54,502 research outputs found
Melting of Branched RNA Molecules
Stability of the branching structure of an RNA molecule is an important
condition for its function. In this letter we show that the melting
thermodynamics of RNA molecules is very sensitive to their branching geometry
for the case of a molecule whose groundstate has the branching geometry of a
Cayley Tree and whose pairing interactions are described by the Go model.
Whereas RNA molecules with a linear geometry melt via a conventional continuous
phase transition with classical exponents, molecules with a Cayley Tree
geometry are found to have a free energy that seems smooth, at least within our
precision. Yet, we show analytically that this free energy in fact has a
mathematical singularity at the stability limit of the ordered structure. The
correlation length appears to diverge on the high-temperature side of this
singularity.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Service Performance Indicators for Infrastructure Investment
Infrastructure systems serving modern economies are highly complex, highly interconnected, and often highly
interactive. The result is increased complexity in investment decision-making, and increased challenges in prioritising
that investment. However, this prioritisation is vital to developing a long-term, sound, robust and achievable pipeline
of national infrastructure.
One key to effective, objective and prudent investment prioritisation is understanding the real performance of
infrastructure. Many metrics are employed to this end, and many are imposed by governments or regulators, but
often these metrics relate only to inputs or outputs in a production process. Whilst these metrics may be useful for
delivery agencies, they largely fail to address the real expectations or requirements of infrastructure users — quality of
service, safety, reliability, and resilience.
What is required is a set of metrics which address not outputs but outcomes — that is, how well does the
infrastructure network meet service needs? This paper reports on a study undertaken at a national level, to identify
service needs across a range of infrastructure sectors, to assess service performance metrics in use, and to show
how they or other suitable metrics can be used to prioritise investment decisions across sectors and jurisdictions
Entanglement entropy of random quantum critical points in one dimension
For quantum critical spin chains without disorder, it is known that the
entanglement of a segment of N>>1 spins with the remainder is logarithmic in N
with a prefactor fixed by the central charge of the associated conformal field
theory. We show that for a class of strongly random quantum spin chains, the
same logarithmic scaling holds for mean entanglement at criticality and defines
a critical entropy equivalent to central charge in the pure case. This
effective central charge is obtained for Heisenberg, XX, and quantum Ising
chains using an analytic real-space renormalization group approach believed to
be asymptotically exact. For these random chains, the effective universal
central charge is characteristic of a universality class and is consistent with
a c-theorem.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Search For A Permanent Electric Dipole Moment Using Atomic Indium
We propose indium (In) as a possible candidate for observing the permanent
electric dipole moment (EDM) arising from the violations of parity (P) and
time-reversal (T) symmetries. This atom has been laser cooled and therefore the
measurement of its EDM has the potential of improving on the current best EDM
limit for a paramagnetic atom which comes from thallium. We report the results
of our calculations of the EDM enhancement factor due to the electron EDM and
the ratio of the atomic EDM to the electron-nucleus scalar-pseudoscalar (S-PS)
interaction coupling constant in In in the framework of the relativistic
coupled cluster theory. It might be possible to get new limits for the electron
EDM and the S-PS CP violating coupling constant by combining the results of our
calculations with the measured value of the EDM of In when it is available.
