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Examining consent for interventional research in potential deceased organ donors: a narrative review
In the last decade, research in transplant medicine has focused on developing interventions in the management of the deceased organ donor to improve the quality and quantity of transplantable organs. Despite the promise of interventional donor research, there remain debates about the ethics of this research, specifically regarding gaining research consent. Here, we examine the concerns and ambiguities around consent for interventional donor research, which incorporate questions about who should consent for interventional donor research and what people are being asked to consent for. We highlight the US and UK policy responses to these concerns and argue that, whereas guidance in this area has done much to clarify these ambiguities, there is little consideration of the nature, practicalities and context around consent in this area, particularly regarding organ donors and their families. We review wider studies of consent in critical care research and social science studies of consent in medical research, to gain a broader view of consent in this area as a relational and contextual process. We contend a lack of consideration has been given to: what it might mean to consent to interventional donor research; how families, patients and health professionals might experience providing and seeking this consent; who is best placed to have these discussions; and the socioāinstitutional contexts affecting these processes. Further, empirical research is required to establish an ethical and sensitive model for consent in interventional donor research, ensuring the principles enshrined in research ethics are met and public trust in organ donation is maintained
Stellar Populations in the Outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud: No Outer Edge Yet
We report the detection of intermediate-age and old stars belonging to the
SMC at 6.5 kpc from the SMC center in the southern direction. We show, from the
analysis of three high quality 34\arcmin 33\arcmin CMDs, that the age
composition of the stellar population is similar at galactocentric distances of
4.7 kpc, 5.6 kpc, and 6.5 kpc. The surface
brightness profile of the SMC follows an exponential law, with no evidence of
truncation, all the way out to 6.5 kpc. These results, taken together, suggest
that the SMC `disk' population is dominating over a possible old Milky Way-like
stellar halo, and that the SMC may be significantly larger than previously
thought.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters. High resolution figures are
available at ftp://ftp.iac.es/out/noe
Quantum Kinetic Theory VI: The Growth of a Bose-Einstein Condensate
A detailed analysis of the growth of a BEC is given, based on quantum kinetic
theory, in which we take account of the evolution of the occupations of lower
trap levels, and of the full Bose-Einstein formula for the occupations of
higher trap levels, as well as the Bose stimulated direct transfer of atoms to
the condensate level introduced by Gardiner et al. We find good agreement with
experiment at higher temperatures, but at lower temperatures the experimentally
observed growth rate is somewhat more rapid. We also confirm the picture of the
``kinetic'' region of evolution, introduced by Kagan et al., for the time up to
the initiation of the condensate. The behavior after initiation essentially
follows our original growth equation, but with a substantially increased rate
coefficient.
Our modelling of growth implicitly gives a model of the spatial shape of the
condensate vapor system as the condensate grows, and thus provides an
alternative to the present phenomenological fitting procedure, based on the sum
of a zero-chemical potential vapor and a Thomas-Fermi shaped condensate. Our
method may give substantially different results for condensate numbers and
temperatures obtained from phenomentological fits, and indicates the need for
more systematic investigation of the growth dynamics of the condensate from a
supersaturated vapor.Comment: TeX source; 29 Pages including 26 PostScript figure
Emergent classicality in continuous quantum measurements
We develop a classical theoretical description for nonlinear many-body
dynamics that incorporates the back-action of a continuous measurement process.
