1,549 research outputs found
Measurement of a Sign-Changing Two-Gap Superconducting Phase in Electron-Doped Ba(Fe_{1-x}Co_x)_2As_2 Single Crystals using Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy
Scanning tunneling spectroscopic studies of (x =
0.06, 0.12) single crystals reveal direct evidence for predominantly two-gap
superconductivity. These gaps decrease with increasing temperature and vanish
above the superconducting transition . The two-gap nature and the slightly
doping- and energy-dependent quasiparticle scattering interferences near the
wave-vectors and are consistent with
sign-changing -wave superconductivity. The excess zero-bias conductance and
the large gap-to- ratios suggest dominant unitary impurity scattering.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. Paper accepted for publication in Physical Review
Letters. Contact author: Nai-Chang Yeh ([email protected]
Liver function as an engineering system
Process Systems Engineering has tackled a wide range of problems including manufacturing, the environment, and advanced materials design. Here we discuss how tools can be deployed to tackle medical problems which involve complex chemical transformations and spatial phenomena looking in particular at the liver system, the body's chemical factory. We show how an existing model has been developed to model distributed behavior necessary to predict the behavior of drugs for treating liver disease. The model has been used to predict the effects of suppression of de novo lipogenesis, stimulation of β-oxidation and a combination of the two. A reduced model has also been used to explore the prediction of behavior of hormones in the blood stream controlling glucose levels to ensure that levels are kept within safe bounds using interval methods. The predictions are made resulting from uncertainty in two key parameters with oscillating input resulting from regular feeding
Electrostatic Patch Effect in Cylindrical Geometry. I. Potential and Energy between Slightly Non-Coaxial Cylinders
We study the effect of any uneven voltage distribution on two close
cylindrical conductors with parallel axes that are slightly shifted in the
radial and by any length in the axial direction. The investigation is
especially motivated by certain precision measurements, such as the Satellite
Test of the Equivalence Principle (STEP). By energy conservation, the force can
be found as the energy gradient in the vector of the shift, which requires
determining potential distribution and energy in the gap. The boundary value
problem for the potential is solved, and energy is thus found to the second
order in the small transverse shift, and to lowest order in the gap to cylinder
radius ratio. The energy consists of three parts: the usual capacitor part due
to the uniform potential difference, the one coming from the interaction
between the voltage patches and the uniform voltage difference, and the energy
of patch interaction, entirely independent of the uniform voltage. Patch effect
forces and torques in the cylindrical configuration are derived and analyzed in
the next two parts of this work.Comment: 26 pages, 1 Figure. Submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit
Homogeneity, Flatness and "Large" Extra Dimensions
We consider a model in which the universe is the direct product of a
(3+1)-dimensional Friedmann, Robertson-Walker (FRW) space and a compact
hyperbolic manifold (CHM). Standard Model fields are confined to a point in the
CHM (i.e. to a brane). In such a space, the decay of massive Kaluza-Klein modes
leads to the injection of any initial bulk entropy into the observable (FRW)
universe. Both Kolmogoro-Sinai mixing due to the non-integrability of flows on
CHMs and the large statistical averaging inherent in the collapse of the
initial entropy onto the brane smooth out any initial inhomogeneities in the
distribution of matter and of 3-curvature on any slice of constant 3-position.
If, as we assume, the initial densities and curvatures in each fundamental
correlation volume are drawn from some universal underlying distributions
independent of location within the space, then these smoothing mechanisms
effectively reduce the density and curvature inhomogeneities projected onto the
FRW. This smoothing is sufficient to account for the current homogeneity and
flatness of the universe. The fundamental scale of physics can be \gsim 1TeV.
All relevant mass and length scales can have natural values in fundamental
units. All large dimensionless numbers, such as the entropy of the universe,
are understood as consequences of the topology of spacetime which is not
explained. No model for the origin of structure is proffered.Comment: minor changes, matches version published in Phys. Rev. Let
Bronchial responses to substance P after antigen challenge in the guinea-pig: in vivo and in vitro studies
The effect of antigen challenge on the airway responses to substance P and on the epithelial neutral endopeptidase (NEP) activity was investigated in aerosol sensitized guinea-pigs. In vivo, bronchial responses to aerosolized substance P were similar to the responses observed in antigen-challenged guinea-pigs and in the control groups. In contrast, when the guinea-pigs were pretreated with the NEP inhibitor, phosphoramidon, a significant increase in the airway responses to substance P was observed after antigen challenge in vivo. However, in vitro, the contractile responses of the tracheal smooth muscle to substance P were similar between groups of guinea-pigs, in respect to the presence or absence of the epithelium and/or phosphoramidon. Histological studies showed an accumulation of eosinophils in the tracheal submucosa after antigen challenge and intact epithelial cells. These results show that in vivo bronchial hyperresponsiveness to substance P after antigen challenge in the guinea-pig is not associated with increased responses of the smooth muscle to exogenous SP in vitro. In addition, the results with phosphoramidon suggest that loss of NEP activity cannot account for the in vivo bronchial hyperresponsiveness to substance P presently observed
DNA hybridization to mismatched templates: a chip study
High-density oligonucleotide arrays are among the most rapidly expanding
technologies in biology today. In the {\sl GeneChip} system, the reconstruction
of the target concentration depends upon the differential signal generated from
hybridizing the target RNA to two nearly identical templates: a perfect match
(PM) and a single mismatch (MM) probe. It has been observed that a large
fraction of MM probes repeatably bind targets better than the PMs, against the
usual expectation from sequence-specific hybridization; this is difficult to
interpret in terms of the underlying physics. We examine this problem via a
statistical analysis of a large set of microarray experiments. We classify the
probes according to their signal to noise () ratio, defined as the
eccentricity of a (PM, MM) pair's `trajectory' across many experiments. Of
those probes having large () only a fraction behave consistently with
the commonly assumed hybridization model. Our results imply that the physics of
DNA hybridization in microarrays is more complex than expected, and they
suggest new ways of constructing estimators for the target RNA concentration.Comment: 3 figures 1 tabl
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