16,010 research outputs found
Roughness exponents and grain shapes
In surfaces with grainy features, the local roughness shows a crossover
at a characteristic length , with roughness exponent changing from
to a smaller . The grain shape, the choice of
or height-height correlation function (HHCF) , and the procedure to
calculate root mean-square averages are shown to have remarkable effects on
. With grains of pyramidal shape, can be as low as 0.71,
which is much lower than the previous prediction 0.85 for rounded grains. The
same crossover is observed in the HHCF, but with initial exponent
for flat grains, while for some conical grains it may
increase to . The universality class of the growth process
determines the exponents after the crossover, but has no
effect on the initial exponents and , supporting the
geometric interpretation of their values. For all grain shapes and different
definitions of surface roughness or HHCF, we still observe that the crossover
length is an accurate estimate of the grain size. The exponents obtained
in several recent experimental works on different materials are explained by
those models, with some surface images qualitatively similar to our model
films.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures and 2 table
Finite-size effects in roughness distribution scaling
We study numerically finite-size corrections in scaling relations for
roughness distributions of various interface growth models. The most common
relation, which considers the average roughness . This illustrates how
finite-size corrections can be obtained from roughness distributions scaling.
However, we discard the usual interpretation that the intrinsic width is a
consequence of high surface steps by analyzing data of restricted
solid-on-solid models with various maximal height differences between
neighboring columns. We also observe that large finite-size corrections in the
roughness distributions are usually accompanied by huge corrections in height
distributions and average local slopes, as well as in estimates of scaling
exponents. The molecular-beam epitaxy model of Das Sarma and Tamborenea in 1+1
dimensions is a case example in which none of the proposed scaling relations
works properly, while the other measured quantities do not converge to the
expected asymptotic values. Thus, although roughness distributions are clearly
better than other quantities to determine the universality class of a growing
system, it is not the final solution for this task.Comment: 25 pages, including 9 figures and 1 tabl
Broad Iron Emission from Gravitationally Lensed Quasars Observed by Chandra
Recent work has demonstrated the potential of gravitationally lensed quasars
to extend measurements of black hole spin out to high-redshift with the current
generation of X-ray observatories. Here we present an analysis of a large
sample of 27 lensed quasars in the redshift range 1.0<z<4.5 observed with
Chandra, utilizing over 1.6 Ms of total observing time, focusing on the
rest-frame iron K emission from these sources. Although the X-ray
signal-to-noise (S/N) currently available does not permit the detection of iron
emission from the inner accretion disk in individual cases in our sample, we
find significant structure in the stacked residuals. In addition to the narrow
core, seen almost ubiquitously in local AGN, we find evidence for an additional
underlying broad component from the inner accretion disk, with a clear red wing
to the emission profile. Based on simulations, we find the detection of this
broader component to be significant at greater than the 3-sigma level. This
implies that iron emission from the inner disk is relatively common in the
population of lensed quasars, and in turn further demonstrates that, with
additional observations, this population represents an opportunity to
significantly extend the sample of AGN spin measurements out to high-redshift.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in Ap
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Optimal protection of stabilised dry live bacteria from bile toxicity in oral dosage forms by bile acid adsorbent resins
We previously found that dried live bacteria of a vaccine strain can be temporarily sensitive to bile acids and suggested that Bile Adsorbing Resins (BAR) can be used in oral vaccine tablets to protect dried bacteria from intestinal bile. Here, we report a quantitative analysis of the ability of BAR to exclude the dye bromophenol blue from penetrating into matrix tablets and also sections of hard capsule shells. Based on this quantitative analysis, we made a fully optimised formulation, comprising 25% w/w of cholestyramine in Vcapsâ„¢ HPMC capsules. This gave effectively 100% protection of viability from 4% bile, with 4200-fold more live bacteria recovered from this formulation compared to unprotected dry bacteria. From the image analysis, we found that the filler material or compaction force used had no measurable effect on dye exclusion but did affect the rate of tablet hydration. Increasing the mass fraction of BAR gave more exclusion of dye up to 25% w/w, after which a plateau was reached and no further dye exclusion was seen. More effective dye exclusion was seen with smaller particle sizes (i.e. cholestyramine) and when the BAR was thoroughly dried and disaggregated. Similar results were found when imaging dye penetration into capsule sections or tablets. The predictions of the dye penetration study were tested using capsules filled with dried attenuated Salmonella vaccine plus different BAR types, and the expected protection from bile was found, validating the imaging study. Surprisingly, depending on the capsule shell material, some protection was given by the capsule alone without adding BAR, with Vcapsâ„¢ HPMC capsules providing up to 174-fold protection against 1% bile; faster releasing Vcaps Plusâ„¢ HPMC capsules and Coni Snapâ„¢ gelatin capsules gave less protection
Phase transitions and crossovers in reaction-diffusion models with catalyst deactivation
The activity of catalytic materials is reduced during operation by several
mechanisms, one of them being poisoning of catalytic sites by chemisorbed
impurities or products. Here we study the effects of poisoning in two
reaction-diffusion models in one-dimensional lattices with randomly distributed
catalytic sites. Unimolecular and bimolecular single-species reactions are
considered, without reactant input during the operation. The models show
transitions between a phase with continuous decay of reactant concentration and
a phase with asymptotic non-zero reactant concentration and complete poisoning
of the catalyst. The transition boundary depends on the initial reactant and
catalyst concentrations and on the poisoning probability. The critical system
behaves as in the two-species annihilation reaction, with reactant
concentration decaying as t^{-1/4} and the catalytic sites playing the role of
the second species. In the unimolecular reaction, a significant crossover to
the asymptotic scaling is observed even when one of those parameters is 10% far
from criticality. Consequently, an effective power-law decay of concentration
may persist up to long times and lead to an apparent change in the reaction
kinetics. In the bimolecular single-species reaction, the critical scaling is
followed by a two-dimensional rapid decay, thus two crossovers are found.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure
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