1,809 research outputs found
Surface tension of electrolytes: Hydrophilic and hydrophobic ions near an interface
We calculate the ion distributions around an interface in fluid mixtures of
highly polar and less polar fluids (water and oil) for two and three ion
species. We take into account the solvation and image interactions between ions
and solvent. We show that hydrophilic and hydrophobic ions tend to undergo a
microphase separation at an interface, giving rise to an enlarged electric
double layer. We also derive a general expression for the surface tension of
electrolyte systems, which contains a negative electrostatic contribution
proportional to the square root of the bulk salt density. The amplitude of this
square-root term is small for hydrophilic ion pairs, but is much increased for
hydrophilic and hydrophobic ion pairs. For three ion species including
hydrophilic and hydrophobic ions, we calculate the ion distributions to explain
those obtained by x-ray reflectivity measurements.Comment: 8 figure
Electrostatic Interactions of Asymmetrically Charged Membranes
We predict the nature (attractive or repulsive) and range (exponentially
screened or long-range power law) of the electrostatic interactions of
oppositely charged and planar plates as a function of the salt concentration
and surface charge densities (whose absolute magnitudes are not necessarily
equal). An analytical expression for the crossover between attractive and
repulsive pressure is obtained as a function of the salt concentration. This
condition reduces to the high-salt limit of Parsegian and Gingell where the
interaction is exponentially screened and to the zero salt limit of Lau and
Pincus in which the important length scales are the inter-plate separation and
the Gouy-Chapman length. In the regime of low salt and high surface charges we
predict - for any ratio of the charges on the surfaces - that the attractive
pressure is long-ranged as a function of the spacing. The attractive pressure
is related to the decrease in counter-ion concentration as the inter-plate
distance is decreased. Our theory predicts several scaling regimes with
different scaling expressions for the pressure as function of salinity and
surface charge densities. The pressure predictions can be related to surface
force experiments of oppositely charged surfaces that are prepared by coating
one of the mica surfaces with an oppositely charged polyelectrolyte
Singular electrostatic energy of nanoparticle clusters
The binding of clusters of metal nanoparticles is partly electrostatic. We
address difficulties in calculating the electrostatic energy when high charging
energies limit the total charge to a single quantum, entailing unequal
potentials on the particles. We show that the energy at small separation
has a strong logarithmic dependence on . We give a general law for the
strength of this logarithmic correction in terms of a) the energy at contact
ignoring the charge quantization effects and b) an adjacency matrix specifying
which spheres of the cluster are in contact and which is charged. We verify the
theory by comparing the predicted energies for a tetrahedral cluster with an
explicit numerical calculation.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to Phys Rev
Solvent-free coarse-grained lipid model for large-scale simulations
A coarse-grained molecular model, which consists of a spherical particle and
an orientation vector, is proposed to simulate lipid membrane on a large length
scale. The solvent is implicitly represented by an effective attractive
interaction between particles. A bilayer structure is formed by
orientation-dependent (tilt and bending) potentials. In this model, the
membrane properties (bending rigidity, line tension of membrane edge, area
compression modulus, lateral diffusion coefficient, and flip-flop rate) can be
varied over broad ranges. The stability of the bilayer membrane is investigated
via droplet-vesicle transition. The rupture of the bilayer and worm-like
micelle formation can be induced by an increase in the spontaneous curvature of
the monolayer membrane.Comment: 13 pages, 19 figure
Building Data-Driven Pathways From Routinely Collected Hospital Data:A Case Study on Prostate Cancer
Background: Routinely collected data in hospitals is complex, typically heterogeneous, and scattered across multiple Hospital Information Systems (HIS). This big data, created as a byproduct of health care activities, has the potential to provide a better understanding of diseases, unearth hidden patterns, and improve services and cost. The extent and uses of such data rely on its quality, which is not consistently checked, nor fully understood. Nevertheless, using routine data for the construction of data-driven clinical pathways, describing processes and trends, is a key topic receiving increasing attention in the literature. Traditional algorithms do not cope well with unstructured processes or data, and do not produce clinically meaningful visualizations. Supporting systems that provide additional information, context, and quality assurance inspection are needed. Objective: The objective of the study is to explore how routine hospital data can be used to develop data-driven pathways that describe the journeys that patients take through care, and their potential uses in biomedical research; it proposes a framework for the construction, quality assessment, and visualization of patient pathways for clinical studies and decision support using a case study on prostate cancer. Methods: Data pertaining to prostate cancer patients were extracted from a large UK hospital from eight different HIS, validated, and complemented with information from the local cancer registry. Data-driven pathways were built for each of the 1904 patients and an expert knowledge base, containing rules on the prostate cancer biomarker, was used to assess the completeness and utility of the pathways for a specific clinical study. Software components were built to provide meaningful visualizations for the constructed pathways. Results: The proposed framework and pathway formalism enable the summarization, visualization, and querying of complex patient-centric clinical information, as well as the computation of quality indicators and dimensions. A novel graphical representation of the pathways allows the synthesis of such information. Conclusions: Clinical pathways built from routinely collected hospital data can unearth information about patients and diseases that may otherwise be unavailable or overlooked in hospitals. Data-driven clinical pathways allow for heterogeneous data (ie, semistructured and unstructured data) to be collated over a unified data model and for data quality dimensions to be assessed. This work has enabled further research on prostate cancer and its biomarkers, and on the development and application of methods to mine, compare, analyze, and visualize pathways constructed from routine data. This is an important development for the reuse of big data in hospitals
