351 research outputs found
Convergence to equilibrium for the discrete coagulation-fragmentation equations with detailed balance
Under the condition of detailed balance and some additional restrictions on
the size of the coefficients, we identify the equilibrium distribution to which
solutions of the discrete coagulation-fragmentation system of equations
converge for large times, thus showing that there is a critical mass which
marks a change in the behavior of the solutions. This was previously known only
for particular cases as the generalized Becker-D\"oring equations. Our proof is
based on an inequality between the entropy and the entropy production which
also gives some information on the rate of convergence to equilibrium for
solutions under the critical mass.Comment: 28 page
Combinatorial activity of flavonoids with antibiotics against drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus
The use of resistance-modifying agents is a potential strategy that is used to prolong the effective life of antibiotics in the face of increasing antibiotic resistance. Since certain flavonoids are potent bacterial efflux pump inhibitors, we assessed morin, rutin, quercetin, hesperidin, and (+)-catechin for their combined activity with the antibiotics ciprofloxacin, tetracycline, erythromycin, oxacillin, and ampicillin against drug-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, including methicillin-resistant S. aureus. Four established methods were used to determine the combined efficacy of each combination: microdilution checkerboard assays, time-kill determinations, the Etest, and dual disc-diffusion methods. The cytotoxicity of the flavonoids was additionally evaluated in a mouse fibroblast cell line. Quercetin and its isomer morin decreased by 3- to 16-fold the minimal inhibitory concentration of ciprofloxacin, tetracycline, and erythromycin against some S. aureus strains. Rutin, hesperidin, and (+)-catechin did not promote any potentiation of antibiotics. Despite the potential cytotoxicity of these phytochemicals at a high concentration (fibroblast IC50 of 41.8 and 67.5mg/L, respectively), quercetin is commonly used as a supplement for several therapeutic purposes. All the methods, with exception of the time-kill assay, presented a high degree of congruence without any apparent strain specificity.This work was supported by Operational Program for
Competitiveness Factors—COMPETE, FCT/MEC (PIDDAC),
and FEDER through Projects Bioresist—PTDC/EBB-EBI/
105085/2008; Phytodisinfectants—PTDC/DTP-SAP/1078/
2012 (COMPETE: FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-028765) and
the PhD grants awarded to Ana Abreu (SFRH/BD/84393/
2012) and Anabela Borges (SFRH/BD/63398/2009). The
authors are very grateful to Professor Simon Gibbons (De-
partment of Pharmaceutical and Biological Chemistry, The
School of Pharmacy, UCL School of Pharmacy, London) for
providing the bacterial strains.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Counterion Condensation and Fluctuation-Induced Attraction
We consider an overall neutral system consisting of two similarly charged
plates and their oppositely charged counterions and analyze the electrostatic
interaction between the two surfaces beyond the mean-field Poisson-Boltzmann
approximation. Our physical picture is based on the fluctuation-driven
counterion condensation model, in which a fraction of the counterions is
allowed to ``condense'' onto the charged plates. In addition, an expression for
the pressure is derived, which includes fluctuation contributions of the whole
system. We find that for sufficiently high surface charges, the distance at
which the attraction, arising from charge fluctuations, starts to dominate can
be large compared to the Gouy-Chapmann length. We also demonstrate that
depending on the valency, the system may exhibit a novel first-order binding
transition at short distances.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, to appear in PR
Shrinking a large dataset to identify variables associated with increased risk of Plasmodium falciparum infection in Western Kenya
Large datasets are often not amenable to analysis using traditional single-step approaches. Here, our general objective was to apply imputation techniques, principal component analysis (PCA), elastic net and generalized linear models to a large dataset in a systematic approach to extract the most meaningful predictors for a health outcome. We extracted predictors for Plasmodium falciparum infection, from a large covariate dataset while facing limited numbers of observations, using data from the People, Animals, and their Zoonoses (PAZ) project to demonstrate these techniques: data collected from 415 homesteads in western Kenya, contained over 1500 variables that describe the health, environment, and social factors of the humans, livestock, and the homesteads in which they reside. The wide, sparse dataset was simplified to 42 predictors of P. falciparum malaria infection and wealth rankings were produced for all homesteads. The 42 predictors make biological sense and are supported by previous studies. This systematic data-mining approach we used would make many large datasets more manageable and informative for decision-making processes and health policy prioritization
Observation of Orbitally Excited B_s Mesons
We report the first observation of two narrow resonances consistent with
states of orbitally excited (L=1) B_s mesons using 1 fb^{-1} of ppbar
collisions at sqrt{s} = 1.96 TeV collected with the CDF II detector at the
Fermilab Tevatron. We use two-body decays into K^- and B^+ mesons reconstructed
as B^+ \to J/\psi K^+, J/\psi \to \mu^+ \mu^- or B^+ \to \bar{D}^0 \pi^+,
\bar{D}^0 \to K^+ \pi^-. We deduce the masses of the two states to be m(B_{s1})
= 5829.4 +- 0.7 MeV/c^2 and m(B_{s2}^*) = 5839.7 +- 0.7 MeV/c^2.Comment: Version accepted and published by Phys. Rev. Let
Measurement of the Bottom-Strange Meson Mixing Phase in the Full CDF Data Set
We report a measurement of the bottom-strange meson mixing phase \beta_s
using the time evolution of B0_s -> J/\psi (->\mu+\mu-) \phi (-> K+ K-) decays
in which the quark-flavor content of the bottom-strange meson is identified at
production. This measurement uses the full data set of proton-antiproton
collisions at sqrt(s)= 1.96 TeV collected by the Collider Detector experiment
at the Fermilab Tevatron, corresponding to 9.6 fb-1 of integrated luminosity.
