1,682 research outputs found
Fractional charge in the noise of Luttinger liquid systems
The current noise of a voltage biased interacting quantum wire adiabatically
connected to metallic leads is computed in presence of an impurity in the wire.
We find that in the weak backscattering limit the Fano factor characterizing
the ratio between shot noise and backscattering current crucially depends on
the noise frequency relative to the ballistic frequency v_F/gL, where v_F is
the Fermi velocity, g the Luttinger liquid interaction parameter, and L the
length of the wire. In contrast to chiral Luttinger liquids, the noise is not
only due to the Poissonian backscattering of fractionally charged
quasiparticles at the impurity, but also depends on Andreev-type reflections of
plasmons at the contacts, so that the frequency dependence of the noise needs
to be analyzed to extract the fractional charge e*=e g of the bulk excitations.
We show that the frequencies needed to see interaction effects in the Fano
factor are within experimental reach.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, conference proceedings of Fluctuations and Noise
2005, Austin, Texa
Appearance of fractional charge in the noise of non-chiral Luttinger liquids
The current noise of a voltage biased interacting quantum wire adiabatically
connected to metallic leads is computed in presence of an impurity in the wire.
We find that in the weak backscattering limit the Fano factor characterizing
the ratio between noise and backscattered current crucially depends on the
noise frequency relative to the ballistic frequency , where
is the Fermi velocity, the Luttinger liquid interaction parameter,
and the length of the wire. In contrast to chiral Luttinger liquids the
noise is not only due to the Poissonian backscattering of fractionally charged
quasiparticles at the impurity, but also depends on Andreev-type reflections at
the contacts, so that the frequency dependence of the noise needs to be
analyzed to extract the fractional charge of the bulk excitations.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, final version, to appear in PR
The effects of aggregation and protein corona on the cellular internalization of iron oxide nanoparticles
Engineered inorganic nanoparticles are essential components in the
development of nanotechnologies. For applications in nanomedicine, particles
need to be functionalized to ensure a good dispersibility in biological fluids.
In many cases however, functionalization is not sufficient : the particles
become either coated by a corona of serum proteins or precipitate out of the
solvent. In the present paper, we show that by changing the coating of iron
oxide nanoparticles from a low-molecular weight ligand (citrate ions) to small
carboxylated polymers (poly(acrylic acid)), the colloidal stability of the
dispersion is improved and the adsorption/internalization of iron towards
living mammalian cells is profoundly affected. Citrate-coated particles are
shown to destabilize in all fetal-calf-serum based physiological conditions
tested, whereas the polymer coated particles exhibit an outstanding
dispersibility as well as a structure devoid of protein corona. The
interactions between nanoparticles and human lymphoblastoid cells are
investigated by transmission electron microscopy and flow cytometry. Two types
of nanoparticle/cell interactions are underlined. Iron oxides are found either
adsorbed on the cellular membranes, or internalized into membrane-bound
endocytosis compartments. For the precipitating citrate-coated particles, the
kinetics of interactions reveal a massive and rapid adsorption of iron oxide on
the cell surfaces. The quantification of the partition between adsorbed and
internalized iron was performed from the cytometry data. The results highlight
the importance of resilient adsorbed nanomaterials at the cytoplasmic membrane.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures, accepted at Biomaterials (2011
Evaluation of the wind pumped hydropower storage integrated flood mitigation system
As Wind Pumped Hydropower Storage (WPHS) need high cost to construct, it is important to study their impacts on economic and environmental aspects. Thus, this research aims to evaluate their economic and environmental performances. First, Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewable (HOMER) was used to simulate power generation system with and without the flood reservoir. Next, the total amount of emitted air pollutant was used to evaluate the environmental impacts. It was found the wind-diesel with reservoir storage system (A-III) will have much lower NPC than other systems that do not include reservoir for flood mitigation when the cost of flood losses are included in the total Net Present Cost (NPC). The NPC for system A-III was RM 1.52 million and for diesel standalone system (A-I) is RM 10.8 million when the cost of flood losses are included in the total NPC. Between both energy systems, the amount of pollutants emitted by the A-III system was only 408 kg-CO2/year which is much less than the A-I system which is 99, 754 kg of carbon dioxide per year. To conclude, the WPHS integrated with flood mitigation system seems promising in the aspects of economic and environment
Tomonaga-Luttinger physics in electronic quantum circuits
In one-dimensional conductors, interactions result in correlated electronic
systems. At low energy, a hallmark signature of the so-called
Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids (TLL) is the universal conductance curve predicted
in presence of an impurity. A seemingly different topic is the quantum laws of
electricity, when distinct quantum conductors are assembled in a circuit. In
