66,357 research outputs found
Fluctuations of the vacuum energy density of quantum fields in curved spacetime via generalized zeta functions
For quantum fields on a curved spacetime with an Euclidean section, we derive
a general expression for the stress energy tensor two-point function in terms
of the effective action. The renormalized two-point function is given in terms
of the second variation of the Mellin transform of the trace of the heat kernel
for the quantum fields. For systems for which a spectral decomposition of the
wave opearator is possible, we give an exact expression for this two-point
function. Explicit examples of the variance to the mean ratio of the vacuum energy density of a
massless scalar field are computed for the spatial topologies of and , with results of , and
respectively. The large variance signifies the importance
of quantum fluctuations and has important implications for the validity of
semiclassical gravity theories at sub-Planckian scales. The method presented
here can facilitate the calculation of stress-energy fluctuations for quantum
fields useful for the analysis of fluctuation effects and critical phenomena in
problems ranging from atom optics and mesoscopic physics to early universe and
black hole physics.Comment: Uses revte
Quantum Field Effects on Cosmological Phase Transition in Anisotropic Spacetimes
The one-loop renormalized effective potentials for the massive
theory on the spatially homogeneous models of Bianchi type I and
Kantowski-Sachs type are evaluated. It is used to see how the quantum field
affects the cosmological phase transition in the anisotropic spacetimes. For
reasons of the mathematical technique it is assumed that the spacetimes are
slowly varying or have specially metric forms. We obtain the analytic results
and present detailed discussions about the quantum field corrections to the
symmetry breaking or symmetry restoration in the model spacetimes.Comment: Latex 17 page
Tv-RIO1 – an atypical protein kinase from the parasitic nematode Trichostrongylus vitrinus
Background: Protein kinases are key enzymes that regulate a wide range of cellular processes, including cell-cycle progression, transcription, DNA replication and metabolic functions. These enzymes catalyse the transfer of phosphates to serine, threonine and tyrosine residues, thus playing functional roles in reversible protein phosphorylation. There are two main groups, namely eukaryotic protein kinases (ePKs) and atypical protein kinases (aPKs); RIO kinases belong to the latter group. While there is some information about RIO kinases and their roles in animals, nothing is known about them in parasites. This is the first study to characterise a RIO1 kinase from any parasite.
Results: A full-length cDNA (Tv-rio-1) encoding a RIO1 protein kinase (Tv-RIO1) was isolated from the economically important parasitic nematode Trichostrongylus vitrinus (Order Strongylida). The uninterrupted open reading frame (ORF) of 1476 nucleotides encoded a protein of 491 amino acids, containing the characteristic RIO1 motif LVHADLSEYNTL. Tv-rio-1 was transcribed at the highest level in the third-stage larva (L3), and a higher level in adult females than in males. Comparison with homologues from other organisms showed that protein Tv-RIO1 had significant homology to related proteins from a range of metazoans and plants. Amino acid sequence identity was most pronounced in the ATP-binding motif, active site and metal binding loop. Phylogenetic analyses of selected amino acid sequence data revealed Tv-RIO1 to be most closely related to the proteins in the species of Caenorhabditis. A structural model of Tv-RIO1 was constructed and compared with the published crystal structure of RIO1 of Archaeoglobus fulgidus (Af-Rio1).
Conclusion: This study provides the first insights into the RIO1 protein kinases of nematodes, and a foundation for further investigations into the biochemical and functional roles of this molecule in biological processes in parasitic nematodes
Noise and Fluctuations in Semiclassical Gravity
We continue our earlier investigation of the backreaction problem in
semiclassical gravity with the Schwinger-Keldysh or closed-time-path (CTP)
functional formalism using the language of the decoherent history formulation
of quantum mechanics. Making use of its intimate relation with the
Feynman-Vernon influence functional (IF) method, we examine the statistical
mechanical meaning and show the interrelation of the many quantum processes
involved in the backreaction problem, such as particle creation, decoherence
and dissipation. We show how noise and fluctuation arise naturally from the CTP
formalism. We derive an expression for the CTP effective action in terms of the
Bogolubov coefficients and show how noise is related to the fluctuations in the
number of particles created. In so doing we have extended the old framework of
semiclassical gravity, based on the mean field theory of Einstein equation with
a source given by the expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor, to that
based on a Langevin-type equation, where the dynamics of fluctuations of
spacetime is driven by the quantum fluctuations of the matter field. This
generalized framework is useful for the investigation of quantum processes in
the early universe involving fluctuations, vacuum stability and phase transtion
phenomena and the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of black holes. It is also
essential to an understanding of the transition from any quantum theory of
gravity to classical general relativity. \pacs{pacs numbers:
04.60.+n,98.80.Cq,05.40.+j,03.65.Sq}Comment: Latex 37 pages, umdpp 93-216 (submitted to Phys. Rev. D, 24 Nov.
