10,526 research outputs found
DNA-psoralen: single-molecule experiments and first principles calculations
The authors measure the persistence and contour lengths of DNA-psoralen
complexes, as a function of psoralen concentration, for intercalated and
crosslinked complexes. In both cases, the persistence length monotonically
increases until a certain critical concentration is reached, above which it
abruptly decreases and remains approximately constant. The contour length of
the complexes exhibits no such discontinuous behavior. By fitting the relative
increase of the contour length to the neighbor exclusion model, we obtain the
exclusion number and the intrinsic intercalating constant of the psoralen-DNA
interaction. Ab initio calculations are employed in order to provide an
atomistic picture of these experimental findings.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures in re-print format 3 pages, 4 figures in the
published versio
Periodic Gravitational Waves From Small Cosmic String Loops
We consider a population of small, high-velocity cosmic string loops. We
assume the typical length of these loops is determined by the gravitational
radiation scale and use the results of \cite{Polchinski:2007rg} which pointed
out their highly relativistic nature. A study of the gravitational wave
emission from such a population is carried out. The large Lorentz boost
involved causes the lowest harmonics of the loops to fall within the frequency
band of the LIGO detector. Due to this feature the gravitational waves emitted
by such loops can be detected in a periodic search rather than in burst or
stochastic analysis.
It is shown that, for interesting values of the string tension
(10^{-10}\lsim G\mu\lsim 10^{-8}) the detector can observe loops at
reasonably high redshifts and that detection is, in principle, possible. We
compute the number of expected observations produced by such a process. For a
10 hour search we find that this number is of order . This is a
consequence of the low effective number density of the loops traveling along
the line of sight. However, small probabilities of reconnection and longer
observation times can improve the result.Comment: 1+15 pages, 7 figure
Gravitational pressure on event horizons and thermodynamics in the teleparallel framework
The concept of gravitational pressure is naturally defined in the context of
the teleparallel equivalent of general relativity. Together with the definition
of gravitational energy, we investigate the thermodynamics of rotating black
holes in the teleparallel framework. We obtain the value of the gravitational
pressure over the external event horizon of the Kerr black hole, and write an
expression for the thermodynamic relation , where the variations
refer to the Penrose process for the Kerr black hole. We employ only the
notions of gravitational energy and pressure that arise in teleparallel
gravity, and do not make any consideration of the area or the variation of the
area of the event horizon. However, our results are qualitatively similar to
the standard expression of the literature.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure
Topological insulator particles as optically induced oscillators: towards dynamical force measurements and optical rheology
We report the first experimental study upon the optical trapping and
manipulation of topological insulator (TI) particles. By virtue of the unique
TI properties, which have a conducting surface and an insulating bulk, the
particles present a peculiar behaviour in the presence of a single laser beam
optical tweezers: they oscillate in a plane perpendicular to the direction of
the laser propagation, as a result of the competition between radiation
pressure and gradient forces. In other words, TI particles behave as optically
induced oscillators, allowing dynamical measurements with unprecedented
simplicity and purely optical control. Actually, optical rheology of soft
matter interfaces and biological membranes, as well as dynamical force
measurements in macromolecules and biopolymers, may be quoted as feasible
possibilities for the near future.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures. Correspondence and requests for Supplementary
Material should be addressed to [email protected]
Variations of the Energy of Free Particles in the pp-Wave Spacetimes
We consider the action of exact plane gravitational waves, or pp-waves, on
free particles. The analysis is carried out by investigating the variations of
the geodesic trajectories of the particles, before and after the passage of the
wave. The initial velocities of the particles are non-vanishing. We evaluate
numerically the Kinetic energy per unit mass of the free particles, and obtain
interesting, quasi-periodic behaviour of the variations of the Kinetic energy
with respect to the width of the gaussian that represents the wave.
The variation of the energy of the free particle is expected to be exactly
minus the variation of the energy of the gravitational field, and therefore
provides an estimation of the local variation of the gravitational energy. The
investigation is carried out in the context of short bursts of gravitational
waves, and of waves described by normalised gaussians, that yield impulsive
waves in a certain limit.Comment: 20 pages, 18 figures, further arguments supporting the localizability
of the gravitational energy are presented, published in Univers
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