627 research outputs found
Dysbiosis in pediatrics is associated with respiratory infections: Is there a place for bacterial-derived products?
Respiratory tract infections (RTIs) are common in childhood because of the physiologic immaturity of the immune system, a microbial community under development in addition to other genetic, physiological, environmental and social factors. RTIs tend to recur and severe lower viral RTIs in early childhood are not uncommon and are associated with increased risk of respiratory disorders later in life, including recurrent wheezing and asthma. Therefore, a better understanding of the main players and mechanisms involved in respiratory morbidity is necessary for a prompt and improved care as well as for primary prevention. The inter-talks between human immune com-ponents and microbiota as well as their main functions have been recently unraveled; nevertheless, more is still to be discovered or understood in the above medical conditions. The aim of this review paper is to provide the most up-to-date overview on dysbiosis in pre-school children and its association with RTIs and their complications. The potential role of non-harmful bacterial-derived prod-ucts, according to the old hygiene hypothesis and the most recent trained-innate immunity concept, will be discussed together with the need of proof-of-concept studies and larger clinical trials with immunological and microbiological endpoints
Data Integration Driven Ontology Design, Case Study Smart City
Methods to design of formal ontologies have been in focus of research since the early nineties when their importance and conceivable practical application in engineering sciences had been understood. However, often significant customization of generic methodologies is required when they are applied in tangible scenarios. In this paper, we present a methodology for ontology design developed in the context of data integration. In this scenario, a targeting ontology is applied as a mediator for distinct schemas of individual data sources and, furthermore, as a reference schema for federated data queries. The methodology has been used and evaluated in a case study aiming at integration of buildings' energy and carbon emission related data. We claim that we have made the design process much more efficient and that there is a high potential to reuse the methodology
Vortex and half-vortex dynamics in a spinor quantum fluid of interacting polaritons
Spinorial or multi-component Bose-Einstein condensates may sustain fractional
quanta of circulation, vorticant topological excitations with half integer
windings of phase and polarization. Matter-light quantum fluids, such as
microcavity polaritons, represent a unique test bed for realising strongly
interacting and out-of-equilibrium condensates. The direct access to the phase
of their wavefunction enables us to pursue the quest of whether half vortices
---rather than full integer vortices--- are the fundamental topological
excitations of a spinor polariton fluid. Here, we are able to directly generate
by resonant pulsed excitations, a polariton fluid carrying either the half or
full vortex states as initial condition, and to follow their coherent evolution
using ultrafast holography. Surprisingly we observe a rich phenomenology that
shows a stable evolution of a phase singularity in a single component as well
as in the full vortex state, spiraling, splitting and branching of the initial
cores under different regimes and the proliferation of many vortex anti-vortex
pairs in self generated circular ripples. This allows us to devise the
interplay of nonlinearity and sample disorder in shaping the fluid and driving
the phase singularities dynamicsComment: New version complete with revised modelization, discussion and added
material. 8 pages, 7 figures. Supplementary videos:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B0QCllnLqdyBfmc2ai0yVF9fa2g2VnZodGUwemVkLThBb3BoOVRKRDJMS2dUdjlZdkRTQk
The physics models of FLUKA: status and recent development
A description of the intermediate and high energy hadronic interaction models
used in the FLUKA code is given. Benchmarking against experimental data is also
reported in order to validate the model performances. Finally the most recent
developments and perspectives for nucleus-nucleus interactions are described
together with some comparisons with experimental data.Comment: talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics
(CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 10 pages, p
Ultrafast control of Rabi oscillations in a polariton condensate
We report the experimental observation and control of space and time-resolved
light-matter Rabi oscillations in a microcavity. Our setup precision and the
system coherence are so high that coherent control can be implemented with
amplification or switching off of the oscillations and even erasing of the
polariton density by optical pulses. The data is reproduced by a fundamental
quantum optical model with excellent accuracy, providing new insights on the
key components that rule the polariton dynamics.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, supplementary 7 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary
videos:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B0QCllnLqdyBNjlMLTdjZlNhbTQ&usp=sharin
The colored Hanbury Brown--Twiss effect
The Hanbury Brown--Twiss effect is one of the celebrated phenomenologies of
modern physics that accommodates equally well classical (interferences of
waves) and quantum (correlations between indistinguishable particles)
interpretations. The effect was discovered in the late thirties with a basic
observation of Hanbury Brown that radio-pulses from two distinct antennas
generate signals on the oscilloscope that wiggle similarly to the naked eye.
When Hanbury Brown and his mathematician colleague Twiss took the obvious step
to propose bringing the effect in the optical range, they met with considerable
opposition as single-photon interferences were deemed impossible. The Hanbury
Brown--Twiss effect is nowadays universally accepted and, being so fundamental,
embodies many subtleties of our understanding of the wave/particle dual nature
of light. Thanks to a novel experimental technique, we report here a
generalized version of the Hanbury Brown--Twiss effect to include the frequency
of the detected light, or, from the particle point of view, the energy of the
detected photons. In addition to the known tendencies of indistinguishable
photons to arrive together on the detector, we find that photons of different
colors present the opposite characteristic of avoiding each others. We
postulate that fermions can be similarly brought to exhibit positive
(boson-like) correlations by frequency filtering.Comment: 18 pages, includes supplementary material of the derivation
Interactions and scattering of quantum vortices in a polariton fluid
Quantum vortices, the quantized version of classical vortices, play a
prominent role in superfluid and superconductor phase transitions. However,
their exploration at a particle level in open quantum systems has gained
considerable attention only recently. Here we study vortex pair interactions in
a resonant polariton fluid created in a solid-state microcavity. By tracking
the vortices on picosecond time scales, we reveal the role of nonlinearity, as
well as of density and phase gradients, in driving their rotational dynamics.
Such effects are also responsible for the split of composite spin-vortex
molecules into elementary half-vortices, when seeding opposite vorticity
between the two spinorial components. Remarkably, we also observe that vortices
placed in close proximity experience a pull-push scenario leading to unusual
scattering-like events that can be described by a tunable effective potential.
Understanding vortex interactions can be useful in quantum hydrodynamics and in
the development of vortex-based lattices, gyroscopes, and logic devices.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, Supplementary Material and 5 movies included in
arXi
Near-tip dual-length scale mechanics of mode I cracking in laminate brittle matrix composites
Abstract. This paper presents the results of a numerical study on the near-tip mechanics of mode I cracking in brittle matrix composite laminates. A finite element model is developed within the context of two competing characteristic lengths present in the composite, i.e., the microstmctural length such as the layer thickness and the macro-length such as the crack length, uncracked ligament size, etc.. The crack surfaces are assumed to be traction free and perpendicular to the reinforcing layers. Conditions leading to macroscopic homogeneous orthotropic mechanical behavior are also assumed. Thus, the near-tip numerical studies are carried out within a small-scale heterogeneous zone which surrounds the crack tip and is dominated at its outer boundary by the displacements associated with a mode I crack in a homogeneous orthotropic medium. The model is used to calculate the stresses and stress intensities in the vicinity of the crack tip which develop due to the alternating fiber/matrix heterogeneous composite microstructure. Parameter studies elucidating the effects of the two competing composite characteristic lengths on the evolution and structure of the near-tip heterogeneous stress fields are carded out. The results indicate that when the characteristic microstmctural length is relatively large compared to the macroscopic length, the singular heterogeneous stress fields may deviate substantially from the assumed homogenized orthotropic fields. The study can be used to determine the necessary conditions under which homogenization applies in obtaining an accurate description of the stresses in the vicinity of the crack tip in a laminated composite
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