The isotropic-nematic interface in suspensions of hard rods: Mean-field properties and capillary waves
We present a study of the isotropic-nematic interface in a system of hard
spherocylinders. First we compare results from Monte Carlo simulations and
Onsager density functional theory for the interfacial profiles of the
orientational order parameter and the density. Those interfacial properties
that are not affected by capillary waves are in good agreement, despite the
fact that Onsager theory overestimates the coexistence densities. Then we show
results of a Monte Carlo study of the capillary waves of the interface. In
agreement with recent theoretical investigations (Eur.Phys.J. E {\bf 18} 407
(2005)) we find a strongly anistropic capillary wave spectrum. For the
wave-numbers accessed in our simulations, the spectrum is quadratic,
i.e.elasticity does not play a role. We conjecture that this effect is due to
the strong bending rigidity of the director field in suspensions of
spherocylinders.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figure
Surface-mediated attraction between colloids
We investigate the equilibrium properties of a colloidal solution in contact
with a soft interface. As a result of symmetry breaking, surface effects are
generally prevailing in confined colloidal systems. In this Letter, particular
emphasis is given to surface fluctuations and their consequences on the local
(re)organization of the suspension. It is shown that particles experience a
significant effective interaction in the vicinity of the interface. This
potential of mean force is always attractive, with range controlled by the
surface correlation length. We suggest that, under some circumstances,
surface-induced attraction may have a strong influence on the local particle
distribution
The lamellar-to-isotropic transition in ternary amphiphilic systems
We study the dependence of the phase behavior of ternary amphiphilic systems
on composition and temperature. Our analysis is based on a curvature elastic
model of the surfactant film with sufficiently large spontaneous curvature and
sufficiently negative saddle-splay modulus that the stable phases are the
lamellar phase and a droplet microemulsion. In addition to the curvature
energy, we consider the contributions to the free energy of the long-ranged van
der Waals interaction and of the undulation modes. We find that for bending
rigidities of order k_B T, the lamellar phase extends further and further into
the water apex of the phase diagram as the phase inversion temperature is
approached, in good agreement with experimental results.Comment: LaTeX2e, 11 pages with references and 2 eps figures included,
submitted to Europhys. Let
Capillary Waves in a Colloid-Polymer Interface
The structure and the statistical fluctuations of interfaces between
coexisting phases in the Asakura-Oosawa (AO) model for a colloid--polymer
mixture are analyzed by extensive Monte Carlo simulations. We make use of a
recently developed grand canonical cluster move with an additional constraint
stabilizing the existence of two interfaces in the (rectangular) box that is
simulated. Choosing very large systems, of size LxLxD with L=60 and D=120,
measured in units of the colloid radius, the spectrum of capillary wave-type
interfacial excitations is analyzed in detail. The local position of the
interface is defined in terms of a (local) Gibbs surface concept. For small
wavevectors capillary wave theory is verified quantitatively, while for larger
wavevectors pronounced deviations show up. For wavevectors that correspond to
the typical distance between colloids in the colloid-rich phase, the
interfacial fluctuations exhibit the same structure as observed in the bulk
structure factor. When one analyzes the data in terms of the concept of a
wavevector-dependent interfacial tension, a monotonous decrease of this
quantity with increasing wavevector is found. Limitations of our analysis are
critically discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 15 figure
Knowledge Rich Natural Language Queries over Structured Biological Databases
Increasingly, keyword, natural language and NoSQL queries are being used for
information retrieval from traditional as well as non-traditional databases
such as web, document, image, GIS, legal, and health databases. While their
popularity are undeniable for obvious reasons, their engineering is far from
simple. In most part, semantics and intent preserving mapping of a well
understood natural language query expressed over a structured database schema
to a structured query language is still a difficult task, and research to tame
the complexity is intense. In this paper, we propose a multi-level
knowledge-based middleware to facilitate such mappings that separate the
conceptual level from the physical level. We augment these multi-level
abstractions with a concept reasoner and a query strategy engine to dynamically
link arbitrary natural language querying to well defined structured queries. We
demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by presenting a Datalog based
prototype system, called BioSmart, that can compute responses to arbitrary
natural language queries over arbitrary databases once a syntactic
classification of the natural language query is made
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