2,514 research outputs found
Screening effects in a density functional theory based description of molecular junctions in the Coulomb blockade regime
We recently introduced a method based on density functional theory (DFT) and
non-equilibrium Green's function techniques (NEGF) for calculating the addition
energies of single molecule nano-junctions in the Coulomb blockade (CB) regime.
Here we apply this approach to benzene molecules lying parallel and at various
distances from two aluminum fcc (111) surfaces, and discuss the distance
dependence in our calculations in terms of electrostatic screening effects. The
addition energies near the surface are reduced by about a factor of two, which
is comparable to previously reported calculations employing a computationally
far more demanding quasi-particle description
Metastable States in High Order Short-Range Spin Glasses
The mean number of metastable states in higher order short-range spin
glasses is estimated analytically using a variational method introduced by
Tanaka and Edwards for very large coordination numbers. For lattices with small
connectivities, numerical simulations do not show any significant dependence on
the relative positions of the interacting spins on the lattice, indicating thus
that these systems can be described by a few macroscopic parameters. As an
extremely anisotropic model we consider the low autocorrelated binary spin
model and we show through numerical simulations that its landscape has an
exceptionally large number of local optima
Towards a theoretical description of molecular junctions in the Coulomb blockade regime based on density functional theory
Non-equilibrium Greens function techniques (NEGF) combined with Density
Functional Theory (DFT) calculations have become a standard tool for the
description of electron transport through single molecule nano-junctions in the
coherent tunneling regime. However, the applicability of these methods for
transport in the Coulomb blockade (CB) regime is still under debate. We present
here NEGF-DFT calculations performed on simple model systems in the presence of
an effective gate potential. The results show that: i) the CB addition energies
can be predicted with such an approach with reasonable accuracy; ii) neither
the magnitude of the Kohn-Sham gap nor the lack of a derivative discontinuity
in the exchange-correlation functional represent a problem for this purpose
The architecture of chicken chromosome territories changes during differentiation
BACKGROUND:
Between cell divisions the chromatin fiber of each chromosome is restricted to a subvolume of the interphase cell nucleus called chromosome territory. The internal organization of these chromosome territories is still largely unknown.
RESULTS:
We compared the large-scale chromatin structure of chromosome territories between several hematopoietic chicken cell types at various differentiation stages. Chromosome territories were labeled by fluorescence in situ hybridization in structurally preserved nuclei, recorded by confocal microscopy and evaluated visually and by quantitative image analysis. Chromosome territories in multipotent myeloid precursor cells appeared homogeneously stained and compact. The inactive lysozyme gene as well as the centromere of the lysozyme gene harboring chromosome located to the interior of the chromosome territory. In further differentiated cell types such as myeloblasts, macrophages and erythroblasts chromosome territories appeared increasingly diffuse, disaggregating to separable substructures. The lysozyme gene, which is gradually activated during the differentiation to activated macrophages, as well as the centromere were relocated increasingly to more external positions.
CONCLUSIONS:
Our results reveal a cell type specific constitution of chromosome territories. The data suggest that a repositioning of chromosomal loci during differentiation may be a consequence of general changes in chromosome territory morphology, not necessarily related to transcriptional changes
A multideterminant assessment of mean field methods for the description of electron transfer in the weak coupling regime
Multideterminant calculations have been performed on model systems to
emphasize the role of many-body effects in the general description of charge
quantization experiments. We show numerically and derive analytically that a
closed-shell ansatz, the usual ingredient of mean-field methods, does not
properly describe the step-like electron transfer characteristic in weakly
coupled systems. With the multideterminant results as a benchmark, we have
evaluated the performance of common ab initio mean field techniques, such as
Hartree Fock (HF) and Density Functional Theory (DFT) with local and hybrid
exchange correlation functionals, with a special focus on spin-polarization
effects. For HF and hybrid DFT, a qualitatively correct open-shell solution
with distinct steps in the electron transfer behaviour can be obtained with a
spin-unrestricted (i.e., spin-polarized) ansatz though this solution differs
quantitatively from the multideterminant reference. We also discuss the
relationship between the electronic eigenvalue gap and the onset of charge
transfer for both HF and DFT and relate our findings to recently proposed
practical schemes for calculating the addition energies in the Coulomb blockade
regime for single molecule junctions from closed-shell DFT within the local
density approximation
Algebraic comparison of metabolic networks, phylogenetic inference, and metabolic innovation
BACKGROUND: Comparison of metabolic networks is typically performed based on the organisms' enzyme contents. This approach disregards functional replacements as well as orthologies that are misannotated. Direct comparison of the structure of metabolic networks can circumvent these problems. RESULTS: Metabolic networks are naturally represented as directed hypergraphs in such a way that metabolites are nodes and enzyme-catalyzed reactions form (hyper)edges. The familiar operations from set algebra (union, intersection, and difference) form a natural basis for both the pairwise comparison of networks and identification of distinct metabolic features of a set of algorithms. We report here on an implementation of this approach and its application to the procaryotes. CONCLUSION: We demonstrate that metabolic networks contain valuable phylogenetic information by comparing phylogenies obtained from network comparisons with 16S RNA phylogenies. The algebraic approach to metabolic networks is suitable to study metabolic innovations in two sets of organisms, free living microbes and Pyrococci, as well as obligate intracellular pathogens
Variational Monte Carlo Calculations of H and He with a relativistic Hamiltonian - II
In relativistic Hamiltonians the two-nucleon interaction is expressed as a
sum of , the interaction in the rest frame,
and the ``boost interaction'' which depends upon the
total momentum and vanishes in the rest frame. The
can be regarded as a sum of four terms: , ,
and ; the first three originate from the
relativistic energy-momentum relation, Lorentz contraction and Thomas
precession, while the last is purely quantum. The contributions of and have been previously calculated with the
variational Monte Carlo method for H and He. In this brief note we
report the results of similar calculations for the contributions of and . These are found to be rather small.Comment: 7 pages, P-94-09-07
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