6,014 research outputs found
Ultrasensitive Displacement Noise Measurement of Carbon Nanotube Mechanical Resonators
Mechanical resonators based on a single carbon nanotube are exceptional
sensors of mass and force. The force sensitivity in these ultra-light
resonators is often limited by the noise in the detection of the vibrations.
Here, we report on an ultra-sensitive scheme based on a RLC resonator and a
low-temperature amplifier to detect nanotube vibrations. We also show a new
fabrication process of electromechanical nanotube resonators to reduce the
separation between the suspended nanotube and the gate electrode down to ~nm. These advances in detection and fabrication allow us to reach
displacement sensitivity. Thermal
vibrations cooled cryogenically at 300~mK are detected with a signal-to-noise
ratio as high as 17~dB. We demonstrate
force sensitivity, which is the best force sensitivity achieved thus far with a
mechanical resonator. Our work is an important step towards imaging individual
nuclear spins and studying the coupling between mechanical vibrations and
electrons in different quantum electron transport regimes.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure
A fast cardiac electromechanics model coupling the Eikonal and the nonlinear mechanics equations
We present a new model of human cardiac electromechanics for the left ventricle where electrophysiology is described by a Reaction-Eikonal model and which enables an off-line resolution of the reaction model, thus entailing a big saving of computational time. Subcellular dynamics is coupled with a model of tissue mechanics, which is in turn coupled with a Windkessel model for blood circulation. Our numerical results show that the proposed model is able to provide a physiological response to changes in certain variables (end-diastolic volume, total peripheral resistance, contractility). We also show that our model is able to reproduce with high accuracy and with a considerably lower computational time the results that we would obtain if the monodomain model should be used in place of the Eikonal model
Investigation on the composition of agarose–collagen i blended hydrogels as matrices for the growth of spheroids from breast cancer cell lines
Three-dimensional (3D) cell culture systems mimic the structural complexity of the tissue microenvironment and are gaining increasing importance as they resemble the extracellular matrix (ECM)–cell and cell–cell physical interactions occurring in vivo. Several scaffold-based culture systems have been already proposed as valuable tools for large-scale production of spheroids, but they often suffer of poor reproducibility or high costs of production. In this work, we present a reliable 3D culture system based on collagen I-blended agarose hydrogels and show how the variation in the agarose percentage affects the physical and mechanical properties of the resulting hydrogel. The influence of the different physical and mechanical properties of the blended hydrogels on the growth, size, morphology, and cell motility of the spheroids obtained by culturing three different breast cancer cell lines (MCF-7, MDA-MB-361, and MDA-MB-231) was also evaluated. As proof of concept, the cisplatin penetration and its cytotoxic effect on the tumor spheroids as function of the hydrogel stiffness were also investigated. Noteworthily, the possibility to recover the spheroids from the hydrogels for further processing and other biological studies has been considered. This feature, in addition to the ease of preparation, the lack of cross-linking chemistry and the high re-producibility, makes this hydrogel a reliable biomimetic matrix for the growth of 3D cell structures
Feature selection for chemical sensor arrays using mutual information
We address the problem of feature selection for classifying a diverse set of chemicals using an array of metal oxide sensors. Our aim is to evaluate a filter approach to feature selection with reference to previous work, which used a wrapper approach on the same data set, and established best features and upper bounds on classification performance. We selected feature sets that exhibit the maximal mutual information with the identity of the chemicals. The selected features closely match those found to perform well in the previous study using a wrapper approach to conduct an exhaustive search of all permitted feature combinations. By comparing the classification performance of support vector machines (using features selected by mutual information) with the performance observed in the previous study, we found that while our approach does not always give the maximum possible classification performance, it always selects features that achieve classification performance approaching the optimum obtained by exhaustive search. We performed further classification using the selected feature set with some common classifiers and found that, for the selected features, Bayesian Networks gave the best performance. Finally, we compared the observed classification performances with the performance of classifiers using randomly selected features. We found that the selected features consistently outperformed randomly selected features for all tested classifiers. The mutual information filter approach is therefore a computationally efficient method for selecting near optimal features for chemical sensor arrays
Topological field theories in n-dimensional spacetimes and Cartan's equations
Action principles of the BF type for diffeomorphism invariant topological
field theories living in n-dimensional spacetime manifolds are presented. Their
construction is inspired by Cuesta and Montesinos' recent paper where Cartan's
first and second structure equations together with first and second Bianchi
identities are treated as the equations of motion for a field theory. In
opposition to that paper, the current approach involves also auxiliary fields
and holds for arbitrary n-dimensional spacetimes. Dirac's canonical analysis
for the actions is detailedly carried out in the generic case and it is shown
that these action principles define topological field theories, as mentioned.
The current formalism is a generic framework to construct geometric theories
with local degrees of freedom by introducing additional constraints on the
various fields involved that destroy the topological character of the original
theory. The latter idea is implemented in two-dimensional spacetimes where
gravity coupled to matter fields is constructed out, which has indeed local
excitations.Comment: LaTeX file, no figure
Linear constraints from generally covariant systems with quadratic constraints
How to make compatible both boundary and gauge conditions for generally
covariant theories using the gauge symmetry generated by first class
constraints is studied. This approach employs finite gauge transformations in
contrast with previous works which use infinitesimal ones. Two kinds of
variational principles are taken into account; the first one features
non-gauge-invariant actions whereas the second includes fully gauge-invariant
actions. Furthermore, it is shown that it is possible to rewrite fully
gauge-invariant actions featuring first class constraints quadratic in the
momenta into first class constraints linear in the momenta (and homogeneous in
some cases) due to the full gauge invariance of their actions. This shows that
the gauge symmetry present in generally covariant theories having first class
constraints quadratic in the momenta is not of a different kind with respect to
the one of theories with first class constraints linear in the momenta if fully
gauge-invariant actions are taken into account for the former theories. These
ideas are implemented for the parametrized relativistic free particle,
parametrized harmonic oscillator, and the SL(2,R) model.Comment: Latex file, revtex4, 18 pages, no figures. This version includes the
corrections to many misprints of v1 and also the ones of the published
version. The conceptual and technical parts of the paper are not altere
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