Fusion of strings vs. percolation and the transition to the quark-gluon plasma

In most of the models of hadronic collisions the number of exchanged colour strings grows with energy and atomic numbers of the projectile and target. At high string densities interaction between them should melt them into the quark-gluon plasma state. It is shown that under certain assumptions about the the string interaction, a phase transition to the quark gluon plasma indeed takes place in the system of many colour strings. It may be of the first or second order (percolation), depending on the particular mechanism of the interaction. The critical string density is about unity in both cases. The critical density may have been already reached in central Pb-Pb collisions at 158 A GeV.Comment: 16 pages, 3 Postscript figure

Progress in the use of adeno-associated viral vectors for gene therapy

The development of safe and efficient gene transfer vectors is crucial for the success of gene therapy trials. A viral vector system promising to meet these requirements is based on the apathogenic adeno-associated virus (AAV-2), a member of the parvovirus family. The advantages of this vector system is the stability of the viral capsid, the low immunogenicity, the ability to transduce both dividing and non-dividing cells, the potential to integrate site specifically and to achieve long-term gene expression even in vivo, and its broad tropism allowing the efficient transduction of diverse organs including the skin. All this makes AAV-2 attractive and efficient for in vitro gene transfer and local injection in vivo. This review covers the progress made in AAV vector technology including the development of AAV vectors based on other serotypes, summarizes the results obtained by AAV targeting vectors and outlines potential applications in the field of cutaneous gene therapy. Copyright (C) 2004 S. Karger AG, Basel

Effect of velocity slip at a porous boundary on the performance of an incompressible porous bearing

Effect of velocity slip at porous boundary on performance of incompressible porous bearin

Structural lubricity: Role of dimension and symmetry

When two chemically passivated solids are brought into contact, interfacial interactions between the solids compete with intrabulk elastic forces. The relative importance of these interactions, which are length-scale dependent, will be estimated using scaling arguments. If elastic interactions dominate on all length scales, solids will move as essentially rigid objects. This would imply superlow kinetic friction in UHV, provided wear was absent. The results of the scaling study depend on the symmetry of the surfaces and the dimensionalities of interface and solids. Some examples are discussed explicitly such as contacts between disordered three-dimensional solids and linear bearings realized from multiwall carbon nanotubes.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

Production of Strange Clusters and Strange Matter in Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions at the AGS

Production probabilities for strange clusters and strange matter in Au+Au collisions at AGS energy are obtained in the thermal fireball model. The only parameters of the model, the baryon chemical potential and temperature, were determined from a description of the rather complete set of hadron yields from Si+nucleus collisions at the AGS. For the production of light nuclear fragments and strange clusters the results are similar to recent coalescence model calculations. Strange matter production with baryon number larger than 10 is predicted to be much smaller than any current experimental sensitivities.Comment: 9 Pages (no figures

Fluctuations of the number of participants and binary collisions in AA interactions at fixed centrality in the Glauber approach

In the framework of the classical Glauber approach, the analytical expressions for the variance of the number of wounded nucleons and binary collisions in AA interactions at a given centrality are presented. Along with the optical approximation term, they contain additional contact terms arising only in the case of nucleus-nucleus collisions. The magnitude of the additional contributions, e.g., for PbPb collisions at SPS energies, is larger than the contribution of the optical approximation at some values of the impact parameter. The sum of the additional contributions is in good agreement with the results of independent Monte Carlo simulations of this process. Due to these additional terms, the variance of the total number of participants for peripheral PbPb collisions and the variance of the number of collisions at all values of the impact parameter exceed several multiples of the Poisson variances. The correlator between the numbers of participants in colliding nuclei at fixed centrality is also analytically calculated.Comment: updated version; as published by Phys. Rev.

A simple conceptual model of abrupt glacial climate events

Here we use a very simple conceptual model in an attempt to reduce essential parts of the complex nonlinearity of abrupt glacial climate changes (the so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger events) to a few simple principles, namely (i) a threshold process, (ii) an overshooting in the stability of the system and (iii) a millennial-scale relaxation. By comparison with a so-called Earth system model of intermediate complexity (CLIMBER-2), in which the events represent oscillations between two climate states corresponding to two fundamentally different modes of deep-water formation in the North Atlantic, we demonstrate that the conceptual model captures fundamental aspects of the nonlinearity of the events in that model. We use the conceptual model in order to reproduce and reanalyse nonlinear resonance mechanisms that were already suggested in order to explain the characteristic time scale of Dansgaard-Oeschger events. In doing so we identify a new form of stochastic resonance (i.e. an overshooting stochastic resonance) and provide the first explicitly reported manifestation of ghost resonance in a geosystem, i.e. of a mechanism which could be relevant for other systems with thresholds and with multiple states of operation. Our work enables us to explicitly simulate realistic probability measures of Dansgaard-Oeschger events (e.g. waiting time distributions, which are a prerequisite for statistical analyses on the regularity of the events by means of Monte-Carlo simulations). We thus think that our study is an important advance in order to develop more adequate methods to test the statistical significance and the origin of the proposed glacial 1470-year climate cycle

Magnetic domain formation in itinerant metamagnets

We examine the effects of long-range dipolar forces on metamagnetic transitions and generalize the theory of Condon domains to the case of an itinerant electron system undergoing a first-order metamagnetic transition. We demonstrate that within a finite range of the applied field, dipolar interactions induce a spatial modulation of the magnetization in the form of stripes or bubbles. Our findings are consistent with recent observations in the bilayer ruthenate Sr$_3$Ru$_2$O$_7$.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, minor changes, references adde