High-density cultivation of Lactobacillus plantarum NCU116 in an ammonium and glucose fed-batch system

Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) constitute a heterogeneous group of bacteria which are found in diverse environments such as the human body, animals and plants. In this study, we reported a simple fedbatch process for Lactobacillus plantarum NCU116 with high cell density. It was found that the optimum initial glucose concentration for this strain was 5% (w/v). To reduce the effect of acid and starvation, the exponential fed-batch culture and ammonium fed-batch system were introduced. At the end of the exponential phase of fermentation, the cell concentration was up to 9.35 × 109 CFU/ml.Key words: Lactobacillus plantarum, high cell density cultivation, exponential fed-batch, ammonium

A Droplet State in an Interacting Two-Dimensional Electron System

It is well known that the dielectric constant of two-dimensional (2D) electron system goes negative at low electron densities. A consequence of the negative dielectric constant could be the formation of the droplet state. The droplet state is a two-phase coexistence region of high density liquid and low density "gas". In this paper, we carry out energetic calculations to study the stability of the droplet ground state. The possible relevance of the droplet state to recently observed 2D metal-insulator transition is also discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. To appear in Phys. Rev. B (Rapid Communications

A New Liquid Phase and Metal-Insulator Transition in Si MOSFETs

We argue that there is a new liquid phase in the two-dimensional electron system in Si MOSFETs at low enough electron densities. The recently observed metal-insulator transition results as a crossover from the percolation transition of the liquid phase through the disorder landscape in the system below the liquid-gas critical temperature. The consequences of our theory are discussed for variety of physical properties relevant to the recent experiments.Comment: 12 pages of RevTeX with 3 postscript figure

Skyrmion Excitations in Quantum Hall Systems

Using finite size calculations on the surface of a sphere we study the topological (skyrmion) excitation in quantum Hall system with spin degree of freedom at filling factors around $\nu=1$. In the absence of Zeeman energy, we find, in systems with one quasi-particle or one quasi-hole, the lowest energy band consists of states with $L=S$, where $L$ and $S$ are the total orbital and spin angular momentum. These different spin states are almost degenerate in the thermodynamic limit and their symmetry-breaking ground state is the state with one skyrmion of infinite size. In the presence of Zeeman energy, the skyrmion size is determined by the interplay of the Zeeman energy and electron-electron interaction and the skyrmion shrinks to a spin texture of finite size. We have calculated the energy gap of the system at infinite wave vector limit as a function of the Zeeman energy and find there are kinks in the energy gap associated with the shrinking of the size of the skyrmion. breaking ground state is the state with one skyrmion of infinite size. In the presence of Zeeman energy, the skyrmion size is determined by the interplay of the Zeeman energy and electron-electronComment: 4 pages, 5 postscript figures available upon reques

Penta-quark states with hidden charm and beauty

More and more hadron states are found to be difficult to be accommodated by the quenched quark models which describe baryons as 3-quark states and mesons as antiquark-quark states. Dragging out an antiquark-quark pair from the gluon field in hadrons should be an important excitation mechanism for hadron spectroscopy. Our recent progress on the penta-quark states with hidden charm and beauty is reviewed.Comment: Plenary talk at the 5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics 2011 (APFB2011), 22-26 Aug., 2011, Seoul, Kore

The edge state network model and the global phase diagram

The effects of randomness are investigated in the fractional quantum Hall systems. Based on the Chern-Simons Ginzburg-Landou theory and considering relevant quasi-particle tunneling, the edge state network model for the hierarchical state is introduced and the plateau-plateau transition and liquid-insulator transition are discussed. This model has duality which corresponds to the relation of the quantum Hall liquid phase and the Hall insulating phase and reveals a mechanism in the weak coupling regime.Comment: 5 page RevTe