1,691 research outputs found
Leg Sympathetic Response to Noxious Skin Stimuli is Similar in High and Low Level Human Spinal Cord Injury
Objective To determine if sympathetically mediated vasoconstriction in the lower extremities is injury level dependent. Although sympathetic responses have been measured in the limbs of people with high and low level SCI using blood flow measurements, including Doppler ultrasound and venous plethysmography, a direct comparison between injury levels has not been made. Methods Volunteers with chronic SCI were grouped according to injury level. Above T6: high level (HL, n = 7), and T6 and below: low level (LL, n = 6). All subjects had complete motor and sensory loss. Leg arterial flows were recorded by venous occlusion plethysmography, and continuous heart rate and mean arterial pressure (MAP) were measured. The conditioning stimulus consisted of transcutaneous stimulation to the arch of the contralateral foot. Results HL and LL subjects demonstrated a significant decrease in arterial conductance during stimulation with no significant difference found between groups. As expected, only group HL demonstrated a significant increase in MAP. Conclusions These results support our hypothesis that local (leg) sympathetic responses are similar for both high and low level SCI. Significance While low level SCI does not typically present with autonomic dysreflexia, bouts of increased reflex sympathetic activity could have ramifications for metabolism as well as renal and motor system functio
Leg Sympathetic Response to Noxious Skin Stimuli is Similar in High and Low Level Human Spinal Cord Injury
Objective To determine if sympathetically mediated vasoconstriction in the lower extremities is injury level dependent. Although sympathetic responses have been measured in the limbs of people with high and low level SCI using blood flow measurements, including Doppler ultrasound and venous plethysmography, a direct comparison between injury levels has not been made. Methods Volunteers with chronic SCI were grouped according to injury level. Above T6: high level (HL, n = 7), and T6 and below: low level (LL, n = 6). All subjects had complete motor and sensory loss. Leg arterial flows were recorded by venous occlusion plethysmography, and continuous heart rate and mean arterial pressure (MAP) were measured. The conditioning stimulus consisted of transcutaneous stimulation to the arch of the contralateral foot. Results HL and LL subjects demonstrated a significant decrease in arterial conductance during stimulation with no significant difference found between groups. As expected, only group HL demonstrated a significant increase in MAP. Conclusions These results support our hypothesis that local (leg) sympathetic responses are similar for both high and low level SCI. Significance While low level SCI does not typically present with autonomic dysreflexia, bouts of increased reflex sympathetic activity could have ramifications for metabolism as well as renal and motor system functio
Geometry of One-Dimensional Wave Propagation
We investigate the geometrical features of one-dimensional wave propagation,
whose dynamics is described by the (2+1)-dimensional Lorentz group. We find
many interesting geometrical ingredients such as spinorlike behavior of wave
amplitudes, gauge transformations, Bloch-type equations, and Lorentz-group
Berry phases. We also propose an optical experiment to verify these effects.Comment: RevTeX, 16 pages, 6 postscript figure
Do Disease Stories Need a Hero? Effects of Human Protagonists on a Narrative Visualization about Cerebral Small Vessel Disease
Authors use various media formats to convey disease information to a broad audience, from articles and videos to interviews or documentaries. These media often include human characters, such as patients or treating physicians, who are involved with the disease. While artistic media, such as hand-crafted illustrations and animations are used for health communication in many cases, our goal is to focus on data-driven visualizations. Over the last decade, narrative visualization has experienced increasing prominence, employing storytelling techniques to present data in an understandable way. Similar to classic storytelling formats, narrative medical visualizations may also take a human character-centered design approach. However, the impact of this form of data communication on the user is largely unexplored. This study investigates the protagonist's influence on user experience in terms of engagement, identification, self-referencing, emotional response, perceived credibility, and time spent in the story. Our experimental setup utilizes a character-driven story structure for disease stories derived from Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey. Using this structure, we generated three conditions for a cerebral small vessel disease story that vary by their protagonist: (1) a patient, (2) a physician, and (3) a base condition with no human protagonist. These story variants formed the basis for our hypotheses on the effect of a human protagonist in disease stories, which we evaluated in an online study with 30 participants. Our findings indicate that a human protagonist exerts various influences on the story perception and that these also vary depending on the type of protagonist.publishedVersio
Canonical and kinetic forms of the electromagnetic momentum in an ad hoc quantization scheme for a dispersive dielectric
An ad hoc quantization scheme for the electromagnetic field in a weakly
dispersive, transparent dielectric leads to the definition of canonical and
kinetic forms for the momentum of the electromagnetic field in a dispersive
medium. The canonical momentum is uniquely defined as the operator that
generates spatial translations in a uniform medium, but the quantization scheme
suggests two possible choices for the kinetic momentum operator, corresponding
to the Abraham or the Minkowski momentum in classical electrodynamics. Another
implication of this procedure is that a wave packet containing a single dressed
photon travels at the group velocity through the medium. The physical
significance of the canonical momentum has already been established by
considerations of energy and momentum conservation in the atomic recoil due to
spontaneous emission, the Cerenkov effect, the Doppler effect, and phase
matching in nonlinear optical processes. In addition, the data of the Jones and
Leslie radiation pressure experiment is consistent with the assignment of one
?k unit of canonical momentum to each dressed photon. By contrast, experiments
in which the dielectric is rigidly accelerated by unbalanced electromagnetic
forces require the use of the Abraham momentum.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figure, aip style, submitted to PR
Berry phases for 3D Hartree type equations with a quadratic potential and a uniform magnetic field
A countable set of asymptotic space -- localized solutions is constructed by
the complex germ method in the adiabatic approximation for 3D Hartree type
equations with a quadratic potential. The asymptotic parameter is 1/T, where
is the adiabatic evolution time.