particular, the conductances are suppressed at low energy, a phenomenon called
dynamical Coulomb blockade (DCB). Here we investigate the conductance of
mesoscopic circuits constituted by a short single-channel quantum conductor in
series with a resistance, and demonstrate a proposed link to TLL physics. We
reformulate and establish experimentally a recently derived phenomenological
expression for the conductance using a wide range of circuits, including carbon
nanotube data obtained elsewhere. By confronting both conductance data and
phenomenological expression with the universal TLL curve, we demonstrate
experimentally the predicted mapping between DCB and the transport across a TLL
with an impurity.Comment: 9p,6fig+SI; to be published in nature comm; v2: mapping extended to
finite range interactions, added discussion and SI material, added reference
Thirty Femtograms Detection of Iron in Mammalian Cells
Inorganic nanomaterials and particles with enhanced optical, mechanical or
magnetic attributes are currently being developed for a wide range of
applications. Safety issues have been formulated however concerning their
potential cyto- and genotoxicity. For in vivo and in vitro experimentations,
recent developments have heightened the need of simple and facile methods to
measure the amount of nanoparticles taken up by cells or tissues. In this work,
we present a rapid and highly sensitive method for quantifying the uptake of
iron oxide nanoparticles in mammalian cells. Our approach exploits the
digestion of incubated cells with concentrated hydrochloric acid reactant and a
colorimetric based UV-Visible absorption technique. The technique allows the
detection of iron in cells over 4 decades in masses, from 0.03 to 300 picograms
per cell. Applied on particles of different surface chemistry and sizes, the
protocol demonstrates that the coating is the key parameter in the
nanoparticle/cell interactions. The data are corroborated by scanning and
transmission electron microscopy and stress the importance of resiliently
adsorbed nanoparticles at the plasma membrane.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure
In vitro toxicity of nanoceria: effect of coating and stability in biofluids
Due to the increasing use of nanometric cerium oxide in applications,
concerns about the toxicity of these particles have been raised and have
resulted in a large number of investigations. We report here on the
interactions between 7 nm anionically charged cerium oxide particles and living
mammalian cells. By a modification of the particle coating including
low-molecular weight ligands and polymers, two generic behaviors are compared:
particles coated with citrate ions that precipitate in biofluids and particles
coated with poly(acrylic acid) that are stable and remain nanometric. We find
that nanoceria covered with both coating agents are taken up by mouse
fibroblasts and localized into membrane-bound compartments. However, flow
cytometry and electron microscopy reveal that as a result of their
precipitation, citrate-coated particles interact more strongly with cells. At
cerium concentration above 1 mM, only citrate-coated nanoceria (and not
particles coated with poly(acrylic acid)) display toxicity and moderate
genotoxicity. The results demonstrate that the control of the surface chemistry
of the particles and its ability to prevent aggregation can affect the toxicity
of nanomaterials.Comment: 33 pages 10 figures, accepted at Nanotoxicolog
External voltage sources and Tunneling in quantum wires
We (re) consider in this paper the problem of tunneling through an impurity
in a quantum wire with arbitrary Luttinger interaction parameter. By combining
the integrable approach developed in the case of Quantum Hall edge states with
the introduction of radiative boundary conditions to describe the adiabatic
coupling to reservoirs, we are able to obtain the exact equilibrium and non
equilibrium current. One of the most striking features observed is the
appearance of negative differential conductances out of equilibrium in the
strongly interacting regime g <=.2. In spite of the various charging effects, a
remarkable form of duality is still observed.
New results on the computation of transport properties in integrable impurity
problems are gathered in appendices. In particular, we prove that the TBA
results satisfy a remarkable relation, originally derived using the Keldysh
formalism, between the order T^2 correction to the current out of equilibrium
and the second derivative of this current at T=0 with respect to the voltage.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure
In vitro toxicity and uptake of magnetic nanorods
In this paper we investigate the internalization and cytotoxicity of
nanostructured materials having the form of elongated rods, with diameter of
200 nm and lengths 1 - 10 {\mu}m. The rods were made from the controlled
aggregation of sub-10 nm iron oxide nanoparticles. Recently, we have shown that
the nanorods inherited the superparamagnetic property of the particles. These
rods can actually be moved by the application of an external magnetic field.
Here we evaluate the in vitro toxicity of the magnetic nanorods by using MTT
assays on NIH/3T3 mouse fibroblasts. The toxicity assays revealed that the
nanorods are biocompatible, as exposed cells remained 100% viable relative to
controls over a period of a few days. Optical microscopy allow to visualize the
rods inside the cells and to determine their number per cell. Roughly 1/3 of
the total incubated rods were uptaken by the fibroblasts.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure
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