The influence of boundaries on high pressure melting experiments

At low pressure, free surfaces play a crucial role in the melting transition. Under pressure, the surface of the sample is acted upon by some pressure transmitting medium. To examine the effect of this medium on melting, we performed Monte Carlo simulations of a system of argon atoms in the form of a slab with two boundaries. We examined two cases, one with a soft and the other with a rigid medium at the boundaries. We found that in the presence of a rigid medium, melting resembles the mechanical lattice instability found in a surface-free solid. With a soft medium at the boundary, melting begins at the surface and at a lower temperature. The relevance of these results to experiment is discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Conversion of the Monomeric Red Fluorescent Protein into a Photoactivatable Probe

SummaryPhotoactivatable fluorescent proteins bring new dimension to the analysis of protein dynamics in the cell. Protein tagged with a photoactivatable label can be visualized and tracked in a spatially and temporally defined manner. Here, we describe a basic rational design strategy to develop monomeric photoactivatable proteins using site-specific mutagenesis of common monomeric red-shifted fluorescent proteins. This strategy was applied to mRFP1, which was converted into probes that are photoactivated by either green or violet light. The latter photoactivatable variants, named PA-mRFP1s, exhibited a 70-fold increase of fluorescence intensity resulting from the photoconversion of a violet-light-absorbing precursor. Detailed characterization of PA-mRFP1s was performed with the purified proteins and the proteins expressed in mammalian cells where the photoactivatable properties were preserved. PA-mRFP1s were used as protein tags to study the intracellular dynamics of GTPase Rab5

A Classical Sequential Growth Dynamics for Causal Sets

Starting from certain causality conditions and a discrete form of general covariance, we derive a very general family of classically stochastic, sequential growth dynamics for causal sets. The resulting theories provide a relatively accessible ``half way house'' to full quantum gravity that possibly contains the latter's classical limit (general relativity). Because they can be expressed in terms of state models for an assembly of Ising spins living on the relations of the causal set, these theories also illustrate how non-gravitational matter can arise dynamically from the causal set without having to be built in at the fundamental level. Additionally, our results bring into focus some interpretive issues of importance for causal set dynamics, and for quantum gravity more generally.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figures, LaTeX, added references and a footnote, minor correction

Path Integral Monte Carlo study of phonons in the bcc phase of 4^4He

Using Path Integral Monte Carlo and the Maximum Entropy method, we calculate the dynamic structure factor of solid $^4$He in the bcc phase at a finite temperature of T = 1.6 K and a molar volume of 21 cm$^3$. Both the single-phonon contribution to the dynamic structure factor and the total dynamic structure factor are evaluated. From the dynamic structure factor, we obtain the phonon dispersion relations along the main crystalline directions, [001], [011] and [111]. We calculate both the longitudinal and transverse phonon branches. For the latter, no previous simulations exist. We discuss the differences between dispersion relations resulting from the single-phonon part vs. the total dynamic structure factor. In addition, we evaluate the formation energy of a vacancy.Comment: 10 figure

SL(4,R) generating symmetry in five-dimensional gravity coupled to dilaton and three-form

We give an explicit formulation of the three-dimensional $SL(4,R)/SO(2,2) \sigma$-model representing the five-dimensional Einstein gravity coupled to the dilaton and the three-form field for spacetimes with two commuting Killing vector fields. New matrix representation is obtained which is similar to one found earlier in the four-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell-Dilaton-Axion (EMDA) theory. The SL(4,R) symmetry joins a variety of 5D solutions of different physical types including strings, 0-branes, KK monopoles etc. interpreting them as duals to the four-dimensional Kerr metric translated along the fifth coordinate. The symmetry transformations are used to construct new rotating strings and composite 0-1-branes endowed with a NUT parameter.Comment: Revtex, 8pp. Revised version to appear in Phys. Lett.

Vacuum decay via Lorentzian wormholes

We speculate about the spacetime description due to the presence of Lorentzian wormholes (handles in spacetime joining two distant regions or other universes) in quantum gravity. The semiclassical rate of production of these Lorentzian wormholes in Reissner-Nordstr\"om spacetimes is calculated as a result of the spontaneous decay of vacuum due to a real tunneling configuration. In the magnetic case it only depends on the field theoretical fine structure constant. We predict that the quantum probability corresponding to the nucleation of such geodesically complete spacetimes should be actually negligible in our physical Universe