These limits could have important implications for the standard model (SM) of
particle physics.Comment: 5 pages, 1 fig, Rapid Communicatio
The Escape of Ionizing Photons from the Galaxy
The Magellanic Stream and several high velocity clouds have now been detected
in optical line emission. The observed emission measures and kinematics are
most plausibly explained by photoionization due to hot, young stars in the
Galactic disk. The highly favorable orientation of the Stream allows an
unambiguous determination of the fraction of ionizing photons, F_esc, which
escape the disk. We have modelled the production and transport of ionizing
photons through an opaque interstellar medium. Normalization to the Stream
detections requires F_esc = 6%, in reasonable agreement with the flux required
to ionize the Reynolds layer. Neither shock heating nor emission within a hot
Galactic corona can be important in producing the observed H-alpha emission. If
such a large escape fraction is typical of L_* galaxies, star-forming systems
dominate the extragalactic ionizing background. Within the context of this
model, both the three-dimensional orientation of the Stream and the distances
to high-velocity clouds can be determined by sensitive H-alpha observations.Comment: 4 pages; LaTeX2e, emulateapj.sty, apjfonts.sty; 4 encapsulated PS
figures. For correct labels, may need to print Fig. 3 separately due to psfig
limitation. Astrophysical Journal (Letters), accepte
Gas Rich Dwarf Spheroidals
We present evidence that nearly half of the dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSph
and dSph/dIrr) in the Local Group are associated with large reservoirs of
atomic gas, in some cases larger than the stellar mass. The gas is sometimes
found at large distance (~10 kpc) from the center of a galaxy and is not
necessarily centered on it. Similarly large quantities of ionized gas could be
hidden in these systems as well. The properties of some of the gas reservoirs
are similar to the median properties of the High-Velocity Clouds (HVCs); two of
the HI reservoirs are catalogued HVCs. The association of the HI with the dwarf
spheroidals might thus provide a link between the HVCs and stars. We show that
the HI content of the Local Group dSphs and dIrrs exhibits a sharp decline if
the galaxy is within 250 kpc of either the Milky Way or M31. This can be
explained if both galaxies have a sufficiently massive x-ray emitting halo that
produces ram-pressure stripping if a dwarf ventures too close to either giant
spiral. We also investigate tidal stripping of the dwarf galaxies and find that
although it may play a role, it cannot explain the apparent total absence of
neutral gas in most dSph galaxies at distances less than 250 kpc. For the
derived mean density of the hot gas, n_0 = 2.5e-5 cm^-2, ram-pressure stripping
is found to be more than an order of magnitude more effective in removing the
gas from the dSph galaxies. The hot halo, with an inferred mass of 1e10 solar
masses, may represent a reservoir of ~1000 destroyed dwarf systems, either HVCs
or true dwarf galaxies similar to those we observe now.Comment: AASTex preprint style, 27 pages including 12 figures. Submitted to
ApJ. See also http://astro.berkeley.edu/~robisha
Nonlinear Evolution of the Genus Statistics with Zel'dovich Approximation
Evolution of genus density is calculated from Gaussian initial conditions
using Zel'dovich approximation. A new approach is introduced which formulates
the desired quantity in a rotationally invariant manner. It is shown that
normalized genus density does not depend on the initial spectral shape but is a
function of the fluctuation amplitude only.Comment: 21 pages, 6 Postscript figures, LaTe
Traceroute sampling makes random graphs appear to have power law degree distributions
The topology of the Internet has typically been measured by sampling
traceroutes, which are roughly shortest paths from sources to destinations. The
resulting measurements have been used to infer that the Internet's degree
distribution is scale-free; however, many of these measurements have relied on
sampling traceroutes from a small number of sources. It was recently argued
that sampling in this way can introduce a fundamental bias in the degree
distribution, for instance, causing random (Erdos-Renyi) graphs to appear to
have power law degree distributions. We explain this phenomenon analytically
using differential equations to model the growth of a breadth-first tree in a
random graph G(n,p=c/n) of average degree c, and show that sampling from a
single source gives an apparent power law degree distribution P(k) ~ 1/k for k
< c
Coherent phonon scattering effects on thermal transport in thin semiconductor nanowires
The thermal conductance by phonons of a quasi-one-dimensional solid with
isotope or defect scattering is studied using the Landauer formalism for
thermal transport. The conductance shows a crossover from localized to Ohmic
behavior, just as for electrons, but the nature of this crossover is modified
by delocalization of phonons at low frequency. A scalable numerical
transfer-matrix technique is developed and applied to model
quasi-one-dimensional systems in order to confirm simple analytic predictions.
We argue that existing thermal conductivity data on semiconductor nanowires,
showing an unexpected linear dependence, can be understood through a model that
combines incoherent surface scattering for short-wavelength phonons with nearly
ballistic long-wavelength phonons. It is also found that even when strong
phonon localization effects would be observed if defects are distributed
throughout the wire, localization effects are much weaker when defects are
localized at the boundary, as in current experiments.Comment: 13 page
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