Decoherence of Gravitational Wave Oscillations in Bigravity

Following up on our recent study, we consider the regime of graviton masses and gravitational wave propagation distances at which decoherence of the wave packets plays a major role for phenomenology. This regime is of particular interest, as it can lead to very striking phenomena of echo events in the gravitational waves coming from coalescence events. The power of the experimental search in this case lies in the fact that it becomes sensitive to a large range of graviton masses, while not relying on a specific production mechanism. We are thus able to place new relevant limits on the parameter space of the graviton mixing angle.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures; v2: extended discussion on the importance of the Vainshtein mechanism, content matches published versio

Gravitational Wave Oscillations in Bigravity

We derive consistent equations for gravitational wave oscillations in bigravity. In this framework a second dynamical tensor field is introduced in addition to General Relativity and coupled such that one massless and one massive linear combination arise. Only one of the two tensors is the physical metric coupling to matter, and thus the basis in which gravitational waves propagate is different from the basis where the wave is produced and detected. Therefore, one should expect -- in analogy to neutrino oscillations -- to observe an oscillatory behavior. We show how this behavior arises explicitly, discuss phenomenological implications and present new limits on the graviton parameter space in bigravity.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, journal versio

Differential contractile response of critically ill patients to neuromuscular electrical stimulation

BACKGROUND: Neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) has been investigated as a preventative measure for intensive care unit-acquired weakness. Trial results remain contradictory and therefore inconclusive. As it has been shown that NMES does not necessarily lead to a contractile response, our aim was to characterise the response of critically ill patients to NMES and investigate potential outcome benefits of an adequate contractile response. METHODS: This is a sub-analysis of a randomised controlled trial investigating early muscle activating measures together with protocol-based physiotherapy in patients with a SOFA score ≥ 9 within the first 72 h after admission. Included patients received protocol-based physiotherapy twice daily for 20 min and NMES once daily for 20 min, bilaterally on eight muscle groups. Electrical current was increased up to 70 mA or until a contraction was detected visually or on palpation. Muscle strength was measured by a blinded assessor at the first adequate awakening and ICU discharge. RESULTS: One thousand eight hundred twenty-four neuromuscular electrical stimulations in 21 patients starting on day 3.0 (2.0/6.0) after ICU admission were included in this sub-analysis. Contractile response decreased from 64.4% on day 1 to 25.0% on day 7 with a significantly lower response rate in the lower extremities and proximal muscle groups. The electrical current required to elicit a contraction did not change over time (day 1, 50.2 [31.3/58.8] mA; day 7, 45.3 [38.0/57.5] mA). The electrical current necessary for a contractile response was higher in the lower extremities. At the first awakening, patients presented with significant weakness (3.2 [2.5/3.8] MRC score). When dividing the cohort into responders and non-responders (> 50% vs. ≤ 50% contractile response), we observed a significantly higher SOFA score in non-responders. The electrical current necessary for a muscle contraction in responders was significantly lower (38.0 [32.8/42.9] vs. 54.7 [51.3/56.0] mA, p < 0.001). Muscle strength showed higher values in the upper extremities of responders at ICU discharge (4.4 [4.1/4.6] vs. 3.3 [2.8/3.8] MRC score, p = 0.036). CONCLUSION: Patients show a differential contractile response to NMES, which appears to be dependent on the severity of illness and also relevant for potential outcome benefits. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN ISRCTN19392591 , registered 17 February 201

Hydrogen site occupancy and strength of forces in nano-sized metal hydrides

The dipole force components in nano-sized metal hydrides are quantitatively determined with curvature and x-ray diffraction measurements. Ab-initio density functional theory is used to calculate the dipole components and the symmetry of the strain field. The hydrogen occupancy in a 100 nm thick V film is shown to be tetrahedral with a slight asymmetry at low concentration and a transition to octahedral occupancy is shown to take place at around 0.07 [H/V] at 360 K. When the thickness of the V layer is reduced to 3 nm and biaxially strained, in a Fe_0.5V_0.5/V superlattice, the hydrogen unequivocally occupies octahedral z-like sites, even at and below concentrations of 0.02 [H/V]

Effekt von Biogas-Fruchtfolgen und Biogas-Gülle auf Boden-struktur und weitere Bodeneigenschaften