The classical approach is compared with the exact quantum solution in an
example with an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate in a double-well potential
where the atom numbers in both potential wells are monitored by light
scattering. In the classical description the back-action of the measurements
appears as diffusion of the relative phase of the condensates on each side of
the trap. When the measurements are frequent enough to resolve the system
dynamics, the system behaves classically. This happens even deep in the quantum
regime, and demonstrates how classical physics emerges from quantum mechanics
as a result of measurement back-action
Quantum turbulence in condensate collisions: an application of the classical field method
We apply the classical field method to simulate the production of correlated
atoms during the collision of two Bose-Einstein condensates. Our
non-perturbative method includes the effect of quantum noise, and provides for
the first time a theoretical description of collisions of high density
condensates with very large out-scattered fractions. Quantum correlation
functions for the scattered atoms are calculated from a single simulation, and
show that the correlation between pairs of atoms of opposite momentum is rather
small. We also predict the existence of quantum turbulence in the field of the
scattered atoms--a property which should be straightforwardly measurable.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures: Rewritten text, replaced figure
Theory of the Ramsey spectroscopy and anomalous segregation in ultra-cold rubidium
The recent anomalous segregation experiment of Lewandowski et al. (PRL, 88,
070403, 2002) shows dramatic, rapid internal state segregation for two
hyperfine levels of rubidium. We simulate an effective one dimensional model of
the system for experimental parameters and find reasonable agreement with the
data. The Ramsey frequency is found to be insensitive to the decoherence of the
superposition, and is only equivalent to the interaction energy shift for a
pure superposition. A Quantum Boltzmann equation describing collisions is
derived using Quantum Kinetic Theory, taking into account the different
scattering lengths of the internal states. As spin-wave experiments are likely
to be attempted at lower temperatures we examine the effect of degeneracy on
decoherence by considering the recent experiment of Lewandowski et al. where
degeneracy is around 10%. We also find that the segregation effect is only
possible when transport terms are included in the equations of motion, and that
the interactions only directly alter the momentum distributions of the states.
The segregation or spin wave effect is thus entirely due to coherent atomic
motion as foreseen in the experimental reportComment: 26 pages, 4 figures, to be published in J. Phys.
Segregation by membrane rigidity in flowing binary suspensions of elastic capsules
Spatial segregation in the wall normal direction is investigated in
suspensions containing a binary mixture of Neo-Hookean capsules subjected to
pressure driven flow in a planar slit. The two components of the binary mixture
have unequal membrane rigidities. The problem is studied numerically using an
accelerated implementation of the boundary integral method. The effect of a
variety of parameters was investigated, including the capillary number,
rigidity ratio between the two species, volume fraction, confinement ratio, and
the number fraction of the more floppy particle in the mixture. It was
observed that in suspensions of pure species, the mean wall normal positions of
the stiff and the floppy particles are comparable. In mixtures, however, the
stiff particles were found to be increasingly displaced towards the walls with
increasing , while the floppy particles were found to increasingly
accumulate near the centerline with decreasing . The origins of this
segregation is traced to the effect of the number fraction on the
localization of the stiff and the floppy particles in the near wall region --
the probability of escape of a stiff particle from the near wall region to the
interior is greatly reduced with increasing , while the exact opposite
trend is observed for a floppy particle with decreasing . Simple model
studies on heterogeneous pair collisions involving a stiff and a floppy
particle mechanistically explain this observation. The key result in these
studies is that the stiff particle experiences much larger cross-stream
displacement in heterogeneous collisions than the floppy particle. A unified
mechanism incorporating the wall-induced migration of deformable particles and
the particle fluxes associated with heterogeneous and homogeneous pair
collisions is presented.Comment: 19 Pages, 16 Figure
Nuclear quantum effects in solids using a colored-noise thermostat
We present a method, based on a non-Markovian Langevin equation, to include
quantum corrections to the classical dynamics of ions in a quasi-harmonic
system. By properly fitting the correlation function of the noise, one can vary
the fluctuations in positions and momenta as a function of the vibrational
frequency, and fit them so as to reproduce the quantum-mechanical behavior,
with minimal a priori knowledge of the details of the system. We discuss the
application of the thermostat to diamond and to ice Ih. We find that results in
agreement with path-integral molecular dynamics can be obtained using only a
fraction of the computational effort.Comment: submitted for publicatio
Tripartite entanglement and threshold properties of coupled intracavity downconversion and sum-frequency generation
The process of cascaded downconversion and sum-frequency generation inside an
optical cavity has been predicted to be a potential source of three-mode
continuous-variable entanglement. When the cavity is pumped by two fields, the
threshold properties have been analysed, showing that these are more
complicated than in well-known processes such as optical parametric
oscillation. When there is only a single pumping field, the entanglement
properties have been calculated using a linearised fluctuation analysis, but
without any consideration of the threshold properties or critical operating
points of the system. In this work we extend this analysis to demonstrate that
the singly pumped system demonstrates a rich range of threshold behaviour when
quantisation of the pump field is taken into account and that asymmetric
polychromatic entanglement is available over a wide range of operational
parameters.Comment: 24 pages, 15 figure
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