1,864 research outputs found
Keeping Your Eyes Continuously on the Ball While Running for Catchable and Uncatchable Fly Balls
When faced with a fly ball approaching along the sagittal plane, fielders need information for the control of their running to the interception location. This information could be available in the initial part of the ball trajectory, such that the interception location can be predicted from its initial conditions. Alternatively, such predictive information is not available, and running to the interception location involves continuous visual guidance. The latter type of control would predict that fielders keep looking at the approaching ball for most of its flight, whereas the former type of control would fit with looking at the ball during the early part of the ball's flight; keeping the eyes on the ball during the remainder of its trajectory would not be necessary when the interception location can be inferred from the first part of the ball trajectory. The present contribution studied visual tracking of approaching fly balls. Participants were equipped with a mobile eye tracker. They were confronted with tennis balls approaching from about 20 m, and projected in such a way that some balls were catchable and others were not. In all situations, participants almost exclusively tracked the ball with their gaze until just before the catch or until they indicated that a ball was uncatchable. This continuous tracking of the ball, even when running close to their maximum speeds, suggests that participants employed continuous visual control rather than running to an interception location known from looking at the early part of the ball flight.</p
Quantum Interference Effects in Electronic Transport through Nanotube Contacts
Quantum interference has dramatic effects on electronic transport through
nanotube contacts. In optimal configuration the intertube conductance can
approach that of a perfect nanotube (). The maximum conductance
increases rapidly with the contact length up to 10 nm, beyond which it exhibits
long wavelength oscillations. This is attributed to the resonant cavity-like
interference phenomena in the contact region. For two concentric nanotubes
symmetry breaking reduces the maximum intertube conductance from to
. The phenomena discussed here can serve as a foundation for building
nanotube electronic circuits and high speed nanoscale electromechanical
devices
Resonant decay of flat directions
We study preheating, i.e., non-perturbative resonant decay, of flat direction
fields, concentrating on MSSM flat directions and the right handed sneutrino.
The difference between inflaton preheating and flaton preheating, is that the
potential is more constraint in the latter case. The effects of a complex
driving field, quartic couplings in the potential, and the presence of a
thermal bath are important and cannot be neglected.
Preheating of MSSM flat directions is typically delayed due to out-of-phase
oscillations of the real and imaginary components and may be preceded by
perturbative decay or -ball formation. Particle production due to the
violation of adiabaticity is expected to be inefficient due to back reaction
effects. For a small initial sneutrino VEV, with
the mass of the right handed sneutrino and a yakawa coupling, there are
tachyonic instabilities. The -term quartic couplings do not generate an
effective mass for the tachyonic modes, making it an efficient decay channel.
It is unclear how thermal scattering affects the resonance.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure
Signal Propagation in Feedforward Neuronal Networks with Unreliable Synapses
In this paper, we systematically investigate both the synfire propagation and
firing rate propagation in feedforward neuronal network coupled in an
all-to-all fashion. In contrast to most earlier work, where only reliable
synaptic connections are considered, we mainly examine the effects of
unreliable synapses on both types of neural activity propagation in this work.
We first study networks composed of purely excitatory neurons. Our results show
that both the successful transmission probability and excitatory synaptic
strength largely influence the propagation of these two types of neural
activities, and better tuning of these synaptic parameters makes the considered
network support stable signal propagation. It is also found that noise has
significant but different impacts on these two types of propagation. The
additive Gaussian white noise has the tendency to reduce the precision of the
synfire activity, whereas noise with appropriate intensity can enhance the
performance of firing rate propagation. Further simulations indicate that the
propagation dynamics of the considered neuronal network is not simply
determined by the average amount of received neurotransmitter for each neuron
in a time instant, but also largely influenced by the stochastic effect of
neurotransmitter release. Second, we compare our results with those obtained in
corresponding feedforward neuronal networks connected with reliable synapses
but in a random coupling fashion. We confirm that some differences can be
observed in these two different feedforward neuronal network models. Finally,
we study the signal propagation in feedforward neuronal networks consisting of
both excitatory and inhibitory neurons, and demonstrate that inhibition also
plays an important role in signal propagation in the considered networks.Comment: 33pages, 16 figures; Journal of Computational Neuroscience
(published
Ebstein’s anomaly may be caused by mutations in the sarcomere protein gene MYH7
