Step Bunching with Alternation of Structural Parameters

By taking account of the alternation of structural parameters, we study bunching of impermeable steps induced by drift of adatoms on a vicinal face of Si(001). With the alternation of diffusion coefficient, the step bunching occurs irrespective of the direction of the drift if the step distance is large. Like the bunching of permeable steps, the type of large terraces is determined by the drift direction. With step-down drift, step bunches grows faster than those with step-up drift. The ratio of the growth rates is larger than the ratio of the diffusion coefficients. Evaporation of adatoms, which does not cause the step bunching, decreases the difference. If only the alternation of kinetic coefficient is taken into account, the step bunching occurs with step-down drift. In an early stage, the initial fluctuation of the step distance determines the type of large terraces, but in a late stage, the type of large terraces is opposite to the case of alternating diffusion coefficient.Comment: 8pages, 16 figure

Development of displacement- and frequency-noise-free interferometer in 3-D configuration for gravitational wave detection

The displacement- and frequency-noise-free interferometer (DFI) is a multiple laser interferometer array for gravitational wave detection free from both the displacement noise of optics and laser frequency noise. So far, partial experimental demonstrations of DFI have been done in 2-D table top experiments. In this paper, we report the complete demonstration of a 3-D DFI. The DFI consists of four Mach-Zehnder interferometers with four mirrors and two beamsplitters. The displacement noises both of mirrors and beamsplitters were suppressed by up to 40 dB. The non-vanishing DFI response to a gravitational wave was successfully confirmed using multiple electro-optic modulators and computing methods

Cosmic Sculpture: A new way to visualise the Cosmic Microwave Background

3D printing presents an attractive alternative to visual representation of physical datasets such as astronomical images that can be used for research, outreach or teaching purposes, and is especially relevant to people with a visual disability. We here report the use of 3D printing technology to produce a representation of the all-sky Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) intensity anisotropy maps produced by the Planck mission. The success of this work in representing key features of the CMB is discussed as is the potential of this approach for representing other astrophysical data sets. 3D printing such datasets represents a highly complementary approach to the usual 2D projections used in teaching and outreach work, and can also form the basis of undergraduate projects. The CAD files used to produce the models discussed in this paper are made available.Comment: Accepted for publication in the European Journal of Physic

Models of Meson-Baryon Reactions in the Nucleon Resonance Region

It is shown that most of the models for analyzing meson-baryon reactions in the nucleon resonance region can be derived from a Hamiltonian formulation of the problem. An extension of the coupled-channel approach to include $\pi\pi N$ channel is briefly described and some preliminary results for the $N^*(1535)$ excitation are presented.Comment: Latex 13 pages; to appear in the Proceedings of Workshop on the Physics of excited nucleons (NSTAR2004), Grenoble (France), March 24-27, 200

A chemically driven fluctuating ratchet model for actomyosin interaction

With reference to the experimental observations by T. Yanagida and his co-workers on actomyosin interaction, a Brownian motor of fluctuating ratchet kind is designed with the aim to describe the interaction between a Myosin II head and a neighboring actin filament. Our motor combines the dynamics of the myosin head with a chemical external system related to the ATP cycle, whose role is to provide the energy supply necessary to bias the motion. Analytical expressions for the duration of the ATP cycle, for the Gibbs free energy and for the net displacement of the myosin head are obtained. Finally, by exploiting a method due to Sekimoto (1997, J. Phys. Soc. Jpn., 66, 1234), a formula is worked out for the amount of energy consumed during the ATP cycle.Comment: 15 pages. 1 figur

Phytohaemagglutinin on maternal and umbilical leukocytes

Almost all the umbilical lymphocytes showed more extensive blast cell formation than that of their mother's lymphocytes with PHA. Pathological conditions of mother in pregnancy and labor such as anemia, gestational toxicosis, difficult labor and asphyxia of babies, inhibited the normal response of both maternal and umbilical lymphocytes to PHA.</p

Microwave Heating of Water, Ice and Saline Solution: Molecular Dynamics Study

In order to study the heating process of water by the microwaves of 2.5-20GHz frequencies, we have performed molecular dynamics simulations by adopting a non-polarized water model that have fixed point charges on rigid-body molecules. All runs are started from the equilibrated states derived from the I$_{c}$ ice with given density and temperature. In the presence of microwaves, the molecules of liquid water exhibit rotational motion whose average phase is delayed from the microwave electric field. Microwave energy is transferred to the kinetic and inter-molecular energies of water, where one third of the absorbed microwave energy is stored as the latter energy. The water in ice phase is scarcely heated by microwaves because of the tight hydrogen-bonded network of water molecules. Addition of small amount of salt to pure water substantially increases the heating rate because of the weakening by defects in the water network due to sloshing large-size negative ions.Comment: 21 pages, 13 figure

Influence of non-local exchange on RKKY interactions in III-V diluted magnetic semiconductors

The RKKY interaction between substitutional Mn local moments in GaAs is both spin-direction-dependent and spatially anisotropic. In this Letter we address the strength of these anisotropies using a semi-phenomenological tight-binding model which treats the hybridization between Mn d-orbitals and As p-orbitals perturbatively and accounts realistically for the non-local exchange interaction between their spins. We show that exchange non-locality, valence-band spin-orbit coupling, and band-structure anisotropy all play a role in determining the strength of both effects. We use these results to estimate the degree of ground-state magnetization suppression due to frustrating interactions between randomly located Mn ions.Comment: 4 pages RevTeX, 2 figures included, v2: replacement because of font proble