Analysis of the Movement of Chlamydomonas Flagella: The Function of the Radial-spoke System Is Revealed by Comparison of Wild-type and Mutant Flagella

The mutation uni-1 gives rise to uniflagellate Chlamydomonas cells which rotate around a fixed point in the microscope field, so that the flagellar bending pattern can be photographed easily . This has allowed us to make a detailed analysis of the wild-type flagellar bending pattern and the bending patterns of flagella on several mutant strains. Cells containing uni-1, and recombinants of uni-1 with the suppressor mutations, sup(_pf)-1 and sup(_pf)-3, show the typical asymmetric bending pattern associated with forward swimming in Chlamydomonas, although sup(_pf)-1 flagella have about one-half the normal beat frequency, apparently as the result of defective function of the outer dynein arms. The pf-17 mutation has been shown to produce nonmotile flagella in which radial spoke heads and five characteristic axonemal polypeptides are missing. Recombinants containing pf-17 and either sup(_pf)-1 or sup(_pf)-3 have motile flagella, but still lack radial-spoke heads and the associated polypeptides . The flagellar bending pattern of these recombinants lacking radial-spoke heads is a nearly symmetric, large amplitude pattern which is quite unlike the wild-type pattern . However, the presence of an intact radial-spoke system is not required to convert active sliding into bending and is not required for bend initiation and bend propagation, since all of these processes are active in the sup(_pf) pf-17 recombinants. The function of the radial-spoke system appears to be to convert the symmetric bending pattern displayed by these recombinants into the asymmetric bending pattern required for efficient swimming, by inhibiting the development of reverse bends during the recovery phase of the bending cycle

Dynamics at the angle of repose: jamming, bistability, and collapse

When a sandpile relaxes under vibration, it is known that its measured angle of repose is bistable in a range of values bounded by a material-dependent maximal angle of stability; thus, at the same angle of repose, a sandpile can be stationary or avalanching, depending on its history. In the nearly jammed slow dynamical regime, sandpile collapse to a zero angle of repose can also occur, as a rare event. We claim here that fluctuations of {\it dilatancy} (or local density) are the key ingredient that can explain such varied phenomena. In this work, we model the dynamics of the angle of repose and of the density fluctuations, in the presence of external noise, by means of coupled stochastic equations. Among other things, we are able to describe sandpile collapse in terms of an activated process, where an effective temperature (related to the density as well as to the external vibration intensity) competes against the configurational barriers created by the density fluctuations.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure. Minor changes and update

The ART of IAM: The Winning Strategy for the 2006 Competition

In many dynamic open systems, agents have to interact with one another to achieve their goals. Here, agents may be self-interested, and when trusted to perform an action for others, may betray that trust by not performing the actions as required. In addition, due to the size of such systems, agents will often interact with other agents with which they have little or no past experience. This situation has led to the development of a number of trust and reputation models, which aim to facilitate an agent's decision making in the face of uncertainty regarding the behaviour of its peers. However, these multifarious models employ a variety of different representations of trust between agents, and measure performance in many different ways. This has made it hard to adequately evaluate the relative properties of different models, raising the need for a common platform on which to compare competing mechanisms. To this end, the ART Testbed Competition has been proposed, in which agents using different trust models compete against each other to provide services in an open marketplace. In this paper, we present the winning strategy for this competition in 2006, provide an analysis of the factors that led to this success, and discuss lessons learnt from the competition about issues of trust in multiagent systems in general. Our strategy, IAM, is Intelligent (using statistical models for opponent modelling), Abstemious (spending its money parsimoniously based on its trust model) and Moral (providing fair and honest feedback to those that request it)

Metastability in zero-temperature dynamics: Statistics of attractors

The zero-temperature dynamics of simple models such as Ising ferromagnets provides, as an alternative to the mean-field situation, interesting examples of dynamical systems with many attractors (absorbing configurations, blocked configurations, zero-temperature metastable states). After a brief review of metastability in the mean-field ferromagnet and of the droplet picture, we focus our attention onto zero-temperature single-spin-flip dynamics of ferromagnetic Ising models. The situations leading to metastability are characterized. The statistics and the spatial structure of the attractors thus obtained are investigated, and put in perspective with uniform a priori ensembles. We review the vast amount of exact results available in one dimension, and present original results on the square and honeycomb lattices.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures. To appear in special issue of JPCM on Granular Matter edited by M. Nicodem

Radial Fredholm perturbation in the two-dimensional Ising model and gap-exponent relation

We consider concentric circular defects in the two-dimensional Ising model, which are distributed according to a generalized Fredholm sequence, i. e. at exponentially increasing radii. This type of aperiodicity does not change the bulk critical behaviour but introduces a marginal extended perturbation. The critical exponent of the local magnetization is obtained through finite-size scaling, using a corner transfer matrix approach in the extreme anisotropic limit. It varies continuously with the amplitude of the modulation and is closely related to the magnetic exponent of the radial Hilhorst-van Leeuwen model. Through a conformal mapping of the system onto a strip, the gap-exponent relation is shown to remain valid for such an aperiodic defect.Comment: 12 pages, TeX file + 4 figures, epsf neede

Competition and cooperation:aspects of dynamics in sandpiles

In this article, we review some of our approaches to granular dynamics, now well known to consist of both fast and slow relaxational processes. In the first case, grains typically compete with each other, while in the second, they cooperate. A typical result of {\it cooperation} is the formation of stable bridges, signatures of spatiotemporal inhomogeneities; we review their geometrical characteristics and compare theoretical results with those of independent simulations. {\it Cooperative} excitations due to local density fluctuations are also responsible for relaxation at the angle of repose; the {\it competition} between these fluctuations and external driving forces, can, on the other hand, result in a (rare) collapse of the sandpile to the horizontal. Both these features are present in a theory reviewed here. An arena where the effects of cooperation versus competition are felt most keenly is granular compaction; we review here a random graph model, where three-spin interactions are used to model compaction under tapping. The compaction curve shows distinct regions where 'fast' and 'slow' dynamics apply, separated by what we have called the {\it single-particle relaxation threshold}. In the final section of this paper, we explore the effect of shape -- jagged vs. regular -- on the compaction of packings near their jamming limit. One of our major results is an entropic landscape that, while microscopically rough, manifests {\it Edwards' flatness} at a macroscopic level. Another major result is that of surface intermittency under low-intensity shaking.Comment: 36 pages, 23 figures, minor correction

On the statistics of superlocalized states in self-affine disordered potentials

We investigate the statistics of eigenstates in a weak self-affine disordered potential in one dimension, whose Gaussian fluctuations grow with distance with a positive Hurst exponent $H$. Typical eigenstates are superlocalized on samples much larger than a well-defined crossover length, which diverges in the weak-disorder regime. We present a parallel analytical investigation of the statistics of these superlocalized states in the discrete and the continuum formalisms. For the discrete tight-binding model, the effective localization length decays logarithmically with the sample size, and the logarithm of the transmission is marginally self-averaging. For the continuum Schr\"odinger equation, the superlocalization phenomenon has more drastic effects. The effective localization length decays as a power of the sample length, and the logarithm of the transmission is fully non-self-averaging.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure