883 research outputs found
Measurement of Motion of Carotid Bifurcation Plaques
Video loops of B-mode ultrasound images of 35 carotid bifurcation plaques were obtained (4 symptomatic and 31 asymptomatic) from patients with carotid bifurcation atherosclerosis. Video loops were classified visually as showing concordant (n=22) or discordant motion (n=13). Concordant plaques were characterized by uniform orientation of motion throughout the cardiac cycle. Discordant plaques exhibited significant spread in motion orientation at different parts of the cardiac cycle, especially at systole. We developed a real-time motion analysis system that applies Farneback's method to estimate velocities between consecutive video frames. For our purposes, we allow a 100msec time interval between the video frames used in the analysis. This approach allows us to analyze significant motions associated with a larger time interval. Over each video frame, we measure the spread of the motion orientation around the dominant orientation. For each video, we look at the spreads of the motion orientations for different motion magnitudes. Using these motion-spread measurements, we can quantify discordant movement. The sum of maximum fan widths for the median pixel motions 5 to 3 (SMFW5to3) had a median value of 100 degrees and interquartile range (IQR) of (80, 110) degrees for the concordant plaques and 270, (230, 430) for the discordant plaques (P <; 0.001). Thus, we have a new tool to differentiate between concordant and discordant plaques
Heavy pseudoscalar mesons in a Schwinger-Dyson--Bethe-Salpeter approach
The mass spectrum of heavy pseudoscalar mesons, described as quark-antiquark
bound systems, is considered within the Bethe-Salpeter formalism with
momentum-dependent masses of the constituents. This dependence is found by
solving the Schwinger-Dyson equation for quark propagators in rainbow-ladder
approximation. Such an approximation is known to provide both a fast
convergence of numerical methods and accurate results for lightest mesons.
However, as the meson mass increases, the method becomes less stable and
special attention must be devoted to details of numerical means of solving the
corresponding equations. We focus on the pseudoscalar sector and show that our
numerical scheme describes fairly accurately the , , , and
ground states. Excited states are considered as well. Our calculations
are directly related to the future physics programme at FAIR.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures; Based on materials of the contribution
"Relativistic Description of Two- and Three-Body Systems in Nuclear Physics",
ECT*, October 19-23, 200
Quantum-fluctuation-induced repelling interaction of quantum string between walls
Quantum string, which was brought into discussion recently as a model for the
stripe phase in doped cuprates, is simulated by means of the
density-matrix-renormalization-group method. String collides with adjacent
neighbors, as it wonders, owing to quantum zero-point fluctuations. The energy
cost due to the collisions is our main concern. Embedding a quantum string
between rigid walls with separation d, we found that for sufficiently large d,
collision-induced energy cost obeys the formula \sim exp (- A d^alpha) with
alpha=0.808(1), and string's mean fluctuation width grows logarithmically \sim
log d. Those results are not understood in terms of conventional picture that
the string is `disordered,' and only the short-wave-length fluctuations
contribute to collisions. Rather, our results support a recent proposal that
owing to collisions, short-wave-length fluctuations are suppressed, but
instead, long-wave-length fluctuations become significant. This mechanism would
be responsible for stabilizing the stripe phase
Fractionalization, topological order, and cuprate superconductivity
This paper is concerned with the idea that the electron is fractionalized in
the cuprate high- materials. We show how the notion of topological order
may be used to develop a precise theoretical characterization of a
fractionalized phase in spatial dimension higher than one. Apart from the
fractional particles into which the electron breaks apart, there are
non-trivial gapped topological excitations - dubbed "visons". A cylindrical
sample that is fractionalized exhibits two disconnected topological sectors
depending on whether a vison is trapped in the "hole" or not. Indeed, "vison
expulsion" is to fractionalization what the Meissner effect ("flux expulsion")
is to superconductivity. This understanding enables us to address a number of
conceptual issues that need to be confronted by any theory of the cuprates
based on fractionalization ideas. We argue that whether or not the electron
fractionalizes in the cuprates is a sharp and well-posed question with a
definite answer. We elaborate on our recent proposal for an experiment to
unambiguously settle this issue.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure
Landau Expansion for the Kugel-Khomskii Hamiltonian
The Kugel-Khomskii (KK) Hamiltonian for the titanates describes spin and
orbital superexchange interactions between ions in an ideal perovskite
structure in which the three orbitals are degenerate in energy and
electron hopping is constrained by cubic site symmetry. In this paper we
implement a variational approach to mean-field theory in which each site, ,
has its own single-site density matrix \rhov(i), where , the
number of allowed single-particle states, is 6 (3 orbital times 2 spin states).
The variational free energy from this 35 parameter density matrix is shown to
exhibit the unusual symmetries noted previously which lead to a
wavevector-dependent susceptibility for spins in orbitals which is
dispersionless in the -direction. Thus, for the cubic KK model
itself, mean-field theory does not provide wavevector `selection', in agreement
with rigorous symmetry arguments. We consider the effect of including various
perturbations. When spin-orbit interactions are introduced, the susceptibility
has dispersion in all directions in -space, but the resulting
antiferromagnetic mean-field state is degenerate with respect to global
rotation of the staggered spin, implying that the spin-wave spectrum is
gapless. This possibly surprising conclusion is also consistent with rigorous
symmetry arguments. When next-nearest-neighbor hopping is included, staggered
moments of all orbitals appear, but the sum of these moments is zero, yielding
an exotic state with long-range order without long-range spin order. The effect
of a Hund's rule coupling of sufficient strength is to produce a state with
orbital order.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. B (2003
Adaptive cluster expansion for the inverse Ising problem: convergence, algorithm and tests
We present a procedure to solve the inverse Ising problem, that is to find
the interactions between a set of binary variables from the measure of their
equilibrium correlations. The method consists in constructing and selecting
specific clusters of variables, based on their contributions to the
cross-entropy of the Ising model. Small contributions are discarded to avoid
overfitting and to make the computation tractable. The properties of the
cluster expansion and its performances on synthetic data are studied. To make
the implementation easier we give the pseudo-code of the algorithm.Comment: Paper submitted to Journal of Statistical Physic
Surface and capillary transitions in an associating binary mixture model
We investigate the phase diagram of a two-component associating fluid mixture
in the presence of selectively adsorbing substrates. The mixture is
characterized by a bulk phase diagram which displays peculiar features such as
closed loops of immiscibility. The presence of the substrates may interfere the
physical mechanism involved in the appearance of these phase diagrams, leading
to an enhanced tendency to phase separate below the lower critical solution
point. Three different cases are considered: a planar solid surface in contact
with a bulk fluid, while the other two represent two models of porous systems,
namely a slit and an array on infinitely long parallel cylinders. We confirm
that surface transitions, as well as capillary transitions for a large
area/volume ratio, are stabilized in the one-phase region. Applicability of our
results to experiments reported in the literature is discussed.Comment: 12 two-column pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in Physical
Review E; corrected versio
Breaking of general rotational symmetries by multi-dimensional classical ratchets
We demonstrate that a particle driven by a set of spatially uncorrelated,
independent colored noise forces in a bounded, multidimensional potential
exhibits rotations that are independent of the initial conditions. We calculate
the particle currents in terms of the noise statistics and the potential
asymmetries by deriving an n-dimensional Fokker-Planck equation in the small
correlation time limit. We analyze a variety of flow patterns for various
potential structures, generating various combinations of laminar and rotational
flows.Comment: Accepted, Physical Review
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