1993
Thermal transistor: Heat flux switching and modulating
Thermal transistor is an efficient heat control device which can act as a
heat switch as well as a heat modulator. In this paper, we study systematically
one-dimensional and two-dimensional thermal transistors. In particular, we show
how to improve significantly the efficiency of the one-dimensional thermal
transistor. The study is also extended to the design of two-dimensional thermal
transistor by coupling different anharmonic lattices such as the
Frenkel-Kontorova and the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam lattices. Analogy between anharmonic
lattices and single-walled carbon nanotube is drawn and possible experimental
realization with multi-walled nanotube is suggested.Comment: To appear in J. Phys. Soc. Jp
Cross-correlation Tomography: Measuring Dark Energy Evolution with Weak Lensing
A cross-correlation technique of lensing tomography is presented to measure
the evolution of dark energy in the universe. The variation of the weak lensing
shear with redshift around massive foreground objects like bright galaxies and
clusters depends solely on ratios of angular diameter distances. Use of the
massive foreground halos allow us to compare relatively high, linear shear
values in the same part of the sky, thus largely eliminating the dominant
source of systematic error in cosmological weak lensing measurements. The
statistic we use does not rely on knowledge of the foreground mass distribution
and is only shot-noise limited. We estimate the constraints that deep lensing
surveys with photometric redshifts can provide on the dark energy density
Omega, the equation of state parameter w and its redshift derivative w'. The
accuracies on w and w' are: sigma(w) ~ 0.02 fsky^{-1/2} and sigma(w') ~ 0.05
fsky^{-1/2}, where fsky is the fraction of sky covered by the survey and
sigma(Omega)=0.03 is assumed in the marginalization. Combining our
cross-correlation method with standard lensing tomography, which has
complementary degeneracies, will allow measurement of the dark energy
parameters with significantly better accuracy.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, submitted to PRL. Error in shear signal corrected
- parameter constraints about a factor of 2 wors
Thermal Particle Creation in Cosmological Spacetimes: A Stochastic Approach
The stochastic method based on the influence functional formalism introduced
in an earlier paper to treat particle creation in near-uniformly accelerated
detectors and collapsing masses is applied here to treat thermal and
near-thermal radiance in certain types of cosmological expansions. It is
indicated how the appearance of thermal radiance in different cosmological
spacetimes and in the two apparently distinct classes of black hole and
cosmological spacetimes can be understood under a unifying conceptual and
methodological framework.Comment: 17 pages, revtex (aps, eqsecnum), submitted to PRD, April 199
Quantum Brownian Motion in a Bath of Parametric Oscillators: A model for system-field interactions
The quantum Brownian motion paradigm provides a unified framework where one
can see the interconnection of some basic quantum statistical processes like
decoherence, dissipation, particle creation, noise and fluctuation. We treat
the case where the Brownian particle is coupled linearly to a bath of time
dependent quadratic oscillators. While the bath mimics a scalar field, the
motion of the Brownian particle modeled by a single oscillator could be used to
depict the behavior of a particle detector, a quantum field mode or the scale
factor of the universe. An important result of this paper is the derivation of
the influence functional encompassing the noise and dissipation kernels in
terms of the Bogolubov coefficients. This method enables one to trace the
source of statistical processes like decoherence and dissipation to vacuum
fluctuations and particle creation, and in turn impart a statistical mechanical
interpretation of quantum field processes. With this result we discuss the
statistical mechanical origin of quantum noise and thermal radiance from black
holes and from uniformly- accelerated observers in Minkowski space as well as
from the de Sitter universe discovered by Hawking, Unruh and Gibbons-Hawking.
We also derive the exact evolution operator and master equation for the reduced
density matrix of the system interacting with a parametric oscillator bath in
an initial squeezed thermal state. These results are useful for decoherence and
backreaction studies for systems and processes of interest in semiclassical
cosmology and gravity. Our model and results are also expected to be useful for
related problems in quantum optics. %\pacs
{05.40.+j,03.65.Sq,98.80.Cq,97.60.Lf}Comment: 42 pages, Latex, umdpp93-210 (submitted to Physical Review D, 3
December 1993
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