48 research outputs found

    Hybridization-induced superconductivity from the electron repulsion on a tetramer lattice having a disconnected Fermi surface

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    Plaquette lattices with each unit cell containing multiple atoms are good candidates for disconnected Fermi surfaces, which are shown by Kuroki and Arita to be favorable for spin-flucutation mediated superconductivity from electron repulsion. Here we find an interesting example in a tetramer lattice where the structure within each unit cell dominates the nodal structure of the gap function. We trace its reason to the way in which a Cooper pair is formed across the hybridized molecular orbitals, where we still end up with a T_c much higher than usual.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

    Superconductivity in quantum-dot superlattices composed of quantum wire networks

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    Based on calculations using the local density approximation, we propose quantum wire networks with square and plaquette type lattice structures that form quantum dot superlattices. These artificial structures are well described by the Hubbard model. Numerical analysis reveals a superconducting ground state with transition temperatures TcT_c of up to 90 mK for the plaquette, which is more than double the value of 40 mK for the square lattice type and is sufficiently high to allow for the experimental observation of superconductivity.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

    Threat of Predation Does Not Affect Crassostrea virginica Filtration

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    Biotic interactions can structure ecological communities and influence ecosystem functioning. As ecosystem engineers and filter feeders, bivalves often have disproportionately large effects on ecosystem functioning. They also utilize numerous morphological and behavioral responses to reduce predation, which can include changes in their filtration rates. To test the response of Crassostrea virginica filtration rates to the presence of predators, juvenile and adult oysters were separately exposed to varying types of predation risk from Callinectes sapidus and Panopeus herbstii in outdoor mesocosms. Water column chlorophyll a concentrations and crab behavior were measured over the duration of the experiment. Predation risk had no effect on oyster reef drawdown of chlorophyll a, which suggests that this important ecosystem function of oyster reefs is not mediated by behaviorally induced predator effects. Therefore, efforts to model how oyster predators influence filtration rates and associated ecosystem services should focus primarily on the factors that influence oyster mortality rather than predator effects on oyster behavior

    Reforming Watershed Restoration: Science in Need of Application and Applications in Need of Science

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    Macroscopic description of the external and middle ear of paca (Cuniculus paca Linnaeus, 1766)

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    Abstract: Paca (Cuniculus paca), one of the largest rodents of the Brazilian fauna, has inherent characteristics of its species which can conribute as a new option for animal experimantation. As there is a growing demand for suitable experimental models in audiologic and otologic surgical research, the gross anatomy and ultrastructural ear of this rodent have been analyzed and described in detail. Fifteen adult pacas from the Wild Animals Sector herd of Faculdade de Ciências Agrárias e Veterinárias, Unesp-Jaboticabal, were used in this study. After anesthesia and euthanasia, we evaluated the entire composition of the external ear, registering and ddescribing the details; the temporal region was often dissected for a better view and detailing of the tympanic bulla which was removed and opened to expose the ear structures analyzed mascroscopically and ultrastructurally. The ear pinna has a triangular and concave shape with irregular ridges and sharp apex. The external auditory canal is winding in its path to the tympanic mebrane. The tympanic bulla is is on the back-bottom of the skull. The middle ear is formed by a cavity region filled with bone and membranous structures bounded by the tympanic membrane and the oval and round windows. The tympanic membrane is flat and seals the ear canal. The anatomy of the paca ear is similar to the guinea pig and from the viewpoint of experimental model has major advantages compared with the mouse ear

    Curvature-bias corrections using a pseudomass method

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    Momentum measurements for very high momentum charged particles, such as muons from electroweak vector boson decays, are particularly susceptible to charge-dependent curvature biases that arise from misalignments of tracking detectors. Low momentum charged particles used in alignment procedures have limited sensitivity to coherent displacements of such detectors, and therefore are unable to fully constrain these misalignments to the precision necessary for studies of electroweak physics. Additional approaches are therefore required to understand and correct for these effects. In this paper the curvature biases present at the LHCb detector are studied using the pseudomass method in proton-proton collision data recorded at centre of mass energy √s = 13 TeV during 2016, 2017 and 2018. The biases are determined using Z → μ+μ- decays in intervals defined by the data-taking period, magnet polarity and muon direction. Correcting for these biases, which are typically at the 10-4 GeV-1 level, improves the Z → μ+μ- mass resolution by roughly 18% and eliminates several pathological trends in the kinematic-dependence of the mean dimuon invariant mass

    New insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias

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    Characterization of the genetic landscape of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias (ADD) provides a unique opportunity for a better understanding of the associated pathophysiological processes. We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study totaling 111,326 clinically diagnosed/'proxy' AD cases and 677,663 controls. We found 75 risk loci, of which 42 were new at the time of analysis. Pathway enrichment analyses confirmed the involvement of amyloid/tau pathways and highlighted microglia implication. Gene prioritization in the new loci identified 31 genes that were suggestive of new genetically associated processes, including the tumor necrosis factor alpha pathway through the linear ubiquitin chain assembly complex. We also built a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future AD/dementia or progression from mild cognitive impairment to AD/dementia. The improvement in prediction led to a 1.6- to 1.9-fold increase in AD risk from the lowest to the highest decile, in addition to effects of age and the APOE ε4 allele

    Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

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    Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

    Search for the Bs0 → μ+μ−γ decay

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    A search for the fully reconstructed B0 s → µ +µ −γ decay is performed at the LHCb experiment using proton-proton collisions at √ s = 13 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5.4 fb−1 . No signifcant signal is found and upper limits on the branching fraction in intervals of the dimuon mass are set B(B 0 s → µ +µ −γ) < 4.2 × 10−8 , m(µ +µ −) ∈ [2mµ, 1.70] GeV/c2 , B(B 0 s → µ +µ −γ) < 7.7 × 10−8 , m(µ +µ −) ∈ [1.70, 2.88] GeV/c2 , B(B 0 s → µ +µ −γ) < 4.2 × 10−8 , m(µ +µ −) ∈ [3.92, mB0 s ] GeV/c2 , at 95% confdence level. Additionally, upper limits are set on the branching fraction in the [2mµ, 1.70] GeV/c2 dimuon mass region excluding the contribution from the intermediate ϕ(1020) meson, and in the region combining all dimuon-mass intervals

    Helium identification with LHCb

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    The identification of helium nuclei at LHCb is achieved using a method based on measurements of ionisation losses in the silicon sensors and timing measurements in the Outer Tracker drift tubes. The background from photon conversions is reduced using the RICH detectors and an isolation requirement. The method is developed using pp collision data at √(s) = 13 TeV recorded by the LHCb experiment in the years 2016 to 2018, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5.5 fb-1. A total of around 105 helium and antihelium candidates are identified with negligible background contamination. The helium identification efficiency is estimated to be approximately 50% with a corresponding background rejection rate of up to O(10^12). These results demonstrate the feasibility of a rich programme of measurements of QCD and astrophysics interest involving light nuclei
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