Hydrodynamic Coupling of Particle Inclusions Embedded in Curved Lipid Bilayer Membranes

We develop theory and computational methods to investigate particle inclusions embedded within curved lipid bilayer membranes. We consider the case of spherical lipid vesicles where inclusion particles are coupled through (i) intramembrane hydrodynamics, (ii) traction stresses with the external and trapped solvent fluid, and (iii) intermonolayer slip between the two leaflets of the bilayer. We investigate relative to flat membranes how the membrane curvature and topology augment hydrodynamic responses. We show how both the translational and rotational mobility of protein inclusions are effected by the membrane curvature, ratio of intramembrane viscosity to solvent viscosity, and inter-monolayer slip. For general investigations of many-particle dynamics, we also discuss how our approaches can be used to treat the collective diffusion and hydrodynamic coupling within spherical bilayers.Comment: 32 pages, double-column format, 15 figure

The Vela pulsar `jet': a companion-punctured bubble of fallback material

Markwardt and Oegelman (1995) used ROSAT to reveal a 12 by 45 arcmin structure in 1 keV X rays around the Vela pulsar, which they interpret as a jet emanating from the pulsar. We here present an alternative view of the nature of this feature, namely that it consists of material from very deep inside the exploding star, close to the mass cut between material that became part of the neutron star and ejected material. The initial radial velocity of the inner material was lower than the bulk of the ejecta, and formed a bubble of slow material that started expanding again due to heating by the young pulsar's spindown energy. The expansion is mainly in one direction, and to explain this we speculate that the pre-supernova system was a binary. The explosion caused the binary to unbind, and the pulsar's former companion carved a lower-density channel into the main ejecta. The resulting puncture of the bubble's edge greatly facilitated expansion along its path relative to other directions. If this is the case, we can estimate the current speed of the former binary companion and from this reconstruct the presupernova binary orbit. It follows that the exploding star was a helium star, hence that the supernova was of type Ib. Since the most likely binary companion is another neutron star, the evolution of the Vela remnant and its surroundings has been rather more complicated than the simple expansion of one supernova blast wave into unperturbed interstellar material.Comment: submitted to MNRAS; 6 pages laTeX, 3 figures (1 postscript, 2 gif files of images

The orbital statistics of stellar inspiral and relaxation near a massive black hole: characterizing gravitational wave sources

We study the orbital parameters distribution of stars that are scattered into nearly radial orbits and then spiral into a massive black hole (MBH) due to dissipation, in particular by emission of gravitational waves (GW). This is important for GW detection, e.g. by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Signal identification requires knowledge of the waveforms, which depend on the orbital parameters. We use analytical and Monte Carlo methods to analyze the interplay between GW dissipation and scattering in the presence of a mass sink during the transition from the initial scattering-dominated phase to the final dissipation-dominated phase of the inspiral. Our main results are (1) Stars typically enter the GW-emitting phase with high eccentricities. (2) The GW event rate per galaxy is a few per Gyr for typical central stellar cusps, almost independently of the relaxation time or the MBH mass. (3) For intermediate mass black holes (IBHs) of ~a thousand solar masses such as may exist in dense stellar clusters, the orbits are very eccentric and the inspiral is rapid, so the sources are very short-lived.Comment: ApJ Accepte

Dynamic Implicit-Solvent Coarse-Grained Models of Lipid Bilayer Membranes : Fluctuating Hydrodynamics Thermostat

Many coarse-grained models have been developed for equilibrium studies of lipid bilayer membranes. To achieve in simulations access to length-scales and time-scales difficult to attain in fully atomistic molecular dynamics, these coarse-grained models provide a reduced description of the molecular degrees of freedom and often remove entirely representation of the solvent degrees of freedom. In such implicit-solvent models the solvent contributions are treated through effective interaction terms within an effective potential for the free energy. For investigations of kinetics, Langevin dynamics is often used. However, for many dynamical processes within bilayers this approach is insufficient since it neglects important correlations and dynamical contributions that are missing as a result of the momentum transfer that would have occurred through the solvent. To address this issue, we introduce a new thermostat based on fluctuating hydrodynamics for dynamic simulations of implicit-solvent coarse-grained models. Our approach couples the coarse-grained degrees of freedom to a stochastic continuum field that accounts for both the solvent hydrodynamics and thermal fluctuations. We show our approach captures important correlations in the dynamics of lipid bilayers that are missing in simulations performed using conventional Langevin dynamics. For both planar bilayer sheets and bilayer vesicles, we investigate the diffusivity of lipids, spatial correlations, and lipid flow within the bilayer. The presented fluctuating hydrodynamics approaches provide a promising way to extend implicit-solvent coarse-grained lipid models for use in studies of dynamical processes within bilayers

