49,481 research outputs found
The Effect of Water Storage on the Bending Properties of Esthetic, Fiber-Reinforced Composite Orthodontic Archwires
Objective: To study the effect of water storage on the bending properties of fiber-reinforced composite archwires and compare it to nickel-titanium (NiTi), stainless steel (SS), and beta-titanium archwires.
Materials and Methods: Align A, B, and C and TorQ A and B composite wires from BioMers Products, 0.014-, 0.016, and 0.018-inch, and 0.019 × 0.025-inch NiTi, 0.016-inch SS, and 0.019 × 0.025-inch beta-titanium archwires were tested (n = 10/type/size/condition). A 20-mm segment was cut from each end of the archwire; one end was then stored in water at 37°C for 30 days, while the other was stored dry. The segments were tested using three-point bending to a maximum deflection of 3.1 mm with force monitored during loading (activation) and unloading (deactivation). Statistical analysis was completed via two-way analysis of variance with wire and condition (dry and water-stored) as factors.
Results: In terms of stiffness and force delivery during activation, in general: beta-titanium was \u3e TorQ B \u3e TorQ A \u3e 0.019 × 0.025-inch NiTi and 0.016-inch SS \u3e Align C \u3e 0.018-inch NiTi \u3e Align B \u3e 0.016-inch NiTi \u3e Align A \u3e 0.014-inch NiTi. Water exposure was detrimental to the larger translucent wires (Align B and C, TorQ A and B) because they were more likely to craze during bending, resulting in decreased forces applied at a given deflection. Align A and the alloy wires were not significantly (P\u3e .05) affected by water storage. Overall, the alloy wires possessed more consistent force values compared to the composite wires
Physical Model of the Immune Response of Bacteria Against Bacteriophage Through the Adaptive CRISPR-Cas Immune System
Bacteria and archaea have evolved an adaptive, heritable immune system that
recognizes and protects against viruses or plasmids. This system, known as the
CRISPR-Cas system, allows the host to recognize and incorporate short foreign
DNA or RNA sequences, called `spacers' into its CRISPR system. Spacers in the
CRISPR system provide a record of the history of bacteria and phage
coevolution. We use a physical model to study the dynamics of this coevolution
as it evolves stochastically over time. We focus on the impact of mutation and
recombination on bacteria and phage evolution and evasion. We discuss the
effect of different spacer deletion mechanisms on the coevolutionary dynamics.
We make predictions about bacteria and phage population growth, spacer
diversity within the CRISPR locus, and spacer protection against the phage
population.Comment: 37 pages, 13 figure
Scalable Compression of Deep Neural Networks
Deep neural networks generally involve some layers with mil- lions of
parameters, making them difficult to be deployed and updated on devices with
limited resources such as mobile phones and other smart embedded systems. In
this paper, we propose a scalable representation of the network parameters, so
that different applications can select the most suitable bit rate of the
network based on their own storage constraints. Moreover, when a device needs
to upgrade to a high-rate network, the existing low-rate network can be reused,
and only some incremental data are needed to be downloaded. We first
hierarchically quantize the weights of a pre-trained deep neural network to
enforce weight sharing. Next, we adaptively select the bits assigned to each
layer given the total bit budget. After that, we retrain the network to
fine-tune the quantized centroids. Experimental results show that our method
can achieve scalable compression with graceful degradation in the performance.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, ACM Multimedia 201
Transport in Graphene Tunnel Junctions
We present a technique to fabricate tunnel junctions between graphene and Al
and Cu, with a Si back gate, as well as a simple theory of tunneling between a
metal and graphene. We map the differential conductance of our junctions versus
probe and back gate voltage, and observe fluctuations in the conductance that
are directly related to the graphene density of states. The conventional
strong-suppression of the conductance at the graphene Dirac point can not be
clearly demonstrated, but a more robust signature of the Dirac point is found:
the inflection in the conductance map caused by the electrostatic gating of
graphene by the tunnel probe. We present numerical simulations of our
conductance maps, confirming the measurement results. In addition, Al causes
