170 research outputs found
Collective fermionic excitations in systems with a large chemical potential
We study fermionic excitations in a cold ultrarelativistic plasma. We
construct explicitly the quantum states associated with the two branches which
develop in the excitation spectrum as the chemical potential is raised. The
collective nature of the long wavelength excitations is clearly exhibited.
Email contact: [email protected]: Saclay-T93/018 Email: [email protected]
Kinetic Equations for Longwavelength Excitations of the Quark-Gluon Plasma
We show that longwavelength excitations of the quark-gluon plasma are
described by simple kinetic equations which represent the exact equations of
motion at leading order in . Properties of the so-called ``hard thermal
loops'', i.e. the dominant contributions to amplitudes with soft external
lines, find in this approach a natural explanation. In particular, their
generating functional appears here as the effective action describing long
wavelength excitations of the plasma.Comment: January 8, 1993; 8 pages; SPhT/93-
Lifetime of quasiparticles in hot QED plasmas
The calculation of the lifetime of quasiparticles in a QED plasma at high
temperature remains plagued with infrared divergences, even after one has taken
into account the screening corrections. The physical processes responsible for
these divergences are the collisions involving the exchange of very soft,
unscreened, magnetic photons, whose contribution is enhanced by the thermal
Bose-Einstein occupation factor. The self energy diagrams which diverge in
perturbation theory contain no internal fermion loops, but an arbitrary number
of internal magnetostatic photon lines. By generalizing the Bloch-Nordsieck
model at finite temperature, we can resum all the singular contributions of
such diagrams, and obtain the correct long time behaviour of the retarded
fermion propagator in the hot QED plasma: , where is the plasma frequency and
.Comment: 13 pages, LaTe
Lifetimes of quasiparticles and collective excitations in hot QED plasmas
The perturbative calculation of the lifetime of fermion excitations in a QED
plasma at high temperature is plagued with infrared divergences which are not
eliminated by the screening corrections. The physical processes responsible for
these divergences are the collisions involving the exchange of longwavelength,
quasistatic, magnetic photons, which are not screened by plasma effects. The
leading divergences can be resummed in a non-perturbative treatement based on a
generalization of the Bloch-Nordsieck model at finite temperature. The
resulting expression of the fermion propagator is free of infrared problems,
and exhibits a {\it non-exponential} damping at large times: , where is the plasma
frequency and .Comment: LaTex file, 57 pages, 11 eps figures include
Evaluation of the Ability of LL-37 to Neutralise LPS In Vitro and Ex Vivo
BACKGROUND: Human cathelicidin LL-37 is a cationic antimicrobial peptide (AMP) which possesses a variety of activities including the ability to neutralise endotoxin. In this study, we investigated the role of LPS neutralisation in mediating LL-37's ability to inhibit Pseudomonas aeruginosa LPS signalling in human monocytic cells. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Pre-treatment of monocytes with LL-37 significantly inhibited LPS-induced IL-8 production and the signalling pathway of associated transcription factors such as NF-κB. However, upon removal of LL-37 from the media prior to LPS stimulation, these inhibitory effects were abolished. These findings suggest that the ability of LL-37 to inhibit LPS signalling is largely dependent on extracellular LPS neutralisation. In addition, LL-37 potently inhibited cytokine production induced by LPS extracted from P. aeruginosa isolated from the lungs of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients. In the CF lung, polyanionic molecules such as glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) and DNA bind LL-37 and impact negatively on its antibacterial activity. In order to determine whether such interactions interfere with the LPS neutralising ability of LL-37, the status of LL-37 and its ability to bind LPS in CF sputum were investigated. Overall our findings suggest that in the CF lung, the ability of LL-37 to bind LPS and inhibit LPS-induced IL-8 production is attenuated as a result of binding to DNA and GAGs. However, LL-37 levels and its concomitant LPS-binding activity can be increased with a combination of DNase and GAG lyase (heparinase II) treatment. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Overall, these findings suggest that a deficiency in available LL-37 in the CF lung may contribute to greater LPS-induced inflammation during CF lung disease
Dynamical Evolution of the Scalar Condensate in Heavy Ion Collisions
We derive the effective coarse-grained field equation for the scalar
condensate of the linear sigma model in a simple and straightforward manner
using linear response theory. The dissipative coefficient is calculated at tree
level on the basis of the physical processes of sigma-meson decay and of
thermal sigma-mesons and pions knocking sigma-mesons out of the condensate. The
field equation is solved for hot matter undergoing either one or three
dimensional expansion and cooling in the aftermath of a high energy nuclear
collision. The results show that the time constant for returning the scalar
condensate to thermal equilibrium is of order 2 fm/c.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figures are embedded at the end. The effect of the time
dependence of the condensate v is included in this revised version. Numerical
work is redone accordingl
On the screening of static electromagnetic fields in hot QED plasmas
We study the screening of static magnetic and electric fields in massless
quantum electrodynamics (QED) and massless scalar electrodynamics (SQED) at
temperature . Various exact relations for the static polarisation tensor are
first reviewed and then verified perturbatively to fifth order (in the
coupling) in QED and fourth order in SQED, using different resummation
techniques. The magnetic and electric screening masses squared, as defined
through the pole of the static propagators, are also calculated to fifth order
in QED and fourth order in SQED, and their gauge-independence and
renormalisation-group invariance is checked. Finally, we provide arguments for
the vanishing of the magnetic mass to all orders in perturbation theory.Comment: 37 pages, 8 figure
Chern-Simons Theory and the Quark-Gluon Plasma
The generating functional for hard thermal loops in QCD is important in
setting up a resummed perturbation theory, so that all terms of a given order
in the coupling constant can be consistently taken into account. It is also the
functional which leads to a gauge invariant description of Debye screening and
plasma waves in the quark-gluon plasma. We have recently shown that this
functional is closely related to the eikonal for a Chern-Simons gauge theory.
In this paper, this relationship is explored and explained in more detail,
along with some generalizations.Comment: 28 pages (4 Feynman diagrams not included, available upon request
A role for whey acidic protein four-disulfide-core 12 (WFDC12) in the regulation of the inflammatory response in the lung
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