1,282 research outputs found
Thirteenth Space Simulation Conference. The Payload: Testing for Success
Information on the state of the art in space simulation, test technology, thermal simulation and protection, contamination, and test measurements and techniques are presented. Simulation of upper atmosphere oxygen was discussed. Problems and successes of retrieving and repairing orbiting spacecrafts by utilizing the shuttle are outlined
Design and evaluation of peptide nucleic acid probes for specific identification of Candida albicans.
Candida albicans is an important cause of systemic fungal infections, and rapid diagnostics for identifying and differentiating C. albicans from other Candida species are critical for the timely application of appropriate antimicrobial therapy, improved patient outcomes, and pharmaceutical cost savings. In this work, two 28S rRNA-directed peptide nucleic acid-fluorescence in situ hybridization (PNA-FISH) probes, P-Ca726 (targeting a novel region of the ribosome) and P-CalB2208 (targeting a previously reported region), were evaluated. Hybridization conditions were optimized by using both fluorescence microscopy (FM) and flow cytometry (FCM), and probes were screened for specificity and discriminative ability against a panel of C. albicans and various nontarget Candida spp. The performance of these PNA probes was compared quantitatively against that of DNA probes or DNA probe/helper combinations directed against the same target regions. Ratiometric analyses of FCM results indicated that both the hybridization quality and yield of the PNA probes were higher than those of the DNA probes. In FCM-based comparisons of the PNA probes, P-Ca726 was found to be highly specific, showing 2.5- to 5.5-fold-higher discriminatory power for C. albicans than P-CalB2208. The use of formamide further improved the performance of the new probe. Our results reinforce the significant practical and diagnostic advantages of PNA probes over their DNA counterparts for FISH and indicate that P-Ca726 may be used advantageously for the rapid and specific identification of C. albicans in clinical and related applications, especially when combined with FCM
Double Quantum Dots in Carbon Nanotubes
We study the two-electron eigenspectrum of a carbon-nanotube double quantum
dot with spin-orbit coupling. Exact calculation are combined with a simple
model to provide an intuitive and accurate description of single-particle and
interaction effects. For symmetric dots and weak magnetic fields, the
two-electron ground state is antisymmetric in the spin-valley degree of freedom
and is not a pure spin-singlet state. When double occupation of one dot is
favored by increasing the detuning between the dots, the Coulomb interaction
causes strong correlation effects realized by higher orbital-level mixing.
Changes in the double-dot configuration affect the relative strength of the
electron-electron interactions and can lead to different ground state
transitions. In particular, they can favor a ferromagnetic ground state both in
spin and valley degrees of freedom. The strong suppression of the energy gap
can cause the disappearance of the Pauli blockade in transport experiments and
thereby can also limit the stability of spin-qubits in quantum information
proposals. Our analysis is generalized to an array of coupled dots which is
expected to exhibit rich many-body behavior.Comment: 14 pages, 11 pages and 1 table. Typos in text and Figs.4 and 6
correcte
Resonant Five-body Recombination in an Ultracold Gas of Bosonic Atoms
We combine theory and experiment to investigate five-body recombination in an
ultracold gas of atomic cesium at negative scattering length. A refined
theoretical model, in combination with extensive laboratory tunability of the
interatomic interactions, enables the five-body resonant recombination rate to
be calculated and measured. The position of the new observed recombination
feature agrees with a recent theoretical prediction and supports the prediction
of a family of universal cluster states at negative that are tied to an
Efimov trimer.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure
Hyperspherical Description of the Degenerate Fermi Gas: S-wave Interactions
We present a unique theoretical description of the physics of the spherically
trapped -atom degenerate Fermi gas (DFG) at zero temperature based on an
ordinary Schr\"{o}dinger equation with a microscopic, two body interaction
potential. With a careful choice of coordinates and a variational wavefunction,
the many body Schr\"{o}dinger equation can be accurately described by a
\emph{linear}, one dimensional effective Schr\"{o}dinger equation in a single
collective coordinate, the rms radius of the gas. Comparisons of the energy,
rms radius and peak density of ground state energy are made to those predicted
by Hartree-Fock (HF). Also the lowest radial excitation frequency (the
breathing mode frequency) agrees with a sum rule calculation, but deviates from
a HF prediction
BEC-BCS Crossover of a Trapped Two-Component Fermi Gas with Unequal Masses
We determine the energetically lowest lying states in the BEC-BCS crossover
regime of s-wave interacting two-component Fermi gases under harmonic
confinement by solving the many-body Schrodinger equation using two distinct
approaches. Essentially exact basis set expansion techniques are applied to
determine the energy spectrum of systems with N=4 fermions. Fixed-node
diffusion Monte Carlo methods are applied to systems with up to N=20 fermions,
and a discussion of different guiding functions used in the Monte Carlo
approach to impose the proper symmetry of the fermionic system is presented.
The energies are calculated as a function of the s-wave scattering length a_s
for N=2-20 fermions and different mass ratios \kappa of the two species. On the
BEC and BCS sides, our energies agree with analytically-determined first-order
correction terms. We extract the scattering length and the effective range of
the dimer-dimer system up to \kappa = 20. Our energies for the
strongly-interacting trapped system in the unitarity regime show no shell
structure, and are well described by a simple expression, whose functional form
can be derived using the local density approximation, with one or two
parameters. The universal parameter \xi for the trapped system for various
\kappa is determined, and comparisons with results for the homogeneous system
are presented.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, extended versio
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