15,085 research outputs found
Nanoindentation of the a and c domains in a tetragonal BaTiO3 single crystal
Nanoindentation in conjunction with piezoresponse force microscopy was used to study domain switching and to measure the mechanical properties of individual ferroelectric domains in a tetragonal BaTiO3 single crystal. It was found that nanoindentation has induced local domain switching; the a and c domains of BaTiO3 have different elastic moduli but similar hardness. Nanoindentation modulus mapping on the a and c domains further confirmed such difference in elasticity. Finite element modeling was used to simulate the von Mises stress and plastic strain profiles of the indentations on both a and c domains, which introduces a much higher stress level than the critical value for domain nucleation
A Fast Potential and Self-Gravity Solver for Non-Axisymmetric Disks
Disk self-gravity could play an important role in the dynamic evolution of
interaction between disks and embedded protoplanets. We have developed a fast
and accurate solver to calculate the disk potential and disk self-gravity
forces for disk systems on a uniform polar grid. Our method follows closely the
method given by Chan et al. (2006), in which an FFT in the azimuthal direction
is performed and a direct integral approach in the frequency domain in the
radial direction is implemented on a uniform polar grid. This method can be
very effective for disks with vertical structures that depend only on the disk
radius, achieving the same computational efficiency as for zero-thickness
disks. We describe how to parallelize the solver efficiently on distributed
parallel computers. We propose a mode-cutoff procedure to reduce the parallel
communication cost and achieve nearly linear scalability for a large number of
processors. For comparison, we have also developed a particle-based fast
tree-code to calculate the self-gravity of the disk system with vertical
structure. The numerical results show that our direct integral method is at
least two order of magnitudes faster than our optimized tree-code approach.Comment: 8 figures, accepted to ApJ
A molecular superfluid: non-classical rotations in doped para-hydrogen clusters
Clusters of para-hydrogen (pH2) have been predicted to exhibit superfluid
behavior, but direct observation of this phenomenon has been elusive. Combining
experiments and theoretical simulations, we have determined the size evolution
of the superfluid response of pH2 clusters doped with carbon dioxide (CO2).
Reduction of the effective inertia is observed when the dopant is surrounded by
the pH2 solvent. This marks the onset of molecular superfluidity in pH2. The
fractional occupation of solvation rings around CO2 correlates with enhanced
superfluid response for certain cluster sizes
The receptor-associated coactivator 3 activates transcription through CREB-binding protein recruitment and autoregulation
Transcriptional coactivators are involved in gene activation by nuclear hormone receptors. The receptor-associated coactivator 3 (RAC3) was recently identified to be highly related to the steroid receptor coactivator-1 and transcriptional intermediate factor 2, thereby establishing a novel family of nuclear receptor coactivators. In this study, we identified a RAC3 fragment containing three LXXLL motifs conserved among this family, which is sufficient to mediate nuclear receptor interaction in vivo and in vitro. Point mutations that disrupt ligand-dependent activation function of the receptor inhibited the interaction. We found that a 162-amino acid fragment of RAC3 conferred transcriptional activation and recruited the CREB-binding protein and that three distinct LXXLL motifs mediated the transcriptional activation. A trimeric far Western analysis demonstrated the formation of a ternary complex containing CREB-binding protein, RAC3, and the receptor. In addition, we showed that RAC3, transcriptional intermediate factor 2, and steroid receptor coactivator-1 are expressed in specific tissues and cancer cells and that RAC3 transcript is directly up-regulated by retinoid treatment. These results suggest that RAC3 may contribute to amplified transcriptional responses through both recruitment of additional coactivators and autoregulation by the receptor-coactivator complex
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