beam energy of 40 GeV/nucleon. The data set comprises about 8.7 millions Pb-Au events with a trigger selection corresponding to approximately the most central 30% of the geometrical cross section. Results on low-mass electron pair analysis are presented. The upgrade of the experimental setup with the radial drift TPC has allowed to enhance hadron physics capabilities of the experiment. New results on hadron spectra (including Lambda) and flow are presented.Comment: Talk at the International Nuclear Physics Conference INPC2001, Berkeley, CA, July 29th - August 3rd 200

Universal Pion Freeze-out in Heavy-Ion Collisions

Based on an evaluation of data on pion interferometry and on particle yields at mid-rapidity, we propose a universal condition for thermal freeze-out of pions in heavy-ion collisions. We show that freeze-out occurs when the mean free path of pions lambda_f reaches a value of about 1 fm, which is much smaller than the spatial extent of the system at freeze-out. This critical mean free path is independent of the centrality of the collision and beam energy from AGS to RHIC.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, revised version resubmitted to PR

Event-by-event fluctuations of the mean transverse momentum in 40, 80, and 158 A GeV/c Pb-Au collisions

Measurements of event-by-event fluctuations of the mean transverse momentum in Pb-Au collisions at 40, 80, and 158 A GeV/c are presented. A significant excess of mean p_T fluctuations at mid-rapidity is observed over the expectation from statistically independent particle emission. The results are somewhat smaller than recent measurements at RHIC. A possible non-monotonic behaviour of the mean p_T fluctuations as function of collision energy, which may have indicated that the system has passed the critical point of the QCD phase diagram in the range of mu_B under investigation, has not been observed. The centrality dependence of mean p_T fluctuations in Pb-Au is consistent with an extrapolation from pp collisions assuming that the non-statistical fluctuations scale with multiplicity. The results are compared to calculations by the RQMD and UrQMD event generators.Comment: 28 pages, 10 figure

Fixed points of Suzuki type generalized multivalued mappings in fuzzy metric spaces with applications

The aim of this paper is to introduce a class of multivalued mappings satisfying a Suzuki type generalized contractive condition in the framework of fuzzy metric spaces and to present fixed point results for such mappings. Some examples are presented to support the results proved herein. As an application, a common fixed point result for a hybrid pair of single and multivalued mappings is obtained. We show the existence and uniqueness of a common bounded solution of functional equations arising in dynamic programming. Our results generalize and extend various results in the existing literature.http://link.springer.com/journal/11784hb201

The CERES/NA45 Radial Drift Time Projection Chamber

The design, calibration, and performance of the first radial drift Time Projection Chamber (TPC) are presented. The TPC was built and installed at the CERES/NA45 experiment at the CERN SPS in the late nineties, with the objective to improve the momentum resolution of the spectrometer. The upgraded experiment took data twice, in 1999 and in 2000. After a detailed study of residual distortions a spatial resolution of 340 um in the azimuthal and 640 um in the radial direction was achieved, corresponding to a momentum resolution of Dp/p = sqrt{(1% * p/GeV)^2 + (2%)^2}.Comment: 57 pages, 59 figure

Modification of jet-like correlations in Pb-Au collisions at 158A GeV/c

Results of a two-particle correlation analysis of high-$p_t$ charged particles in Pb-Au collisions at 158$A$ GeV/$c$ are presented. The data have been recorded by the CERES experiment at the CERN-SPS. The correlations are studied as function of transverse momentum, particle charge and collision centrality. We observe a jet-like structure in the vicinity of a high-$p_t$ trigger particle and a broad back-to-back distribution. The yields of associated particles per trigger show a strong dependence on the trigger/associate charge combination. A comparison to PYTHIA confirms the jet-like pattern at the near-side but suggests a strong modification at the away-side, implying significant energy transfer of the hard-scattered parton to the medium.Comment: 4 figure

Scale-dependence of transverse momentum correlations in Pb-Au collisions at 158A GeV/c

We present results on transverse momentum correlations of charged particle pairs produced in Pb-Au collisions at 158$A$ GeV/$c$ at the Super Proton Synchrotron. The transverse momentum correlations have been studied as a function of collision centrality, angular separation of the particle pairs, transverse momentum and charge sign. We demonstrate that the results are in agreement with previous findings in scale-independent analyses at the same beam energy. Employing the two-particle momentum correlator $<\Delta p_{t,i}, \Delta p_{t,j}>$ and the cumulative $p_t$ variable $x(p_t)$, we identify, using the scale-dependent approach presented in this paper, different sources contributing to the measured correlations, such as quantum and Coulomb correlations, elliptic flow and mini-jet fragmentation.Comment: Revised versio