In a field experiment with five different main crop rotations and fives subtypes for organic biogas systems, aggregate stability, organic carbon, total nitrogen and pH were evaluated in the topsoil layer (0-5 cm) in April 2010 in a winter wheat stand. Aggregate stability reacted on variation of crop rotation but not on manuring with biogas slurry. Rotations with a higher percentage of legumes led to a higher aggregate stability. Nitrogen reacted in a similar way while organic carbon and pH were more influence by soil inhomogeneity

A tool for determination of the three-dimensional orientation of electronic transition dipole moments and identification of configurational isomers

A method is presented that combines femtosecondpolarization resolved UV/visible pump–IR probe spectroscopy and density functional theory calculations in determining the three-dimensional orientation of an electronic transition dipole moment (tdm) within the molecular structure. The method is demonstrated on the approximately planar molecule coumarin 314 (C314) dissolved in acetonitrile, which can exist in two ground state configurations: the E- and the Z-isomer. Based on an exhaustive search analysis on polarization resolved measurement data for four different vibrational modes, it is concluded that C314 in acetonitrile is the E-isomer. The electronic tdm vector for the electronic S0→S1 transition is determined and the analysis shows that performing the procedure for four vibrational modes instead of the minimally required three reduces the 1σ probability area from 2.34% to 2.24% of the solution space. Moreover, the fastest rotational correlation timeτc for the C314 E-isomer is determined to be 26±2 ps

Incorporating anthropogenic influences into fire probability models : effects of human activity and climate change on fire activity in California

The costly interactions between humans and wildfires throughout California demonstrate the need to understand the relationships between them, especially in the face of a changing climate and expanding human communities. Although a number of statistical and process-based wildfire models exist for California, there is enormous uncertainty about the location and number of future fires, with previously published estimates of increases ranging from nine to fifty-three percent by the end of the century. Our goal is to assess the role of climate and anthropogenic influences on the state's fire regimes from 1975 to 2050. We develop an empirical model that integrates estimates of biophysical indicators relevant to plant communities and anthropogenic influences at each forecast time step. Historically, we find that anthropogenic influences account for up to fifty percent of explanatory power in the model. We also find that the total area burned is likely to increase, with burned area expected to increase by 2.2 and 5.0 percent by 2050 under climatic bookends (PCM and GFDL climate models, respectively). Our two climate models show considerable agreement, but due to potential shifts in rainfall patterns, substantial uncertainty remains for the semiarid inland deserts and coastal areas of the south. Given the strength of human-related variables in some regions, however, it is clear that comprehensive projections of future fire activity should include both anthropogenic and biophysical influences. Previous findings of substantially increased numbers of fires and burned area for California may be tied to omitted variable bias from the exclusion of human influences. The omission of anthropogenic variables in our model would overstate the importance of climatic ones by at least 24%. As such, the failure to include anthropogenic effects in many models likely overstates the response of wildfire to climatic change

Towards a Modular Framework for Visco-Hyperelastic Simulations of Soft Material Manipulators with Well-Parameterised Material

Controller design for continuum robots maintains to be a difficult task. Testing controllers requires dedicated work in manufacturing and investment into hardware as well as software, to acquire a test bench capable of performing dynamic control tasks. Typically, proprietary software for practical controller design such as Matlab/Simulink is used but lacks specific implementations of soft material robots. This intermediate work presents the results of a toolchain to derive well-identified rod simulations. State-of-the-art methods to simulate the dynamics of continuum robots are integrated into an object-oriented implementation and wrapped into the Simulink framework. The generated S-function is capable of handling arbitrary, user-defined input such as pressure actuation or external tip forces as demonstrated in numerical examples. With application to a soft pneumatic actuator, stiffness parameters of a nonlinear hyperelastic material law are identified via finite element simulation and paired with heuristically identified damping parameters to perform dynamic simulation. To prove the general functionality of the simulation, a numerical example as well as a benchmark from literature is implemented and shown. A soft pneumatic actuator is used to generate validation data, which is in good accordance with the respective simulation output. The tool is provided as an open-source project. Code is available under https://gitlab.com/soft_material_robotics/cosserat-rod-simulink-sfunction.© 2023 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other work