Application of the Schwinger variational principle to electron scattering

The authors present the results of the first rigorous application of the Schwinger variational principle to electron scattering with the inclusion of exchange. The results of this application to e-He scattering in the static-exchange approximation show that the Schwinger method provides accurate solutions of the scattering problem with small basis set expansions

Accurate Hartree-Fock vibrational branching ratios in 3σg photoionisation of N2

The authors report vibrational branching ratios for resonant photoionisation of N2 leading to the X2 Sigma g+ state of N2+. Their theoretical values are obtained from an accurate solution of the adiabatic-nuclei frozen-core Hartree-Fock model of molecular photoionisation. In contrast to other theoretical results the present results are in very good agreement with experimental measurements. Differences between the present and previous calculations are discussed

Stochastic Gene Expression in Cells: A Point Process Approach

This paper investigates the stochastic fluctuations of the number of copies of a given protein in a cell. This problem has already been addressed in the past and closed-form expressions of the mean and variance have been obtained for a simplified stochastic model of the gene expression. These results have been obtained under the assumption that the duration of all the protein production steps are exponentially distributed. In such a case, a Markovian approach (via Fokker-Planck equations) is used to derive analytic formulas of the mean and the variance of the number of proteins at equilibrium. This assumption is however not totally satisfactory from a modeling point of view since the distribution of the duration of some steps is more likely to be Gaussian, if not almost deterministic. In such a setting, Markovian methods can no longer be used. A finer characterization of the fluctuations of the number of proteins is therefore of primary interest to understand the general economy of the cell. In this paper, we propose a new approach, based on marked Poisson point processes, which allows to remove the exponential assumption. This is applied in the framework of the classical three stages models of the literature: transcription, translation and degradation. The interest of the method is shown by recovering the classical results under the assumptions that all the durations are exponentially distributed but also by deriving new analytic formulas when some of the distributions are not anymore exponential. Our results show in particular that the exponential assumption may, surprisingly, underestimate significantly the variance of the number of proteins when some steps are in fact not exponentially distributed. This counter-intuitive result stresses the importance of the statistical assumptions in the protein production process

A Stochastic Representation of the Local Structure of Turbulence

Based on the mechanics of the Euler equation at short time, we show that a Recent Fluid Deformation (RFD) closure for the vorticity field, neglecting the early stage of advection of fluid particles, allows to build a 3D incompressible velocity field that shares many properties with empirical turbulence, such as the teardrop shape of the R-Q plane. Unfortunately, non gaussianity is weak (i.e. no intermittency) and vorticity gets preferentially aligned with the wrong eigenvector of the deformation. We then show that slightly modifying the former vectorial field in order to impose the long range correlated nature of turbulence allows to reproduce the main properties of stationary flows. Doing so, we end up with a realistic incompressible, skewed and intermittent velocity field that reproduces the main characteristics of 3D turbulence in the inertial range, including correct vorticity alignment properties.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, final version, published

Models of protein production along the cell cycle: an investigation of possible sources of noise

In this article, we quantitatively study, through stochastic models, the efects of several intracellular phenomena, such as cell volume growth, cell division, gene replication as well as fuctuations of available RNA polymerases and ribosomes. These phenomena are indeed rarely considered in classic models of protein production and no relative quantitative comparison among them has been performed. The parameters for a large and representative class of proteins are determined using experimental measures. The main important and surprising conclusion of our study is to show that despite the signifcant fuctuations of free RNA polymerases and free ribosomes, they bring little variability to protein production contrary to what has been previously proposed in the literature. After verifying the robustness of this quite counter-intuitive result, we discuss its possible origin from a theoretical view, and interpret it as the result of a mean-feld efect