Survival of Terrestrial Planets in the Presence of Giant Planet Migration

The presence of ``Hot Jupiters'', Jovian mass planets with very short orbital periods orbiting nearby main sequence stars, has been proposed to be primarily due to the orbital migration of planets formed in orbits initially much further from the parent star. The migration of giant planets would have profound effects on the evolution of inner terrestrial planets in these systems, and previous analyses have assumed that no terrestrial planets survive after migration has occurred. We present numerical simulations showing that a significant fraction of terrestrial planets could survive the migration process, eventually returning to circular orbits relatively close to their original positions. A fraction of the final orbits are in the Habitable Zone, suggesting that planetary systems with close-in giant planets are viable targets for searches for Earth-like habitable planets around other stars.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, emulateapj. ApJL in press, referee comments changes and edited for lengt

Layers of powers: societies and institutions in Europe

Historians and social scientists have offered many and varied definitions of the term “community”. This chapter focuses on specific examples of face-to-face or local communities in order to test the possibilities and limits of the two major analytical approaches to communities: an anthropological approach which identifies ‘community’ as an organic entity, and a symbolic one which considers feelings of belonging and self-identification as constitutive aspects of a community. In this quest, close attention is paid to the question of the stabilization of community’s structures through legislation and institutions, a process that integrates such micro-societies into broader networks of power, and renders them visible to historians. In the first section we examine what we have called a “world of communities”, from periods when communities constituted the dominant element of social structure. Examining ancient Jewish and medieval Icelandic communities, and then early modern Irish and Scottish clans, we try to identify their basic characteristics and to reconstruct the way they related to the rest of the social structure. The second section analyzes the emergence of new loyalties and models of social membership from the 19th century onwards, emphasizing how the discourse on communities played a crucial role in the construction of these diverse patterns of identification and differentiation. Finally, we explore the permanence of the communitarian world supposedly replaced by nationalism and other major modern ideologies along with the new meanings and uses of communities in the 20th and 21st centuries. In sum, this broad overview provides a preliminary narrative of the changes in the structures of communities and their shifting position within wider patterns of social organizations while drawing attention to parallel transformations in theoretical reflection on communities

Transition from adiabatic inspiral to plunge into a spinning black hole

A test particle of mass mu on a bound geodesic of a Kerr black hole of mass M >> mu will slowly inspiral as gravitational radiation extracts energy and angular momentum from its orbit. This inspiral can be considered adiabatic when the orbital period is much shorter than the timescale on which energy is radiated, and quasi-circular when the radial velocity is much less than the azimuthal velocity. Although the inspiral always remains adiabatic provided mu << M, the quasi-circular approximation breaks down as the particle approaches the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO). In this paper, we relax the quasi-circular approximation and solve the radial equation of motion explicitly near the ISCO. We use the requirement that the test particle's 4-velocity remain properly normalized to calculate a new contribution to the difference between its energy and angular momentum. This difference determines how a black hole's spin changes following a test-particle merger, and can be extrapolated to help predict the mass and spin of the final black hole produced in finite-mass-ratio black-hole mergers. Our new contribution is particularly important for nearly maximally spinning black holes, as it can affect whether a merger produces a naked singularity.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, final version published in PRD with minor change

Gravitational radiation timescales for extreme mass ratio inspirals

The capture and inspiral of compact stellar masses into massive black holes is an important source of low-frequency gravitational waves (with frequencies of ~1-100mHz), such as those that might be detected by the planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Simulations of stellar clusters designed to study this problem typically rely on simple treatments of the black hole encounter which neglect some important features of orbits around black holes, such as the minimum radii of stable, non-plunging orbits. Incorporating an accurate representation of the orbital dynamics near a black hole has been avoided due to the large computational overhead. This paper provides new, more accurate, expressions for the energy and angular momentum lost by a compact object during a parabolic encounter with a non-spinning black hole, and the subsequent inspiral lifetime. These results improve on the Keplerian expressions which are now commonly used and will allow efficient computational simulations to be performed that account for the relativistic nature of the spacetime around the central black hole in the system.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures. Changed in response to referee's report. Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journa