EGF receptor trafficking: consequences for signaling and cancer

The ligand-stimulated epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) has been extensively studied in the analysis of molecular mechanisms regulating endocytic traffic and the role of that traffic in signal transduction. Although such studies have largely focused on mitogenic signaling and dysregulated traffic in tumorigenesis, there is growing interest in the potential role of EGFR traffic in cell survival and the consequent response to cancer therapy. Here we review recent advances in our understanding of molecular mechanisms regulating ligand-stimulated EGFR activation, internalization, and post-endocytic sorting. The role of EGFR overexpression/mutation and new modulators of EGFR traffic in cancer and the response to cancer therapeutics are also discussed. Finally, we speculate on the relationship between EGFR traffic and cell survival

Four-point correlators of BPS operators in N=4 SYM at order g^4

We study the large N degeneracy in the structure of the four-point amplitudes of 1/2-BPS operators of arbitrary weight k in perturbative N=4 SYM theory. At one loop (order g^2) this degeneracy manifests itself in a smaller number of independent conformal invariant functions describing the amplitude, compared to AdS_5 supergravity results. To study this phenomenon at the two-loop level (order g^4) we consider a particular N=2 hypermultiplet projection of the general N=4 amplitude. Using the formalism of N=2 harmonic superspace we then explicitly compute this four-point correlator at two loops and identify the corresponding conformal invariant functions. In the cases of 1/2-BPS operators of weight k=3 and k=4 the one-loop large N degeneracy is lifted by the two-loop corrections. However, for weight k > 4 the degeneracy is still there at the two-loop level. This behavior suggests that for a given weight k the degeneracy will be removed if perturbative corrections of sufficiently high order are taken into account. These results are in accord with the AdS/CFT duality conjecture.Comment: 45 pages, latex, 14 figure

Global solvability and blow up for the convective Cahn-Hilliard equations with concave potentials

We study initial boundary value problems for the convective Cahn-Hilliard equation \Dt u +\px^4u +u\px u+\px^2(|u|^pu)=0. It is well-known that without the convective term, the solutions of this equation may blow up in finite time for any $p>0$. In contrast to that, we show that the presence of the convective term u\px u in the Cahn-Hilliard equation prevents blow up at least for $0<p<\frac49$. We also show that the blowing up solutions still exist if $p$ is large enough ($p\ge2$). The related equations like Kolmogorov-Sivashinsky-Spiegel equation, sixth order convective Cahn-Hilliard equation, are also considered

Unstable particle's wave-function renormalization prescription

We strictly define two set Wave-function Renormalization Constants (WRC) under the LSZ reduction formula for unstable particles at the first time. Then by introducing antiparticle's WRC and the CPT conservation law we obtain a new wave-function renormalization condition which can be used to totally determine the two set WRC. We calculate two physical processes to manifest the consistence of the present wave-function renormalization prescription with the gauge theory in standard model. We also prove that the conventional wave-function renormalization prescription which discards the imaginary part of unstable particle's WRC leads to physical amplitude gauge dependent.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Stimulated Emission from a single excited atom in a waveguide

We study stimulated emission from an excited two-level atom coupled to a waveguide containing an incident single-photon pulse. We show that the strong photon correlation, as induced by the atom, plays a very important role in stimulated emission. Additionally, the temporal duration of the incident photon pulse is shown to have a marked effect on stimulated emission and atomic lifetime.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Spinning superstrings at two loops: strong-coupling corrections to dimensions of large-twist SYM operators

We consider folded spinning strings in AdS_5xS^5 (with one spin component S in AdS_5 and J in S^5) corresponding to the Tr(D^S Z^J) operators in the sl(2) sector of the N=4 SYM theory in the special scaling limit in which both the string mass M ~ \sqrt \lambda \ln S and J are sent to infinity with their ratio fixed. Expanding in the parameter \el= J/M we compute the 2-loop string sigma model correction to the string energy and show that it agrees with the expression proposed by Alday and Maldacena in arxiv:0708.0672. We suggest that a resummation of the logarithmic \el^2 \ln^n \el terms is necessary in order to establish an interpolation to the weakly coupled gauge theory results. In the process, we set up a general framework for the calculation of higher loop corrections to the energy of multi-spin string configurations. In particular, we find that in addition to the direct 2-loop term in the string energy there is a contribution from lower loop order due to a finite ``renormalization'' of the relation between the parameters of the classical solution and the fixed spins, i.e. the charges of the SO(2,4) x SO(6) symmetry.Comment: 31 pages, Latex. v2:minor corrections; few comments and references added v3: typos correcte