Ebstein's anomaly is a rare congenital heart malformation characterised by adherence of the septal and posterior leaflets of the tricuspid valve to the underlying myocardium. Associated abnormalities of left ventricular morphology and function including left ventricular noncompaction (LVNC) have been observed. An association between Ebstein's anomaly with LVNC and mutations in the sarcomeric protein gene MYH7, encoding β-myosin heavy chain, has been shown by recent studies. This might represent a specific subtype of Ebstein's anomaly with a Mendelian inheritance pattern. In this review we discuss the association of MYH7 mutations with Ebstein's anomaly and LVNC and its implications for the clinical care for patients and their family members.Congenital Heart Diseas
Curvatons in Supersymmetric Models
We study the curvaton scenario in supersymmetric framework paying particular
attention to the fact that scalar fields are inevitably complex in
supersymmetric theories. If there are more than one scalar fields associated
with the curvaton mechanism, isocurvature (entropy) fluctuations between those
fields in general arise, which may significantly affect the properties of the
cosmic density fluctuations. We examine several candidates for the curvaton in
the supersymmetric framework, such as moduli fields, Affleck-Dine field, -
and -flat directions, and right-handed sneutrino. We estimate how the
isocurvature fluctuations generated in each case affect the cosmic microwave
background angular power spectrum. With the use of the recent observational
result of the WMAP, stringent constraints on the models are derived and, in
particular, it is seen that large fraction of the parameter space is excluded
if the Affleck-Dine field plays the role of the curvaton field. Natural and
well-motivated candidates of the curvaton are also listed.Comment: 34 pages, 5 figure
Nanoscale atomic waveguides with suspended carbon nanotubes
We propose an experimentally viable setup for the realization of
one-dimensional ultracold atom gases in a nanoscale magnetic waveguide formed
by single doubly-clamped suspended carbon nanotubes. We show that all common
decoherence and atom loss mechanisms are small guaranteeing a stable operation
of the trap. Since the extremely large current densities in carbon nanotubes
are spatially homogeneous, our proposed architecture allows to overcome the
problem of fragmentation of the atom cloud. Adding a second nanowire allows to
create a double-well potential with a moderate tunneling barrier which is
desired for tunneling and interference experiments with the advantage of
tunneling distances being in the nanometer regime.Comment: Replaced with the published version, 7 pages, 3 figure
Low-frequency Current Fluctuations in Individual Semiconducting Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes
We present a systematic study on low-frequency current fluctuations of
nano-devices consisting of one single semiconducting nanotube, which exhibit
significant 1/f-type noise. By examining devices with different switching
mechanisms, carrier types (electrons vs. holes), and channel lengths, we show
that the 1/f fluctuation level in semiconducting nanotubes is correlated to the
total number of transport carriers present in the system. However, the 1/f
noise level per carrier is not larger than that of most bulk conventional
semiconductors, e.g. Si. The pronounced noise level observed in nanotube
devices simply reflects on the small number of carriers involved in transport.
These results not only provide the basis to quantify the noise behavior in a
one-dimensional transport system, but also suggest a valuable way to
characterize low-dimensional nanostructures based on the 1/f fluctuation
phenomenon
Shot noise of a quantum dot with non-Fermi liquid correlations
The shot noise of a one-dimensional wire interrupted by two barriers shows
interesting features related to the interplay between Coulomb blockade effects,
Luttinger correlations and discrete excitations. At small bias the Fano factor
reaches the lowest attainable value, 1/2, irrespective of the ratio of the two
junction resistances. At larger voltages this asymmetry is power-law
renormalized by the interaction strength. We discuss how the measurement of
current and these features of the noise allow to extract the Luttinger liquid
parameter.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures,to be published in Phys. Rev. B. For high
resolution image of Fig.1 see http://server1.fisica.unige.it/~braggio/doc.ht
Transverse Electronic Transport through DNA Nucleotides with Functionalized Graphene Electrodes
Graphene nanogaps and nanopores show potential for the purpose of electrical
DNA sequencing, in particular because single-base resolution appears to be
readily achievable. Here, we evaluated from first principles the advantages of
a nanogap setup with functionalized graphene edges. To this end, we employed
density functional theory and the non-equilibrium Green's function method to
investigate the transverse conductance properties of the four nucleotides
occurring in DNA when located between the opposing functionalized graphene
electrodes. In particular, we determined the electrical tunneling current
variation as a function of the applied bias and the associated differential
conductance at a voltage which appears suitable to distinguish between the four
nucleotides. Intriguingly, we observe for one of the nucleotides a negative
differential resistance effect.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figure
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