Finite-size scaling of helix-coil transitions in poly-alanine studied by multicanonical simulations

We report results from multicanonical simulations of poly-alanine. Homopolymers of up to 30 amino acids were considered and various thermodynamic quantities as a function of temperature calculated. We study the nature of the observed helix-coil transition and present estimates for critical exponents.Comment: to appear in J.Chem.Phys. (Jan 99

Rotation Curves of Spiral Galaxies and Large Scale Structure of Universe under Generalized Einstein Action

We consider an addition of the term which is a square of the scalar curvature to the Einstein-Hilbert action. Under this generalized action, we attempt to explain i) the flat rotation curves observed in spiral galaxies, which is usually attributed to the existence of dark matter, and ii) the contradicting observations of uniform cosmic microwave background and non-uniform galaxy distributions against redshift. For the former, we attain the flatness of velocities, although the magnitudes remain about half of the observations. For the latter, we obtain a solution with oscillating Hubble parameter under uniform mass distributions. This solution leads to several peaks of galaxy number counts as a function of redshift with the first peak corresponding to the Great Wall.Comment: 16 page