We report confidence regions in the two-dimensional space of \beta_s and the
B0_s decay-width difference \Delta\Gamma_s, and measure \beta_s in [-\pi/2,
-1.51] U [-0.06, 0.30] U [1.26, \pi/2] at the 68% confidence level, in
agreement with the standard model expectation. Assuming the standard model
value of \beta_s, we also determine \Delta\Gamma_s = 0.068 +- 0.026 (stat) +-
0.009 (syst) ps-1 and the mean B0_s lifetime, \tau_s = 1.528 +- 0.019 (stat) +-
0.009 (syst) ps, which are consistent and competitive with determinations by
other experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, Phys. Rev. Lett 109, 171802 (2012
Dynamic stability of vortex solutions of Ginzburg-Landau and nonlinear Schrödinger equations
The dynamic stability of vortex solutions to the Ginzburg-Landau and nonlinear Schrödinger equations is the basic assumption of the asymptotic particle plus field description of interacting vortices. For the Ginzburg-Landau dynamics we prove that all vortices are asymptotically nonlinearly stable relative to small radial perturbations. Initially finite energy perturbations of vortices decay to zero in L p (ℝ 2 ) spaces with an algebraic rate as time tends to infinity. We also prove that under general (nonradial) perturbations, the plus and minus one-vortices are linearly dynamically stable in L 2 ; the linearized operator has spectrum equal to (−∞, 0] and generates a C 0 semigroup of contractions on L 2 (ℝ 2 ). The nature of the zero energy point is clarified; it is resonance , a property related to the infinite energy of planar vortices. Our results on the linearized operator are also used to show that the plus and minus one-vortices for the Schrödinger (Hamiltonian) dynamics are spectrally stable, i.e. the linearized operator about these vortices has ( L 2 ) spectrum equal to the imaginary axis. The key ingredients of our analysis are the Nash-Aronson estimates for obtaining Gaussian upper bounds for fundamental solutions of parabolic operator, and a combination of variational and maximum principles.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/46494/1/220_2005_Article_BF02099719.pd
W boson polarization measurement in the ttbar dilepton channel using the CDF II Detector
We present a measurement of boson polarization in top-quark decays in
events with decays to dilepton final states using of integrated luminosity in collisions collected by the
CDF II detector at the Tevatron. A simultaneous measurement of the fractions of
longitudinal () and right-handed () bosons yields the results
and . Combining this measurement
with our previous result based on single lepton final states, we obtain and . The results are consistent with standard
model expectation.Comment: Published in Phys. Lett.
Measurement of the Bs Lifetime in Fully and Partially Reconstructed Bs -> Ds- (phi pi-)X Decays in pbar-p Collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV
We present a measurement of the Bs lifetime in fully and partially
reconstructed Bs -> Ds(phi pi)X decays in 1.3 fb-1 of pbar-p collisions at
sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV collected by the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron.
We measure tau(Bs) = 1.518 +/- 0.041 (stat.) +/- 0.027 (syst.) ps. The ratio of
this result and the world average B0 lifetime yields tau(Bs)/tau(B0) = 0.99
+/-0.03, which is in agreement with recent theoretical predictions.Comment: submitted to Phys. Rev. Let
Observation of the structure in the Mass Spectrum in cays
The observation of the structure in decays produced in collisions at \sqrt{s}=1.96~\TeV is
reported with a statistical significance greater than 5 standard deviations. A
fit to the mass spectrum is performed assuming the presence of a
Breit-Wigner resonance. The fit yields a signal of resonance
events, and resonance mass and width of
4143.4^{+2.9}_{-3.0}(\mathrm{stat})\pm0.6(\mathrm{syst})~\MeVcc and
15.3^{+10.4}_{-6.1}(\mathrm{stat})\pm2.5(\mathrm{syst})~\MeVcc respectively.
The parameters of this resonance-like structure are consistent with values
reported from an earlier CDF analysis.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, submited to Phys. Rev. Let
- …