10,805 research outputs found
Depletion of chondrocyte primary cilia reduces the compressive modulus of articular cartilage
Primary cilia are slender, microtubule based structures found in the majority of cell types with one cilium per cell. In articular cartilage, primary cilia are required for chondrocyte mechanotransduction and the development of healthy tissue. Loss of primary cilia in Col2aCre;ift88(fl/fl) transgenic mice results in up-regulation of osteoarthritic (OA) markers and development of OA like cartilage with greater thickness and reduced mechanical stiffness. However no previous studies have examined whether loss of primary cilia influences the intrinsic mechanical properties of articular cartilage matrix in the form of the modulus or just the structural properties of the tissue. The present study describes a modified analytical model to derive the viscoelastic moduli based on previous experimental indentation data. Results show that the increased thickness of the articular cartilage in the Col2aCre;ift88(fl/fl) transgenic mice is associated with a reduction in both the instantaneous and equilibrium moduli at indentation strains of greater than 20%. This reveals that the loss of primary cilia causes a significant reduction in the mechanical properties of cartilage particularly in the deeper zones and possibly the underlying bone. This is consistent with histological analysis and confirms the importance of primary cilia in the development of a mechanically functional articular cartilage
The output distribution of important LULU-operators
Two procedures to compute the output distribution phi_S of certain stack
filters S (so called erosion-dilation cascades) are given. One rests on the
disjunctive normal form of S and also yields the rank selection probabilities.
The other is based on inclusion-exclusion and e.g. yields phi_S for some
important LULU-operators S. Properties of phi_S can be used to characterize
smoothing properties of S. One of the methods discussed also allows for the
calculation of the reliability polynomial of any positive Boolean function
(e.g. one derived from a connected graph).Comment: 20 pages, up to trivial differences this is the final version to be
published in Quaestiones Mathematicae 201
Deep spectroscopic luminosity function of Abell 85: no evidence for a steep upturn of the faint-end slope
We present a new deep determination of the spectroscopic LF within the virial
radius of the nearby and massive Abell\,85 (A85) cluster down to the dwarf
regime (M* + 6) using VLT/VIMOS spectra for galaxies with m mag and mag arcsec. The
resulting LF from 438 cluster members is best modelled by a double Schechter
function due to the presence of a statistically significant upturn at the
faint-end. The amplitude of this upturn (),
however, is much smaller than that of the SDSS composite photometric cluster LF
by Popesso et al. 2006, -2. The faint-end slope of the LF in
A85 is consistent, within the uncertainties, with that of the field. The red
galaxy population dominates the LF at low luminosities, and is the main
responsible for the upturn. The fact that the slopes of the spectroscopic LFs
in the field and in a cluster as massive as A85 are similar suggests that the
cluster environment does not play a major role in determining the abundance of
low-mass galaxies.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted at MNRAS lette
On the quantumness of correlations in nuclear magnetic resonance
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) was successfully employed to test several
protocols and ideas in Quantum Information Science. In most of these
implementations the existence of entanglement was ruled out. This fact
introduced concerns and questions about the quantum nature of such bench tests.
In this article we address some issues related to the non-classical aspects of
NMR systems. We discuss some experiments where the quantum aspects of this
system are supported by quantum correlations of separable states. Such
quantumness, beyond the entanglement-separability paradigm, is revealed via a
departure between the quantum and the classical versions of information theory.
In this scenario, the concept of quantum discord seems to play an important
role. We also present an experimental implementation of an analogous of the
single-photon Mach-Zehnder interferometer employing two nuclear spins to encode
the interferometric paths. This experiment illustrate how non-classical
correlations of separable states may be used to simulate quantum dynamics. The
results obtained are completely equivalent to the optical scenario, where
entanglement (between two field modes) may be present
Nonclassical correlation in NMR quadrupolar systems
The existence of quantum correlation (as revealed by quantum discord), other
than entanglement and its role in quantum-information processing (QIP), is a
current subject for discussion. In particular, it has been suggested that this
nonclassical correlation may provide computational speedup for some quantum
algorithms. In this regard, bulk nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) has been
successfully used as a test bench for many QIP implementations, although it has
also been continuously criticized for not presenting entanglement in most of
the systems used so far. In this paper, we report a theoretical and
experimental study on the dynamics of quantum and classical correlations in an
NMR quadrupolar system. We present a method for computing the correlations from
experimental NMR deviation-density matrices and show that, given the action of
the nuclear-spin environment, the relaxation produces a monotonic time decay in
the correlations. Although the experimental realizations were performed in a
specific quadrupolar system, the main results presented here can be applied to
whichever system uses a deviation-density matrix formalism.Comment: Published versio
Frequency up- and down-conversions in two-mode cavity quantum electrodynamics
In this letter we present a scheme for the implementation of frequency up-
and down-conversion operations in two-mode cavity quantum electrodynamics
(QED). This protocol for engineering bilinear two-mode interactions could
enlarge perspectives for quantum information manipulation and also be employed
for fundamental tests of quantum theory in cavity QED. As an application we
show how to generate a two-mode squeezed state in cavity QED (the original
entangled state of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen)
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