Testing a stochastic acceleration model of pulsar wind nebulae: Early evolution of a wind nebula associated with SN 1986J

Over three thousand pulsars have been discovered, but none have been confirmed to be younger than a few hundred years. Observing a pulsar after a supernova explosion will help us understand the properties of newborn ones, including their capability to produce gamma-ray bursts and fast radio bursts. Here, the possible youngest pulsar wind nebula (PWN) at the center of the SN 1986J remnant is studied. We demonstrate that the 5 GHz flux of 'PWN 1986J', increasing with time, is consistent with a stochastic acceleration model of PWNe developed to explain the flat radio spectrum of the Crab Nebula. We obtain an acceleration time-scale of electrons/positrons and a decay time-scale of the turbulence responsible for the stochastic acceleration as about 10 and 70 years, respectively. Our findings suggest that efficient stochastic acceleration and rising radio/submm light curves are characteristic signatures of the youngest PWNe. Follow-up ${\it ALMA}$ observations of decades-old supernovae within a few tens of Mpc, including SN 1986J, are encouraged to reveal the origin of the flat radio spectrum of PWNe.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 8 pages, 2 figures and 1 tabl

't Hooft Expansion of 1/2 BPS Wilson Loop

We revisit the 't Hooft expansion of 1/2 BPS circular Wilson loop in N=4 SYM studied by Drukker and Gross in hep-th/0010274. We find an interesting recursion relation which relates different number of holes on the worldsheet. We also argue that we can turn on the string coupling by applying a certain integral transformation to the planar result.Comment: 21 pages; v2: minor correction

Unconventional spin density wave in Bechgaard salt (TMTSF)2NO3

Among many Bechgaard salts, TMTSF2NO3 exhibits very anomalous low temperature properties. Unlike conventional spin density wave (SDW), TMTSF2NO3 undergoes the SDW transition at \T_SDW\approx 9.5 K and the low temperature quasiparticle excitations are gapless. Also, it is known that TMTSF2NO3 does not exhibit superconductivity even under pressure, while FISDW is found in TMTSF2NO3 only for P=8.5 kbar and B>20 T. Here we shall show that both the angle dependent magnetoresistance data and the nonlinear Hall resistance of TMTSF2NO3 at ambient pressure are interpreted satisfactory in terms of unconventional spin density wave (USDW). Based on these facts, we propose a new phase diagram for Bechgaards salts.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figs, RevTe

Steady viscoelastic flow around high-aspect-ratio, low-blockage-ratio microfluidic cylinders

We employ a state-of-the-art microfabrication technique (selective laser-induced etching, SLE) to produce microfluidic cylinder geometries that explore new geometrical regimes. Using SLE, two microchannels are fabricated in monolithic fused silica substrate with height H = 2 mm and width W = 0.4 mm (aspect ratio α = H/W = 5) containing cylinders of radius r = 0.02 mm (blockage ratio β = 2r/W = 0.1), centered at the channel mid-width, W/2. An ‘sc’ channel contains a single cylinder, while a ‘dc’ channel contains two axiallyaligned cylinders separated by a distance L = 1 mm (L = 50r). Compared with cylinder geometries fabricated by soft lithography (which typically have α ≪ 1 and β ≳ 0.5), these rigid glass devices provide a quasi-two-dimensional flow along the direction of the cylinder axis and also more clearly reveal the effects of the strong extensional wake regions located at the leading and trailing stagnation points. Using flow velocimetry and quantitative birefringence measurement techniques, we study the behaviour of a well-characterized viscoelastic polymer solution in flow around the cylinders. The small cylinder radii result in low inertia and very high elasticity numbers El ≈ 2400. For the sc device, we report strong flow modification effects around the cylinder as the flow rate is incremented. This is associated with the deformation of polymer molecules primarily in the upstream wake region, leading to the onset of a purely elastic flow asymmetry upstream of the cylinder. Stretched polymer molecules are advected around the cylinder and relax downstream of the cylinder, resulting in an extremely long elastic wake extending for > 300r downstream. In the dc channel, at lower flow rates, similar flow modification effects are observed to develop around, and downstream of, both cylinders. However, at higher flow rates the wake of the first cylinder extends > 50r downstream, and begins to interact with the second cylinder. The second cylinder becomes encapsulated by the wake of the first and is effectively obviated from the flow field. The results will be of relevance to understanding practical applications of viscoelastic fluids, for example in particle suspension and porous media flows, and also for benchmarking against numerical simulations using viscoelastic constitutive models

