Comparative Aspects of Splenic Microcirculatory Pathways in Mammals: The Region Bordering the White Pulp

Splenic microcorrosion casts prepared using minimal volumes of material show that most of the flow passes through the region bordering the white pulp. However, the nature of these microcirculatory pathways has received little attention. We have studied these in dog, cat, rat, mouse, and normal versus diseased human spleens. In all 5 species, a marginal sinus (MS) of anastomosing vascular spaces 5-10 μm thick lies between the white pulp and marginal zone (MZ). The morphology differs between species and the MS is absent in immune thrombocytopenia. The MS fills by circumferential flow before blood passes outward to the MZ. Many capillaries supply the MS and MZ, their arrangement and degree of branching differing among species. Capillaries never terminate within the reticulum of the white pulp. In immune thrombocytopenia, marked vascular hyperplasia occurs within white pulp and MZ. The perimarginal cavernous sinus plexus (PMCS), found in human, dog and rat, comprises large flattened spaces up to 300 μm x 1000 μmin area and 30-100 μm thick. It lies between the MZ and red pulp or directly adjacent to white pulp, and receives flow principally via the MZ. In sinusal spleens, the MS, MZ and PMCS are drained by open-ended venous sinuses. In non-sinusal spleens, the MS and MZ are drained by pulp venules. Approximately 90% of the splenic inflow passes through the region bordering the white pulp, bypassing the filtration beds of the red pulp. This suggests that immunologic functions of the spleen take precedence over the filtration of blood cellular elements in the red pulp

Sommerfeld's image method in the calculation of van der Waals forces

We show how the image method can be used together with a recent method developed by C. Eberlein and R. Zietal to obtain the dispersive van der Waals interaction between an atom and a perfectly conducting surface of arbitrary shape. We discuss in detail the case of an atom and a semi- infinite conducting plane. In order to employ the above procedure to this problem it is necessary to use the ingenious image method introduced by Sommerfeld more than one century ago, which is a generalization of the standard procedure. Finally, we briefly discuss other interesting situations that can also be treated by the joint use of Sommerfeld's image technique and Eberlein-Zietal method.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of Conference on Quantum Field Theory under the Influence of External Conditions (QFEXT11

Itinerant Electron Ferromagnetism in the Quantum Hall Regime

We report on a study of the temperature and Zeeman-coupling-strength dependence of the one-particle Green's function of a two-dimensional (2D) electron gas at Landau level filling factor $\nu =1$ where the ground state is a strong ferromagnet. Our work places emphasis on the role played by the itinerancy of the electrons, which carry the spin magnetization and on analogies between this system and conventional itinerant electron ferromagnets. We discuss the application to this system of the self-consistent Hartree-Fock approximation, which is analogous to the band theory description of metallic ferromagnetism and fails badly at finite temperatures because it does not account for spin-wave excitations. We go beyond this level by evaluating the one-particle Green's function using a self-energy, which accounts for quasiparticle spin-wave interactions. We report results for the temperature dependence of the spin magnetization, the nuclear spin relaxation rate, and 2D-2D tunneling conductances. Our calculations predict a sharp peak in the tunneling conductance at large bias voltages with strength proportional to temperature. We compare with experiment, where available, and with predictions based on numerical exact diagonalization and other theoretical approaches.Comment: 29 pages, 20 figure

Bilayer Quantum Hall Systems at Filling Factor \nu=2: An Exact Diagonalisation Study

We present an exact diagonalisation study of bilayer quantum Hall systems at a filling factor of two in the spherical geometry. We find the high-Zeeman-coupling phase boundary of the broken symmetry canted antiferromagnet is given exactly by previous Hartree-Fock mean-field theories, but that the state's stability at weak Zeeman coupling has been qualitatively overestimated. In the absence of interlayer tunneling, degeneracies occur between total spin multiplets due to the Hamiltonian's invariance under independent spin-rotations in top and bottom two-dimensional electron layers.Comment: Some remarks added in the discussion of the phase diagram, and some typos corrected. Version to be published in Phys. Rev. Let

Collective excitations in double-layer quantum Hall systems

We study the collective excitation spectra of double-layer quantum-Hall systems using the single mode approximation. The double-layer in-phase density excitations are similar to those of a single-layer system. For out-of-phase density excitations, however, both inter-Landau-level and intra-Landau-level double-layer modes have finite dipole oscillator strengths. The oscillator strengths at long wavelengths for the latter transitions are shifted upward by interactions by identical amounts proportional to the interlayer Coulomb coupling. The intra-Landau-level out-of-phase mode has a gap when the ground state is incompressible except in the presence of spontaneous inter-layer coherence. We compare our results with predictions based on the Chern-Simons-Landau-Ginzburg theory for double-layer quantum Hall systems.Comment: RevTeX, 21 page

Improved methods for detecting gravitational waves associated with short gamma-ray bursts

In the era of second generation ground-based gravitational wave detectors, short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) will be among the most promising astrophysical events for joint electromagnetic and gravitational wave observation. A targeted search for gravitational wave compact binary merger signals in coincidence with short GRBs was developed and used to analyze data from the first generation LIGO and Virgo instruments. In this paper, we present improvements to this search that enhance our ability to detect gravitational wave counterparts to short GRBs. Specifically, we introduce an improved method for estimating the gravitational wave background to obtain the event significance required to make detections; implement a method of tiling extended sky regions, as required when searching for signals associated to poorly localized GRBs from Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor or the InterPlanetary Network; and incorporate astrophysical knowledge about the beaming of GRB emission to restrict the search parameter space. We describe the implementation of these enhancements and demonstrate how they improve the ability to observe binary merger gravitational wave signals associated with short GRBs.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Correlations in Two-Dimensional Vortex Liquids

We report on a high temperature perturbation expansion study of the superfluid-density spatial correlation function of a Ginzburg-Landau-model superconducting film in a magnetic field. We have derived a closed form which expresses the contribution to the correlation function from each graph of the perturbation theory in terms of the number of Euler paths around appropriate subgraphs. We have enumerated all graphs appearing out to 10-th order in the expansion and have evaluated their contributions to the correlation function. Low temperature correlation functions, obtained using Pad\'{e} approximants, are in good agreement with Monte Carlo simulation results and show that the vortex-liquid becomes strongly correlated at temperatures well above the vortex solidification temperature.Comment: 18 pages (RevTeX 3.0) and 4 figures, available upon request, IUCM93-01

Magnons and skyrmions in fractional Hall ferromagnets

Recent experiments have established a qualitative difference between the magnetization temperature-dependences $M(T)$ of quantum Hall ferromagnets at integer and fractional filling factors. We explain this difference in terms of the relative energies of collective magnon and particle-hole excitations in the two cases. Analytic calculations for hard-core model systems are used to demonstrate that, in the fractional case, interactions suppress the magnetization at finite temperatures and that particle-hole excitations rather than long-wavelength magnons control $M(T)$ at low $T$.Comment: 4 pages, no figure