Broad Line Radio Galaxies: Jet Contribution to the nuclear X-Ray Continuum

It is shown that, for Broad Line Radio Galaxies the strength of the non-thermal beamed radiation, when present, is always smaller than the accretion flow by a factor < 0.7 in the 2-10 keV band. The result has been obtained using the procedure adopted for disentangling the Flat Spectrum Radio Quasar 3C 273 (Grandi & Palumbo 2004). Although this implies a significantly smaller non-thermal flux in Radio Galaxies when compared to Blazars, the jet component, if present, could be important at very high energies and thus easily detectable with GLAST.Comment: 12 pages including 2 figures (4 files), ApJ accepte

Self-assembly of multi-component fluorescent molecular logic gates in micelles

A recent strategy for developing supramolecular logic gates in water is based on combinations of molecules via self-assembly with surfactants, which eliminates the need for time-consuming synthesis. The self-assembly of surfactants and lumophores and receptors can result in interesting properties providing cooperative e ffects useful for molecular information processing and other potential applications such as drug delivery systems. This article highlights some of the recent advancements in supramolecular information processing using microheterogeneous media including micelles in aqueous solution.peer-reviewe

Insight into CO2 dissociation in plasmas from numerical solution of a vibrational diffusion equation

The dissociation of CO2 molecules in plasmas is a subject of enormous importance for fundamental studies and the recent interest in carbon capture and carbon-neutral fuels. The vibrational excitation of the CO2 molecule plays an important role in the process. The complexity of the present state-to-state (STS) models makes it difficult to find out the key parameters. In this paper we propose as an alternative a numerical method based on the diffusion formalism developed in the past for analytical studies. The non-linear Fokker-Planck equation is solved by the time-dependent diffusion Monte Carlo method. Transport quantities are calculated from STS rate coefficients. The asymmetric stretching mode of CO2 is used as a test case. We show that the method reproduces the STS results or a Treanor distribution depending on the choice of the boundary conditions. A positive drift, whose energy onset is determined by the vibrational to translational temperature ratio, brings molecules from mid-energy range to dissociation. The high-energy fall of the distribution is observed even neglecting VT processes which are normally believed to be its cause. Our study explains several puzzling features of previous studies, provides new insights into the control of the dissociation rate and a much sought compression of the required data for modeling