Newly emerged bumblebees are highly susceptible to gut parasite infection

One factor that can affect infection susceptibility is host age, the effects of which vary in a range of ways. For example, susceptibility may increase with age, due to senescence or decrease with age as a result of maturation of the immune system. If certain ages are more susceptible to infection, populations with contrasting demographics, such as same-age cohorts versus a mixture of ages, will exhibit differing disease prevalence. We use the bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, and its interaction with the gut trypanosome Crithidia sp. as a model system to investigate age-related susceptibility in a social insect. Crithidia sp. are widespread and prevalent parasites of bumblebees that are spread between colonies via faeces on flowers when foraging, and within colonies via contact with infected bees and contaminated surfaces and resources. In the field, Bombus spp. live for approximately three weeks. Here, we inoculated bumblebees at 0, 7, 14 and 21 days of age and measured their infection after one week. We also measured the level of gene expression of two antimicrobial peptides important in the defence against Crithidia bombi in bumblebees. We found that younger bumblebees are more susceptible to infection by Crithidia sp. than their older siblings. Specifically, individuals inoculated on their first day of emergence had infection intensities seven days later that were four-fold higher than bees inoculated at 21 days of age. In contrast, the gene expression of two AMPs known to protect against the trypanosome, abaecin and defensin, did not significantly vary with age. These results suggest that age does affect susceptibility to Crithidia sp. infection in B. terrestris. The higher susceptibility of callows may have implications for the susceptibility of colonies at different stages of their lifecycle, due to the contrasting age demography of workers in the colony

Generalized Lévy walks and the role of chemokines in migration of effector CD8+ T cells.

Chemokines have a central role in regulating processes essential to the immune function of T cells, such as their migration within lymphoid tissues and targeting of pathogens in sites of inflammation. Here we track T cells using multi-photon microscopy to demonstrate that the chemokine CXCL10 enhances the ability of CD8+ T cells to control the pathogen Toxoplasma gondii in the brains of chronically infected mice. This chemokine boosts T-cell function in two different ways: it maintains the effector T-cell population in the brain and speeds up the average migration speed without changing the nature of the walk statistics. Notably, these statistics are not Brownian; rather, CD8+ T-cell motility in the brain is well described by a generalized Lévy walk. According to our model, this unexpected feature enables T cells to find rare targets with more than an order of magnitude more efficiency than Brownian random walkers. Thus, CD8+ T-cell behaviour is similar to Lévy strategies reported in organisms ranging from mussels to marine predators and monkeys, and CXCL10 aids T cells in shortening the average time taken to find rare targets

3D-printed glass microfluidics for fluid dynamics and rheology

Microfluidics provides a versatile platform for handling small volumes of fluids at small length scales. From a fluid dynamics perspective, microfluidics gives access to a regime of very high deformation rates at moderate to negligible Reynolds numbers Re. For viscoelastic fluid flows, the resulting high Weissenberg numbers Wi = tau, where tau is the fluid characteristic time, means the flow occurs at high elasticity number El = Wi/Re. Consequently, microfluidics supports a burgeoning interest in the experimental study of purely elastic flow instabilities and elastic turbulence. However, for rheological studies, typical microfluidic fabrications by soft lithography in poly (dimethyl siloxane) suffer from a number of limitations arising from the low elastic modulus and poor optical properties of the material. In this review, we summarise a few recent studies from our group in which we have experimented with microdevice fabrications using the subtractive three-dimensional (3D)-printing technique of selective laser-induced etching (SLE). SLE can be used to fabricate arbitrary 3D geometries with micron precision in fused silica: a high modulus, highly transparent material, which is robust and resistant to organic solvents. Apart from high elasticity number flows, we have found that SLE fabricated devices can sustain very high deformation rates without device failure, providing new access to little-explored inertio-elastic regimes in extremely dilute polymer solutions. Furthermore, it is possible to visualize flows from multiple planes of observation, allowing the quantitative study of 3D flow instabilities and vortex dynamics in both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids. SLE fabrication offers many new opportunities to those involved in fluid dynamics and rheology research at the microscale, and we highlight what we perceive as potentially fruitful ideas for future studies using this technique

Global AdS Picture of 1/2 BPS Wilson Loops

We study the holographic dual string configuration of 1/2 BPS circular Wilson loops in N=4 super Yang-Mills theory by using the global coordinate of AdS. The dual string worldsheet is given by the Poincare disk AdS_2 sitting at a constant global time slice of AdS_5. We also analyze the correlator of two concentric circular Wilson loops from the global AdS perspective and study the phase transition associated with the instability of annulus worldsheet connecting the two Wilson loops.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, v2: discussion on two branches corrected, v3: reference adde

Wilson Loops in N=4 SYM and Fermion Droplets

The matrix models which are conjectured to compute the circle Wilson loop and its correlator with chiral primary operators are mapped onto normal matrix models. A fermion droplet picture analogous to the well-known one for chiral primary operators is shown to emerge in the large N limit. Several examples are computed. We find an interesting selection rule for the correlator of a single trace Wilson loop with a chiral primary operator. It can be non-zero only if the chiral primary is in a representation with a single hook. We show that the expectation value of the Wilson loop in a large representation labelled by a Young diagram with a single row has a first order phase transition between a regime where it is identical to a large column representation and a regime where it is a large wrapping number single trace Wilson loop.Comment: 32 pages, 2 figure