42,845 research outputs found
Complexation of DNA with positive spheres: phase diagram of charge inversion and reentrant condensation
The phase diagram of a water solution of DNA and oppositely charged spherical
macroions is studied. DNA winds around spheres to form beads-on-a-string
complexes resembling the chromatin 10 nm fiber. At small enough concentration
of spheres these "artificial chromatin" complexes are negative, while at large
enough concentrations of spheres the charge of DNA is inverted by the adsorbed
spheres. Charges of complexes stabilize their solutions. In the plane of
concentrations of DNA and spheres the phases with positive and negative
complexes are separated by another phase, which contains the condensate of
neutral DNA-spheres complexes. Thus when the concentration of spheres grows,
DNA-spheres complexes experience condensation and resolubilization (or
reentrant condensation). Phenomenological theory of the phase diagram of
reentrant condensation and charge inversion is suggested. Parameters of this
theory are calculated by microscopic theory. It is shown that an important part
of the effect of a monovalent salt on the phase diagram can be described by the
nontrivial renormalization of the effective linear charge density of DNA wound
around a sphere, due to the Onsager-Manning condensation. We argue that our
phenomenological phase diagram or reentrant condensation is generic to a large
class of strongly asymmetric electrolytes. Possible implication of these
results for the natural chromatin are discussed.Comment: Many corrections to text. SUbmitted to J. Chem. Phy
Adaptive high-order finite element solution of transient elastohydrodynamic lubrication problems
This article presents a new numerical method to solve transient line contact elastohydrodynamic lubrication (EHL) problems. A high-order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element method is used for the spatial discretization, and the standard Crank-Nicolson method is employed to approximate the time derivative. An h-adaptivity method is used for grid adaptation with the time-stepping, and the penalty method is employed to handle the cavitation condition.
The roughness model employed here is a simple indentation, which is located on the upper surface. Numerical results are presented comparing the DG method to standard finite difference (FD) techniques. It is shown that micro-EHL features are captured with far fewer degrees of freedom than when using low-order FD methods
Phase Transition in the ABC Model
Recent studies have shown that one-dimensional driven systems can exhibit
phase separation even if the dynamics is governed by local rules. The ABC
model, which comprises three particle species that diffuse asymmetrically
around a ring, shows anomalous coarsening into a phase separated steady state.
In the limiting case in which the dynamics is symmetric and the parameter
describing the asymmetry tends to one, no phase separation occurs and the
steady state of the system is disordered. In the present work we consider the
weak asymmetry regime where is the system size and
study how the disordered state is approached. In the case of equal densities,
we find that the system exhibits a second order phase transition at some
nonzero .
The value of and the optimal profiles can be
obtained by writing the exact large deviation functional. For nonequal
densities, we write down mean field equations and analyze some of their
predictions.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure
Spacetime Supersymmetry in a nontrivial NS-NS Superstring Background
In this paper we consider superstring propagation in a nontrivial NS-NS
background. We deform the world sheet stress tensor and supercurrent with an
infinitesimal B_{\mu\nu} field. We construct the gauge-covariant super-Poincare
generators in this background and show that the B_{\mu\nu} field spontaneously
breaks spacetime supersymmetry. We find that the gauge-covariant spacetime
momenta cease to commute with each other and with the spacetime supercharges.
We construct a set of "magnetic" super-Poincare generators that are conserved
for constant field strength H_{\mu\nu\lambda}, and show that these generators
obey a "magnetic" extension of the ordinary supersymmetry algebra.Comment: 13 pages, Latex. Published versio
Operator Product Expansion for Exclusive Decays: B^+ ->Ds^+ e+e- and B^+ -> Ds^{*+} e+e-
The decays and proceed
through a weak and an electromagnetic interaction. This is a typical ``long
distance'' process, usually difficult to compute systematically. We propose
that over a large fraction of phase space a combination of an operator product
and heavy quark expansions effectively turns this process into one in which the
weak and electromagnetic interactions occur through a local operator. Moreover,
we use heavy quark spin symmetry to relate all the local operators that appear
in leading order of the operator expansion to two basic ones. We use this
operator expansion to estimate the decay rates for .Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, Latex, published version in PR
DNA Spools under Tension
DNA-spools, structures in which DNA is wrapped and helically coiled onto
itself or onto a protein core are ubiquitous in nature. We develop a general
theory describing the non-equilibrium behavior of DNA-spools under linear
tension. Two puzzling and seemingly unrelated recent experimental findings, the
sudden quantized unwrapping of nucleosomes and that of DNA toroidal condensates
under tension are theoretically explained and shown to be of the same origin.
