Active and Passive Transport of Cargo in a Corrugated Channel: A Lattice Model Study

Inside cells, cargos such as vesicles and organelles are transported by molecular motors to their correct locations via active motion on cytoskeletal tracks and passive, Brownian diffusion. During the transportation of cargos, motor-cargo complexes (MCC) navigate the confining and crowded environment of the cytoskeletal network and other macromolecules. Motivated by this, we study a minimal two-state model of motor-driven cargo transport in confinement and predict transport properties that can be tested in experiments. We assume that the motion of the MCC is directly affected by the entropic barrier due to confinement if it is in the passive, unbound state, but not in the active, bound state where it moves with a constant bound velocity. We construct a lattice model based on a Fokker Planck description of the two-state system, study it using a kinetic Monte Carlo method and compare our numerical results with analytical expressions for a mean field limit. We find that the effect of confinement strongly depends on the bound velocity and the binding kinetics of the MCC. Confinement effectively reduces the effective diffusivity and average velocity, except when it results in an enhanced average binding rate and thereby leads to a larger average velocity than when unconfined.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Collective stochastic resonance in shear-induced melting of sliding bilayers

The far-from-equilibrium dynamics of two crystalline two-dimensional monolayers driven past each other is studied using Brownian dynamics simulations. While at very high and low driving rates the layers slide past one another retaining their crystalline order, for intermediate range of drives the system alternates irregularly between the crystalline and fluid-like phases. A dynamical phase diagram in the space of interlayer coupling and drive is obtained. A qualitative understanding of this stochastic alternation between the liquid-like and crystalline phases is proposed in terms of a reduced model within which it can be understood as a stochastic resonance for the dynamics of collective order parameter variables. This remarkable example of stochastic resonance in a spatially extended system should be seen in experiments which we propose in the paper.Comment: 12 pages, 18 eps figures, minor changes in text and labelling of figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Stability constraints in triplet extension of MSSM

We study the stability constraints on the parameter space of a triplet extension of MSSM. Existence of unbounded from below directions in the potential can spoil successful Electroweak (EW) symmetry breaking by making the corresponding minimum unstable, and hence the model should be free from those directions. Avoiding those directions restricts the parameter space of the model. We derive four stability constraints, of which only three independent from each other. After scanning the model's parameter space for phenomenologically viable data points, we impose the stability constraints and find that only about a quarter of the data points features a stable EW minimum. At those data points featuring stability, $\mu$ and the up Higgs soft mass turn out to be smaller than about a TeV in absolute value, which make the mass of the lightest chargino and neutralino smaller than about 700 GeV. Two relevant phenomenological consequences of lifting the unbounded from below directions are that the lightest Higgs boson decay rate to diphoton predicted by the triplet extension of MSSM generally features larger deviations from MSSM and fine tuning is actually higher, that what each of the two would be without imposing stability constraints.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure

Lower order and higher order entanglement in 87Rb87Rb 5S−5P−5D5S-5P-5D hyperfine manifold modeled as a four-wave mixing process

Possibilities of generation of lower order and higher order intermodal entanglement in 87Rb 5S-5P-5D hyperfine manifold are rigorously investigated using Sen-Mandal perturbative technique by showing the equivalence of the system with the four-wave mixing (FWM) process. The investigation has revealed that for a set of experimentally realizable/relevant parameters we can observe lower order and higher order intermodal entanglement between pump and signal modes, signal and idler modes, and idler and pump modes in a FWM process associated with the 87Rb 5S-5P-5D hyperfine manifold. In addition, trimodal entanglement involving pump, signal and idler modes is also reported.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure