Superior pre-osteoblast cell response of etched ultrafine-grained titanium with a controlled crystallographic orientation

Ultrafine-grained (UFG) Ti for improved mechanical performance as well as its surface modification enhancing biofunctions has attracted much attention in medical industries. Most of the studies on the surface etching of metallic biomaterials have focused on surface topography and wettability but not crystallographic orientation, i.e., texture, which influences the chemical as well as the physical properties. In this paper, the influences of texture and grain size on roughness, wettability, and pre-osteoblast cell response were investigated in vitro after HF etching treatment. The surface characteristics and cell behaviors of ultrafine, fine, and coarse-grained Ti were examined after the HF etching. The surface roughness during the etching treatment was significantly increased as the orientation angle from the basal pole was increased. The cell adhesion tendency of the rough surface was promoted. The UFG Ti substrate exhibited a higher texture energy state, rougher surface, enhanced hydrophilic wettability, and better cell adhesion and proliferation behaviors after etching than those of the coarse- and fine-grained Ti substrates. These results provide a new route for enhancing both mechanical and biological performances using etching after grain refinement of Ti. ? The Author(s) 2017.115Ysciescopu

Local Variational Principle

A generalization of the Gibbs-Bogoliubov-Feynman inequality for spinless particles is proven and then illustrated for the simple model of a symmetric double-well quartic potential. The method gives a pointwise lower bound for the finite-temperature density matrix and it can be systematically improved by the Trotter composition rule. It is also shown to produce groundstate energies better than the ones given by the Rayleigh-Ritz principle as applied to the groundstate eigenfunctions of the reference potentials. Based on this observation, it is argued that the Local Variational Principle performs better than the equivalent methods based on the centroid path idea and on the Gibbs-Bogoliubov-Feynman variational principle, especially in the range of low temperatures.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, one more section adde

Magnetic Phases of Electron-Doped Manganites

We study the anisotropic magnetic structures exhibited by electron-doped manganites using a model which incorporates the double-exchange between orbital ly degenerate $e_{g}$ electrons and the super-exchange between $t_{2g}$ electrons with realistic values of the Hund's coupling($J_H$), the super-exchange coupling($J_{AF}$), and the bandwidth($W$). We look at the relative stabilities of the G, C and A type antiferromagnetic ph ases. In particular we find that the G-phase is stable for low electron doping as seen in experiments. We find good agreement with the experimentally observed magnetic phase diagrams of electron-doped manganites ($x > 0.5$) such as Nd$_{1-x}$Sr$_{x}$MnO$_{3}$, Pr$_{1-x}$Sr$_{x}$MnO$_{3}$, and Sm$_{1-x}$Ca$_{x}$MnO$_{3}$. We can also explain the experimentally observed orbital structures of the C a nd A phases. We also extend our calculation for electron-doped bilayer manganites of the form R$_{2-2x}$A$_{1+2x}$Mn$_2$O$_7$ and predict that the C-phase will be absent in t hese systems due to their reduced dimensionality.Comment: 7 .ps files included. To appear in Phys. Rev. B (Feb 2001

Neutron beam test of CsI crystal for dark matter search

We have studied the response of Tl-doped and Na-doped CsI crystals to nuclear recoils and $\gamma$'s below 10 keV. The response of CsI crystals to nuclear recoil was studied with mono-energetic neutrons produced by the $^3$H(p,n)$^3$He reaction. This was compared to the response to Compton electrons scattered by 662 keV $\gamma$-ray. Pulse shape discrimination between the response to these $\gamma$'s and nuclear recoils was studied, and quality factors were estimated. The quenching factors for nuclear recoils were derived for both CsI(Na) and CsI(Tl) crystals.Comment: 21pages, 14figures, submitted to NIM

Obstructions to the Existence of Sasaki-Einstein Metrics

We describe two simple obstructions to the existence of Ricci-flat Kahler cone metrics on isolated Gorenstein singularities or, equivalently, to the existence of Sasaki-Einstein metrics on the links of these singularities. In particular, this also leads to new obstructions for Kahler-Einstein metrics on Fano orbifolds. We present several families of hypersurface singularities that are obstructed, including 3-fold and 4-fold singularities of ADE type that have been studied previously in the physics literature. We show that the AdS/CFT dual of one obstruction is that the R-charge of a gauge invariant chiral primary operator violates the unitarity bound.Comment: 35 pages, 1 figure; references and a footnote adde

Origin and pressure dependence of ferromagnetism in A2Mn2O7 pyrochlores (A=Y, In, Lu, and Tl)

Non-conventional mechanisms have been recently invoked in order to explain the ferromagnetic ground state of A2Mn2O7 pyrochlores (A=Y, In, Lu and Tl) and the puzzling decrease of their Curie temperatures with applied pressure. Here we show, using a perturbation expansion in the Mn-O hopping term, that both features can be understood within the superexhange model, provided that the intra-atomic oxygen interactions are properly taken into account. An additional coupling between the Mn ions mediated by the In(5s)/Tl(6s) bands yields the higher Tc's of these two compounds, this mechamism enhancing their ferromagnetism for higher pressures.Comment: 7 pages and 2 figures submitted to Phys. Rev. B, missing text adde

Genome sequence of Jatropha curcas L., a non-edible biodiesel plant, provides a resource to improve seed-related traits

Jatropha curcas (physic nut), a non‐edible oilseed crop, represents one of the most promising alternative energy sources due to its high seed oil content, rapid growth and adaptability to various environments. We report ~339 Mbp draft whole genome sequence of J. curcas var. Chai Nat using both the PacBio and Illumina sequencing platforms. We identified and categorized differentially expressed genes related to biosynthesis of lipid and toxic compound among four stages of seed development. Triacylglycerol (TAG), the major component of seed storage oil, is mainly synthesized by phospholipid:diacylglycerol acyltransferase in Jatropha, and continuous high expression of homologs of oleosin over seed development contributes to accumulation of high level of oil in kernels by preventing the breakdown of TAG. A physical cluster of genes for diterpenoid biosynthetic enzymes, including casbene synthases highly responsible for a toxic compound, phorbol ester, in seed cake, was syntenically highly conserved between Jatropha and castor bean. Transcriptomic analysis of female and male flowers revealed the up‐regulation of a dozen family of TFs in female flower. Additionally, we constructed a robust species tree enabling estimation of divergence times among nine Jatropha species and five commercial crops in Malpighiales order. Our results will help researchers and breeders increase energy efficiency of this important oil seed crop by improving yield and oil content, and eliminating toxic compound in seed cake for animal feed

A Real Space Description of Magnetic Field Induced Melting in the Charge Ordered Manganites: I. The Clean Limit

We study the melting of charge order in the half doped manganites using a model that incorporates double exchange, antiferromagnetic superexchange, and Jahn-Teller coupling between electrons and phonons. We primarily use a real space Monte Carlo technique to study the phase diagram in terms of applied field $(h)$ and temperature $(T)$, exploring the melting of charge order with increasing $h$ and its recovery on decreasing $h$. We observe hysteresis in this response, and discover that the `field melted' high conductance state can be spatially inhomogeneous even without extrinsic disorder. The hysteretic response plays out in the background of field driven equilibrium phase separation. Our results, exploring $h$, $T$, and the electronic parameter space, are backed up by analysis of simpler limiting cases and a Landau framework for the field response. This paper focuses on our results in the `clean' systems, a companion paper studies the effect of cation disorder on the melting phenomena.Comment: 16 pages, pdflatex, 11 png fig

First limit on WIMP cross section with low background CsI(Tl) crystal detector

The Korea Invisible Mass Search (KIMS) collaboration has been carrying out WIMP search experiment with CsI(T$\ell$)crystal detectors at the YanYang Underground Laboratory. A successful reduction of the internal background of the crystal is done and a good pulse shape discrimination is achieved. We report the first result on WIMP search obtained with 237 kg$\cdot$days data using one full-size CsI(T$\ell$)crystal of 6.6 kg mass.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Physics Letters

Centrality dependence of charged particle production at large transverse momentum in Pb-Pb collisions at sNN=2.76\sqrt{s_{\rm{NN}}} = 2.76 TeV

The inclusive transverse momentum ($p_{\rm T}$) distributions of primary charged particles are measured in the pseudo-rapidity range $|\eta|<0.8$ as a function of event centrality in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm{NN}}}=2.76$ TeV with ALICE at the LHC. The data are presented in the $p_{\rm T}$ range $0.15<p_{\rm T}<50$ GeV/$c$ for nine centrality intervals from 70-80% to 0-5%. The Pb-Pb spectra are presented in terms of the nuclear modification factor $R_{\rm{AA}}$ using a pp reference spectrum measured at the same collision energy. We observe that the suppression of high-$p_{\rm T}$ particles strongly depends on event centrality. In central collisions (0-5%) the yield is most suppressed with $R_{\rm{AA}}\approx0.13$ at $p_{\rm T}=6$-7 GeV/$c$. Above $p_{\rm T}=7$ GeV/$c$, there is a significant rise in the nuclear modification factor, which reaches $R_{\rm{AA}} \approx0.4$ for $p_{\rm T}>30$ GeV/$c$. In peripheral collisions (70-80%), the suppression is weaker with $R_{\rm{AA}} \approx 0.7$ almost independently of $p_{\rm T}$. The measured nuclear modification factors are compared to other measurements and model calculations.Comment: 17 pages, 4 captioned figures, 2 tables, authors from page 12, published version, figures at http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/ArtSubmission/node/284