A generalization of the Berry phase of the linear Schr\"odinger equation is
formulated for the Hartree type equation. For the solutions constructed, the
Berry phases are found in explicit form.Comment: 15 pages, no figure
Phase Operator for the Photon Field and an Index Theorem
An index relation is
satisfied by the creation and annihilation operators and of a
harmonic oscillator. A hermitian phase operator, which inevitably leads to
, cannot be consistently
defined. If one considers an dimensional truncated theory, a hermitian
phase operator of Pegg and Barnett which carries a vanishing index can be
defined. However, for arbitrarily large , we show that the vanishing index
of the hermitian phase operator of Pegg and Barnett causes a substantial
deviation from minimum uncertainty in a characteristically quantum domain with
small average photon numbers. We also mention an interesting analogy between
the present problem and the chiral anomaly in gauge theory which is related to
the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. It is suggested that the phase operator
problem related to the above analytic index may be regarded as a new class of
quantum anomaly. From an anomaly view point ,it is not surprising that the
phase operator of Susskind and Glogower, which carries a unit index, leads to
an anomalous identity and an anomalous commutator.Comment: 32 pages, Late
The Survey for Ionization in Neutral Gas Galaxies: I. Description and Initial Results
We introduce the Survey for Ionization in Neutral Gas Galaxies (SINGG), a
census of star formation in HI-selected galaxies. The survey consists of
H-alpha and R-band imaging of a sample of 468 galaxies selected from the HI
Parkes All Sky Survey (HIPASS). The sample spans three decades in HI mass and
is free of many of the biases that affect other star forming galaxy samples. We
present the criteria for sample selection, list the entire sample, discuss our
observational techniques, and describe the data reduction and calibration
methods. This paper focuses on 93 SINGG targets whose observations have been
fully reduced and analyzed to date. The majority of these show a single
Emission Line Galaxy (ELG). We see multiple ELGs in 13 fields, with up to four
ELGs in a single field. All of the targets in this sample are detected in
H-alpha indicating that dormant (non-star forming) galaxies with M(HI) > ~3e7
M_sun are very rare. A database of the measured global properties of the ELGs
is presented. The ELG sample spans four orders of magnitude in luminosity
(H-alpha and R-band), and H-alpha surface brightness, nearly three orders of
magnitude in R surface brightness and nearly two orders of magnitude in H-alpha
equivalent width (EW). The surface brightness distribution of our sample is
broader than that of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectroscopic sample, the
(EW) distribution is broader than prism-selected samples, and the morphologies
found include all common types of star forming galaxies (e.g. irregular,
spiral, blue compact dwarf, starbursts, merging and colliding systems, and even
residual star formation in S0 and Sa spirals). (abridged)Comment: 28 pages, ApJS, in press. Full resolution version with all panels of
Fig. 8 available at http://sungg.pha.jhu.edu/publications.html . On line data
available at http://sungg.pha.jhu.edu/PubData/ . Author list corrected. Wrong
value for f_ap used in eq. 7 now corrected; typos corrected, non-used
references replaced, others update
Factorisation of analytic representations in the unit disk and number-phase statistics of a quantum harmonic oscillator
The inner-outer part factorisation of analytic representations in the unit
disk is used for an effective characterisation of the number-phase statistical
properties of a quantum harmonic oscillator. It is shown that the factorisation
is intimately connected to the number-phase Weyl semigroup and its properties.
In the Barut-Girardello analytic representation the factorisation is
implemented as a convolution. Several examples are given which demonstrate the
physical significance of the factorisation and its role for quantum statistics.
In particular, we study the effect of phase-space interference on the
factorisation properties of a superposition state.Comment: to appear in J. Phys. A, LaTeX, 13 pages, no figures. More
information on http://www.technion.ac.il/~brif/science.htm
Locality and digital quantum simulation of power-law interactions
The propagation of information in non-relativistic quantum systems obeys a
speed limit known as a Lieb-Robinson bound. We derive a new Lieb-Robinson bound
for systems with interactions that decay with distance as a power law,
. The bound implies an effective light cone tighter than all
previous bounds. Our approach is based on a technique for approximating the
time evolution of a system, which was first introduced as part of a quantum
simulation algorithm by Haah et al., FOCS'18. To bound the error of the
approximation, we use a known Lieb-Robinson bound that is weaker than the bound
we establish. This result brings the analysis full circle, suggesting a deep
connection between Lieb-Robinson bounds and digital quantum simulation. In
addition to the new Lieb-Robinson bound, our analysis also gives an error bound
for the Haah et al. quantum simulation algorithm when used to simulate
power-law decaying interactions. In particular, we show that the gate count of
the algorithm scales with the system size better than existing algorithms when
(where is the number of dimensions).Comment: 18 pages, 10 figure
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