Cavity cooling of an optically trapped nanoparticle

We study the cooling of a dielectric nanoscale particle trapped in an optical cavity. We derive the frictional force for motion in the cavity field, and show that the cooling rate is proportional to the square of oscillation amplitude and frequency. Both the radial and axial centre-of-mass motion of the trapped particle, which are coupled by the cavity field, are cooled. This motion is analogous to two coupled but damped pendulums. Our simulations show that the nanosphere can be cooled to 1/e of its initial momentum over time scales of hundredths of milliseconds.Comment: 11 page

Counting the electrons in a multiphoton ionization by elastic scattering of microwaves

Laser induced plasmas have found numerous applications including plasma-assisted combustion, combustion diagnostics, laser induced breakdown spectroscopy, light detection and ranging techniques (LIDAR), microwave guiding, reconfigurable plasma antennae etc. Multiphoton ionization (MPI) is a fundamental first step in high-energy laser-matter interaction and is important for understanding of the mechanism of plasma formation. With the discovery of MPI more than 50 years ago, there were numerous attempts to determine basic physical constants of this process in the direct experiments, namely photoionization rates and cross-sections of the MPI, however, no reliable data is available until today and spread in the literature values often reaches 2-3 orders of magnitude. This is due to inability to conduct absolute measurements of plasma electron numbers generated by MPI which leads to uncertainties and, sometimes, contradictions between the MPI cross-section values utilized by different researchers across the field. Here we report first direct measurement of absolute plasma electron numbers generated at MPI of air and subsequently we precisely determine ionization rate and cross-section of eight-photon ionization of oxygen molecule by 800 nm photons ${\sigma}_8=(3.32{\pm}0.3)*10^{-130} W^{-8}m^{16}s^{-1}$. Method is based on the absolute measurement of electron number created by MPI using elastic scattering of microwaves off the plasma volume in Rayleigh regime and establishes a general approach to directly measure and tabulate basic constants of the MPI process for various gases and photon energies

A Regulatory Circuitry Between Gria2, miR-409, and miR-495 Is Affected by ALS FUS Mutation in ESC-Derived Motor Neurons

Mutations in fused in sarcoma (FUS) cause amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). FUS is a multifunctional protein involved in the biogenesis and activity of several types of RNAs, and its role in the pathogenesis of ALS may involve both direct effects of disease-associated mutations through gain- and loss-of-function mechanisms and indirect effects due to the cross talk between different classes of FUS-dependent RNAs. To explore how FUS mutations impinge on motor neuron-specific RNA-based circuitries, we performed transcriptome profiling of small and long RNAs of motor neurons (MNs) derived from mouse embryonic stem cells carrying a FUS-P517L knock-in mutation, which is equivalent to human FUS-P525L, associated with a severe and juvenile-onset form of ALS. Combining ontological, predictive and molecular analyses, we found an inverse correlation between several classes of deregulated miRNAs and their corresponding mRNA targets in both homozygous and heterozygous P517L MNs. We validated a circuitry in which the upregulation of miR-409-3p and miR-495-3p, belonging to a brainspecific miRNA subcluster implicated in several neurodevelopmental disorders, produced the downregulation of Gria2, a subunit of the glutamate α‐amino‐3‐hydroxy‐5‐methyl-4-isoxazole propionic acid (AMPA) receptor with a significant role in excitatory neurotransmission. Moreover, we found that FUS was involved in mediating such miRNA repression. Gria2 alteration has been proposed to be implicated in MN degeneration, through disturbance of Ca2+ homeostasis, which triggers a cascade of damaging “excitotoxic” events. The molecular cross talk identified highlights a role for FUS in excitotoxicity and in miRNA-dependent regulation of Gria2. This circuitry also proved to be deregulated in heterozygosity, which matches the human condition perfectly

FUS affects circular RNA expression in murine embryonic stem cell-derived motor neurons

The RNA-binding protein FUS participates in several RNA biosynthetic processes and has been linked to the pathogenesis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia. Here we report that FUS controls back-splicing reactions leading to circular RNA (circRNA) production. We identified circRNAs expressed in in vitro -derived mouse motor neurons (MNs) and determined that the production of a considerable number of these circRNAs is regulated by FUS. Using RNAi and overexpression of wild-type and ALS-asso- ciated FUS mutants, we directly correlate the modulation of circRNA biogenesis with alteration of FUS nuclear levels and with putative toxic gain of function activities. We also demonstrate that FUS regulates circRNA biogenesis by binding the introns flanking the back-splicing junctions and that this control can be reproduced with artificial constructs. Most circRNAs are conserved in humans and specific ones are deregulated in human-induced pluripotent stem cell-derived MNs carrying the FUS P525L mutation associated with AL

Probabilistic prediction of Dst storms one-day-ahead using Full-Disk SoHO Images

We present a new model for the probability that the Disturbance storm time (Dst) index exceeds -100 nT, with a lead time between 1 and 3 days. $Dst$ provides essential information about the strength of the ring current around the Earth caused by the protons and electrons from the solar wind, and it is routinely used as a proxy for geomagnetic storms. The model is developed using an ensemble of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that are trained using SoHO images (MDI, EIT and LASCO). The relationship between the SoHO images and the solar wind has been investigated by many researchers, but these studies have not explicitly considered using SoHO images to predict the $Dst$ index. This work presents a novel methodology to train the individual models and to learn the optimal ensemble weights iteratively, by using a customized class-balanced mean square error (CB-MSE) loss function tied to a least-squares (LS) based ensemble. The proposed model can predict the probability that Dst<-100 nT 24 hours ahead with a True Skill Statistic (TSS) of 0.62 and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.37. The weighted TSS and MCC from Guastavino et al. (2021) is 0.68 and 0.47, respectively. An additional validation during non-Earth-directed CME periods is also conducted which yields a good TSS and MCC score.Comment: accepted by journal <Space Weather

Kinetic modeling of evolution of 3 + 1:Resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization plasma in argon at low pressures

We present numerical kinetic modeling of generation and evolution of the plasma produced as a result of resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization (REMPI) in Argon gas. The particle-in-cell/Monte Carlo collision (PIC/MCC) simulations capture non-equilibrium effects in REMPI plasma expansion by considering the major collisional processes at the microscopic level: elastic scattering, electron impact ionization, ion charge exchange, and recombination and quenching for metastable excited atoms. The conditions in one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) formulations correspond to known experiments in Argon at a pressure of 5 Torr. The 1D PIC/MCC calculations are compared with the published results of local drift-diffusion model, obtained for the same conditions. It is shown that the PIC/MCC and diffusion-drift models are in qualitative and in reasonable quantitative agreement during the ambipolar expansion stage, whereas significant non-equilibrium exists during the first few 10 s of nanoseconds. 2D effects are important in the REMPI plasma expansion. The 2D PIC/MCC calculations produce significantly lower peak electron densities as compared to 1D and show a better agreement with experimentally measured microwave radiation scatterin