The study provides new insights into nucleosome and chromatin fiber stability
and dynamics
Validity, reliability, acceptability, and utility of the Social Inclusion Questionnaire User Experience (SInQUE): a clinical tool to facilitate social inclusion amongst people with severe mental health problems.
BACKGROUND: Individuals with severe mental health problems are at risk of social exclusion, which may complicate their recovery. Mental health and social care staff have, until now, had no valid or reliable way of assessing their clients' social inclusion. The Social Inclusion Questionnaire User Experience (SInQUE) was developed to address this. It assesses five domains: social integration; productivity; consumption; access to services; and political engagement, in the year prior to first psychiatric admission (T1) and the year prior to interview (T2) from which a total score at each time point can be calculated. AIMS: To establish the validity, reliability, and acceptability of the SInQUE in individuals with a broad range of psychiatric diagnoses receiving care from community mental health services and its utility for mental health staff. METHOD: Participants were 192 mental health service users with psychosis, personality disorder, or common mental disorder (e.g., depression, anxiety) who completed the SInQUE alongside other validated outcome measures. Test-retest reliability was assessed in a sub-sample of 30 participants and inter-rater reliability was assessed in 11 participants. SInQUE ratings of 28 participants were compared with those of a sibling with no experience of mental illness to account for shared socio-cultural factors. Acceptability and utility of the tool were assessed using completion rates and focus groups with staff. RESULTS: The SInQUE demonstrated acceptable convergent validity. The total score and the Social Integration domain score were strongly correlated with quality of life, both in the full sample and in the three diagnostic groups. Discriminant validity and test-retest reliability were established across all domains, although the test-retest reliability on scores for the Service Access and Political Engagement domains prior to first admission to hospital (T1) was lower than other domains. Inter-rater reliability was excellent for all domains at T1 and T2. CONCLUSIONS: The component of the SInQUE that assesses current social inclusion has good psychometric properties and can be recommended for use by mental health staff
Pain Quality Descriptors in Persons with Limb Loss
Background: Phantom limb pain is very common, and its pain quality descriptors give insight to the lived experience of phantom limb pain.
Significance: This study reports unique phantom limb pain quality descriptor categories
Analysis of rock cutting process with a blunt PDC cutter under different wear flat inclination angles
It is generally accepted that drilling with drag bits (Polycrystalline Diamond Compact bits) simultaneously consists of “pure cutting” and “frictional contact” processes. To date, the mechanics of rock cutting have been mostly based on the assumption that these two processes are fully independent as the influence of wear flat inclination angle (ß) with respect to the cutter velocity vector (v) on the frictional contact force is often not accounted for. The specific aim of this study is to determine the effect of wear flat inclination angle on the frictional force acting on the wear flat surface of a single blunt cutter over a wide range of depths of cut (d). For this purpose, an extensive and comprehensive set of cutting experiments was performed on two sedimentary rock samples (a limestone and a sandstone) using a state-of-the-art rock cutting equipment and a unique cutter holder. The results show that the normal contact stress (s) at the wear flat-rock interface (and therefore the normal frictional force acting on the wear flat) is dependent on the depth of cut within the elastoplastic and particularly plastic regimes of frictional contact; however, the contact stress is invariant with depth of cut within the elastic regime. Further investigations indicate that the assumption that the force acting on the wear flat surface of a blunt cutter is independent of the cutting process taking place ahead of the cutter is not valid in particular, for the large values of inclination angles
Long range polarization attraction between two different likely charged macroions
It is known that in a water solution with multivalent counterions (Z-ions),
two likely charged macroions can attract each other due to correlations of
Z-ions adsorbed on their surfaces. This "correlation" attraction is
short-ranged and decays exponentially with increasing distance between
macroions at characteristic distance A/2\pi, where A is the average distance
between Z-ions on the surfaces of macroions. In this work, we show that an
additional long range "polarization" attraction exists when the bare surface
charge densities of the two macroions have the same sign, but are different in
absolute values. The key idea is that with adsorbed Z-ions, two insulating
macroions can be considered as conductors with fixed but different electric
potentials. Each potential is determined by the difference between the entropic
bulk chemical potential of a Z-ion and its correlation chemical potential at
the surface of the macroion determined by its bare surface charge density. When
the two macroions are close enough, they get polarized in such a way that their
adjacent spots form a charged capacitor, which leads to attraction. In a salt
free solution this polarization attractive force is long ranged: it decays as a
power of the distance between the surfaces of two macroions, d. The
polarization force decays slower than the van der Waals attraction and
therefore is much larger than it in a large range of distances. In the presence
of large amount of monovalent salt, when A/2\pi<< d<< r_s (r_s is the
Debye-H\"{u}ckel screening radius), this force is still much stronger than the
van der Waals attraction and the correlation attraction mentioned above.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. Small change in the text, no change in result
- …