1,475 research outputs found
Granting Austrian citizenship to German-speaking Italians would not be a victory for South Tyrol's separatists
Austria's new government has proposed to offer Austrian citizenship to German-speakers in the province of South Tyrol in Italy. Stephen J. Larin and Alice Engl argue that although the proposal has been welcomed by separatist parties in South Tyrol, it does not threaten Italy's territorial integrity, and it would not have happened without the close relationship between the Austrian ÖVP and the autonomist-but-not-separatist South Tyrolean People’s Party (SVP)
Regularization independent of the noise level: an analysis of quasi-optimality
The quasi-optimality criterion chooses the regularization parameter in
inverse problems without taking into account the noise level. This rule works
remarkably well in practice, although Bakushinskii has shown that there are
always counterexamples with very poor performance. We propose an average case
analysis of quasi-optimality for spectral cut-off estimators and we prove that
the quasi-optimality criterion determines estimators which are rate-optimal
{\em on average}. Its practical performance is illustrated with a calibration
problem from mathematical finance.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure
Development of Muon Drift-Tube Detectors for High-Luminosity Upgrades of the Large Hadron Collider
The muon detectors of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have
to cope with unprecedentedly high neutron and gamma ray background rates. In
the forward regions of the muon spectrometer of the ATLAS detector, for
instance, counting rates of 1.7 kHz/square cm are reached at the LHC design
luminosity. For high-luminosity upgrades of the LHC, up to 10 times higher
background rates are expected which require replacement of the muon chambers in
the critical detector regions. Tests at the CERN Gamma Irradiation Facility
showed that drift-tube detectors with 15 mm diameter aluminum tubes operated
with Ar:CO2 (93:7) gas at 3 bar and a maximum drift time of about 200 ns
provide efficient and high-resolution muon tracking up to the highest expected
rates. For 15 mm tube diameter, space charge effects deteriorating the spatial
resolution at high rates are strongly suppressed. The sense wires have to be
positioned in the chamber with an accuracy of better than 50 ?micons in order
to achieve the desired spatial resolution of a chamber of 50 ?microns up to the
highest rates. We report about the design, construction and test of prototype
detectors which fulfill these requirements
Ions in Fluctuating Channels: Transistors Alive
Ion channels are proteins with a hole down the middle embedded in cell
membranes. Membranes form insulating structures and the channels through them
allow and control the movement of charged particles, spherical ions, mostly
Na+, K+, Ca++, and Cl-. Membranes contain hundreds or thousands of types of
channels, fluctuating between open conducting, and closed insulating states.
Channels control an enormous range of biological function by opening and
closing in response to specific stimuli using mechanisms that are not yet
understood in physical language. Open channels conduct current of charged
particles following laws of Brownian movement of charged spheres rather like
the laws of electrodiffusion of quasi-particles in semiconductors. Open
channels select between similar ions using a combination of electrostatic and
'crowded charge' (Lennard-Jones) forces. The specific location of atoms and the
exact atomic structure of the channel protein seems much less important than
certain properties of the structure, namely the volume accessible to ions and
the effective density of fixed and polarization charge. There is no sign of
other chemical effects like delocalization of electron orbitals between ions
and the channel protein. Channels play a role in biology as important as
transistors in computers, and they use rather similar physics to perform part
of that role. Understanding their fluctuations awaits physical insight into the
source of the variance and mathematical analysis of the coupling of the
fluctuations to the other components and forces of the system.Comment: Revised version of earlier submission, as invited, refereed, and
published by journa
Cellular and molecular phenotypes depending upon the RNA repair system RtcAB of Escherichia coli
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) [BB/J00717X/1]; Medical Research Council (MRC) [MR/M017672/1]; Queen's Fellowship (Queen's University Belfast, UK) (to C.E.); Antimicrobial Resistance Cross Council Initiative. Funding for open access charge: BBSRC [BB/J00717X/1]; MRC [MR/M017672/1]
Effect of food-related stress conditions and loss of agr and sigB on seb promoter activity in S. aureus
Staphylococcal enterotoxin B (SEB) causes staphylococcal food poisoning and is produced in up to ten times higher quantities than other major enterotoxins. While Staphylococcus aureus growth is often repressed by competing flora, the organism exhibits a decisive growth advantage under some stress conditions. So far, data on the influence of food-related stressors and regulatory mutations on seb expression is limited and largely based on laboratory strains, which were later reported to harbor mutations. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the influence of stress and regulatory mutations on seb promoter activity. To this end, transcriptional fusions were created in two strains, USA300 and HG003, carrying different seb upstream sequences fused to a blaZ reporter. NaCl, nitrite, and glucose stress led to significantly decreased seb promoter activity, while lactic acid stress resulted in significantly increased seb promoter activity. Loss of agr decreased seb promoter activity and loss of sigB increased promoter activity, with the magnitude of change depending on the strain. These results demonstrate that mild stress conditions encountered during food production and preservation can induce significant changes in seb promoter activity
The density of states of chaotic Andreev billiards
Quantum cavities or dots have markedly different properties depending on
whether their classical counterparts are chaotic or not. Connecting a
superconductor to such a cavity leads to notable proximity effects,
particularly the appearance, predicted by random matrix theory, of a hard gap
in the excitation spectrum of quantum chaotic systems. Andreev billiards are
interesting examples of such structures built with superconductors connected to
a ballistic normal metal billiard since each time an electron hits the
superconducting part it is retroreflected as a hole (and vice-versa). Using a
semiclassical framework for systems with chaotic dynamics, we show how this
reflection, along with the interference due to subtle correlations between the
classical paths of electrons and holes inside the system, are ultimately
responsible for the gap formation. The treatment can be extended to include the
effects of a symmetry breaking magnetic field in the normal part of the
billiard or an Andreev billiard connected to two phase shifted superconductors.
Therefore we are able to see how these effects can remold and eventually
suppress the gap. Furthermore the semiclassical framework is able to cover the
effect of a finite Ehrenfest time which also causes the gap to shrink. However
for intermediate values this leads to the appearance of a second hard gap - a
clear signature of the Ehrenfest time.Comment: Refereed version. 23 pages, 19 figure
Adaptive Covariance Estimation with model selection
We provide in this paper a fully adaptive penalized procedure to select a
covariance among a collection of models observing i.i.d replications of the
process at fixed observation points. For this we generalize previous results of
Bigot and al. and propose to use a data driven penalty to obtain an oracle
inequality for the estimator. We prove that this method is an extension to the
matricial regression model of the work by Baraud
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