Cerebral and cardiovascular effects of analgesic doses of ketamine during a target controlled general anesthesia: a prospective randomized study

Introduction: Ketamine is increasingly being used in various pain settings. The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of an analgesic dose of ketamine in the bispectral index (BIS), spectral edge frequency (SEF-95), density spectral array (DSA), cerebral oximetry (rSO2) and mean arterial pressure (MAP) during general anaesthesia with a target controlled infusion. Methods: A prospective, single-blinded and randomized study on adult patients scheduled for elective spine surgery was carried out. After anaesthesia induction with propofol, remifentanil and rocuronium, when a stable BIS value (45-55) was achieved, an automatic recording of BIS, SEF-95, rSO2 and MAP values during 9 min was performed to establish patients baseline values. Subsequently, patients were randomly assigned to receive a ketamine bolus dose of 0.2 mg/kg, 0.5 mg/kg or 1 mg/kg; all variables were recorded for additional 9 min after the ketamine bolus, in the absence of any surgical stimulus. A p-value <0.05 was considered significant in the statistical analysis. Results and discussion: Thirty-nine patients were enrolled in the study. Our results show a dose-related increase of SEF-95 and BIS values. DSA demonstrate a shift in the frequency range and power distribution towards higher frequencies. Our results do not show significant differences in MAP and rSO2 values. Conclusion: When ketamine is used intraoperatively in analgesic doses, the anaesthetist should anticipate an increase in SEF-95 and BIS values which will not be associated with the level of anaesthesia.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

On the renormalization of the electroweak chiral Lagrangian with a Higgs

We consider the scalar sector of the effective non-linear electroweak Lagrangian with a light "Higgs" particle, up to four derivatives in the chiral expansion. The complete off-shell renormalization procedure is implemented, including one loop corrections stemming from the leading two-derivative terms, for finite Higgs mass. This determines the complete set of independent chiral invariant scalar counterterms required for consistency; these include bosonic operators often disregarded. Furthermore, new counterterms involving the Higgs particle which are apparently chiral non-invariant are identified in the perturbative analysis. A novel general parametrization of the pseudoescalar field redefinitions is proposed, which reduces to the various usual ones for specific values of its parameter; the non-local field redefinitions reabsorbing all chiral non-invariant counterterms are then explicitly determined. The physical results translate into renormalization group equations which may be useful when comparing future Higgs data at different energies

The graphene sheet versus the 2DEG: a relativistic Fano spin-filter via STM and AFM tips

We explore theoretically the density of states (LDOS) probed by an STM tip of 2D systems hosting an adatom and a subsurface impurity,both capacitively coupled to AFM tips and traversed by antiparallel magnetic fields. Two kinds of setups are analyzed, a monolayer of graphene and a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG). The AFM tips set the impurity levels at the Fermi energy, where two contrasting behaviors emerge: the Fano factor for the graphene diverges, while in the 2DEG it approaches zero. As result, the spin-degeneracy of the LDOS is lifted exclusively in the graphene system, in particular for the asymmetric regime of Fano interference. The aftermath of this limit is a counterintuitive phenomenon, which consists of a dominant Fano factor due to the subsurface impurity even with a stronger STM-adatom coupling. Thus we find a full polarized conductance, achievable just by displacing vertically the position of the STM tip. To the best knowledge, our work is the first to propose the Fano effect as the mechanism to filter spins in graphene. This feature arises from the massless Dirac electrons within the band structure and allows us to employ the graphene host as a relativistic Fano spin-filter

Quantum phase transition triggering magnetic BICs in graphene

Graphene hosting a pair of collinear adatoms in the phantom atom configuration has pseudogap with cubic scaling on energy, $\Delta\propto|\varepsilon|^{3}$ which leads to the appearance of spin-degenerate bound states in the continuum (BICs) [Phys. Rev. B 92, 045409 (2015)]. In the case when adatoms are locally coupled to a single carbon atom the pseudogap scales linearly with energy, which prevents the formation of BICs. In this Letter, we explore the effects of non-local coupling characterized by the Fano factor of interference $q_{0},$ tunable by changing the slope of the Dirac cones in the graphene band-structure. We demonstrate that three distinct regimes can be identified: i) for $q_{0}<q_{c1}$ (critical point) a mixed pseudogap $\Delta\propto|\varepsilon|,|\varepsilon|^{2}$ appears yielding a phase with spin-degenerate BICs; ii) near $q_{0}=q_{c1}$ when $\Delta\propto|\varepsilon|^{2}$ the system undergoes a quantum phase transition in which the new phase is characterized by magnetic BICs and iii) at a second critical value $q_{0}>q_{c2}$ the cubic scaling of the pseudogap with energy $\Delta\propto|\varepsilon|^{3}$ characteristic to the phantom atom configuration is restored and the phase with non-magnetic BICs is recovered. The phase with magnetic BICs can be described in terms of an effective intrinsic exchange field of ferromagnetic nature between the adatoms mediated by graphene monolayer. We thus propose a new type of quantum phase transition resulting from the competition between the states characterized by spin-degenerate and magnetic BICs