5,012 research outputs found
Efficient small-world and scale-free functional brain networks at rest using k-nearest neighbors thresholding
Selenium-Binding Protein 1 Indicates Myocardial Stress and Risk for Adverse Outcome in Cardiac Surgery
Selenium-binding protein 1 (SELENBP1) is an intracellular protein that has been detected in the circulation in response to myocardial infarction. Hypoxia and cardiac surgery affect selenoprotein expression and selenium (Se) status. For this reason, we decided to analyze circulating SELENBP1 concentrations in patients (n = 75) necessitating cardioplegia and a cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) during the course of the cardiac surgery. Serum samples were collected at seven time-points spanning the full surgical process. SELENBP1 was quantified by a highly sensitive newly developed immunological assay. Serum concentrations of SELENBP1 increased markedly during the intervention and showed a positive association with the duration of ischemia (ρ = 0.6, p < 0.0001). Elevated serum SELENBP1 concentrations at 1 h after arrival at the intensive care unit (post-surgery) were predictive to identify patients at risk of adverse outcome (death, bradycardia or cerebral ischemia, "endpoint 1"; OR 29.9, CI 3.3-268.8, p = 0.00027). Circulating SELENBP1 during intervention (2 min after reperfusion or 15 min after weaning from the CPB) correlated positively with an established marker of myocardial infarction (CK-MB) measured after the intervention (each with ρ = 0.5, p < 0.0001). We concluded that serum concentrations of SELENBP1 were strongly associated with cardiac arrest and the duration of myocardial ischemia already early during surgery, thereby constituting a novel and promising quantitative marker for myocardial hypoxia, with a high potential to improve diagnostics and prediction in combination with the established clinical parameters
Universality in Glassy Low-Temperature Physics
We propose a microscopic translationally invariant glass model which exhibits
two level tunneling systems with a broad range of asymmetries and barrier
heights in its glassy phase. Their distribution is qualitatively different from
what is commonly assumed in phenomenological models, in that symmetric
tunneling systems are systematically suppressed. Still, the model exhibits the
usual glassy low-temperature anomalies. Universality is due to the collective
origin of the glassy potential energy landscape. We obtain a simple explanation
also for the mysterious {\em quantitative} universality expressed in the
unusually narrow universal glassy range of values for the internal friction
plateau.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, uses RevTeX
Electroweak effects in top-quark pair production at Hadron Colliders
Top-quark physics plays an important role at hadron colliders such as the
Tevatron collider at Fermilab or the upcoming Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at
CERN. Given the planned experimental precision, detailed theoretical
predictions are mandatory. In this article we present analytic results for the
complete electroweak corrections to gluon induced top-quark pair production,
completing our earlier results for the quark-induced reaction. As an
application we discuss top-quark pair production at Tevatron and at LHC. In
particular we show that, although small for inclusive quantities, weak
corrections can be sizeable for differential distribution
Laser Control of Dissipative Two-Exciton Dynamics in Molecular Aggregates
There are two types of two-photon transitions in molecular aggregates, that
is, non-local excitations of two monomers and local double excitations to some
higher excited intra-monomer electronic state. As a consequence of the
inter-monomer Coulomb interaction these different excitation states are coupled
to each other. Higher excited intra-monomer states are rather short-lived due
to efficient internal conversion of electronic into vibrational energy.
Combining both processes leads to the annihilation of an electronic excitation
state, which is a major loss channel for establishing high excitation densities
in molecular aggregates. Applying theoretical pulse optimization techniques to
a Frenkel exciton model it is shown that the dynamics of two-exciton states in
linear aggregates (dimer to tetramer) can be influenced by ultrafast shaped
laser pulses. In particular, it is studied to what extent the decay of the
two-exciton population by inter-band transitions can be transiently suppressed.
Intra-band dynamics is described by a dissipative hierarchy equation approach,
which takes into account strong exciton-vibrational coupling in the
non-Markovian regime.Comment: revised version, fig. 8 ne
Stereoscopic rendering in a head mounted display elicits higher functional connectivity during virtual reality
Four-loop moments of the heavy quark vacuum polarization function in perturbative QCD
New results at four-loop order in perturbative QCD for the first two Taylor
coefficients of the heavy quark vacuum polarization function are presented.
They can be used to perform a precise determination of the charm- and
bottom-quark mass. Implications for the value of the quark masses are briefly
discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 13 figures; final version accepted for publication in the
journa
Resolution and enhancement in nanoantenna-based fluorescence microscopy
Single gold nanoparticles can act as nanoantennas for enhancing the
fluorescence of emitters in their near-fields. Here we present experimental and
theoretical studies of scanning antenna-based fluorescence microscopy as a
function of the diameter of the gold nanoparticle. We examine the interplay
between fluorescence enhancement and spatial resolution and discuss the
requirements for deciphering single molecules in a dense sample. Resolutions
better than 20 nm and fluorescence enhancement up to 30 times are demonstrated
experimentally. By accounting for the tip shaft and the sample interface in
finite-difference time-domain calculations, we explain why the measured
fluorescence enhancements are higher in the presence of an interface than the
values predicted for a homogeneous environment.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. accepted for publication in Nano Letter
Variational study of U(1) and SU(2) lattice gauge theories with Gaussian states in 1+1 dimensions
We introduce a method to investigate the static and dynamic properties of
both Abelian and non-Abelian lattice gauge models in 1+1 dimensions.
Specifically, we identify a set of transformations that disentangle different
degrees of freedom, and apply a simple Gaussian variational ansatz to the
resulting Hamiltonian. To demonstrate the suitability of the method, we analyze
both static and dynamic aspects of string breaking for the U(1) and SU(2) gauge
models. We benchmark our results against tensor network simulations and observe
excellent agreement, although the number of variational parameters in the
Gaussian ansatz is much smaller.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures. Added references and corrected typo
Gaussian states for the variational study of (1+1)-dimensional lattice gauge models
We introduce a variational ansatz based on Gaussian states for
(1+1)-dimensional lattice gauge models. To this end we identify a set of
unitary transformations which decouple the gauge degrees of freedom from the
matter fields. Using our ansatz, we study static aspects as well as real-time
dynamics of string breaking in two (1+1)-dimensional theories, namely QED and
two-color QCD. We show that our ansatz captures the relevant features and is in
excellent agreement with data from numerical calculations with tensor networks.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, proceedings of the 36th Annual International
Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 22-28 July, 2018 Michigan State
University, East Lansing, Michigan, US
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