strong n-doping of graphene, Cu causes a moderate p-doping, and in high
resistance junctions, phonon resonances are observed, as in STM studies.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure
Asymptotics of Spinfoam Amplitude on Simplicial Manifold: Lorentzian Theory
The present paper studies the large-j asymptotics of the Lorentzian EPRL
spinfoam amplitude on a 4d simplicial complex with an arbitrary number of
simplices. The asymptotics of the spinfoam amplitude is determined by the
critical configurations. Here we show that, given a critical configuration in
general, there exists a partition of the simplicial complex into three type of
regions R_{Nondeg}, R_{Deg-A}, R_{Deg-B}, where the three regions are
simplicial sub-complexes with boundaries. The critical configuration implies
different types of geometries in different types of regions, i.e. (1) the
critical configuration restricted into R_{Nondeg} is degenerate of type-A in our definition of degeneracy, but implies
a nondegenerate discrete Euclidean geometry on R_{Deg-A}, (3) the critical
configuration restricted into R_{Deg-B} is degenerate of type-B, and implies a
vector geometry on R_{Deg-B}. With the critical configuration, we further make
a subdivision of the regions R_{Nondeg} and R_{Deg-A} into sub-complexes (with
boundary) according to their Lorentzian/Euclidean oriented 4-simplex volume
V_4(v), such that sgn(V_4(v)) is a constant sign on each sub-complex. Then in
the each sub-complex, the spinfoam amplitude at the critical configuration
gives the Regge action in Lorentzian or Euclidean signature respectively on
R_{Nondeg} or R_{Deg-A}. The Regge action reproduced here contains a sign
factor sgn(V_4(v)) of the oriented 4-simplex volume. Therefore the Regge action
reproduced here can be viewed a discretized Palatini action with on-shell
connection. Finally the asymptotic formula of the spinfoam amplitude is given
by a sum of the amplitudes evaluated at all possible critical configurations,
which are the products of the amplitudes associated to different type of
geometries.Comment: 54 pages, 2 figures, reference adde
Imaginary-time formulation of steady-state nonequilibrium in quantum dot models
We examine the recently proposed imaginary-time formulation for strongly
correlated steady-state nonequilibrium for its range of validity and discuss
significant improvements in the analytic continuation of the Matsubara voltage
as well as the fermionic Matsubara frequency. The discretization error in the
conventional Hirsch-Fye algorithm has been compensated in the Fourier
transformation with reliable small frequency behavior of self-energy. Here we
give detailed discussions for generalized spectral representation ansatz by
including high order vertex corrections and its numerical analytic continuation
procedures. The differential conductance calculations agree accurately with
existing data from other nonequilibrium transport theories. It is verified
that, at finite source-drain voltage, the Kondo resonance is destroyed at bias
comparable to the Kondo temperature. Calculated coefficients in the scaling
relation of the zero bias anomaly fall within the range of experimental
estimates.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, Comparison to other theories adde
The mass function of hydrogen-rich white dwarfs: robust observational evidence for a distinctive high-mass excess near 1Msun
The mass function of hydrogen-rich atmosphere white dwarfs has been
frequently found to reveal a distinctive high-mass excess near 1Msun. However,
a significant excess of massive white dwarfs has not been detected in the mass
function of the largest white dwarf catalogue to date from the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey. Hence, whether a high-mass excess exists or not has remained an
open question. In this work we build the mass function of the latest catalogue
of data release 10 SDSS hydrogen-rich white dwarfs, including the cool and
faint population (i.e. effective temperatures 6,000 <~ Teff <~ 12,000 K,
equivalent to 12 mag <~ Mbol <~ 13 mag). We show that the high-mass excess is
clearly present in our mass function, and that it disappears only if the
hottest (brightest) white dwarfs (those with Teff >~ 12,000 K, Mbol <~ 12 mag)
are considered. This naturally explains why previous SDSS mass functions failed
at detecting a significant excess of high-mass white dwarfs. Thus, our results
provide additional and robust observational evidence for the existence of a
distinctive high-mass excess near 1Msun. We investigate possible origins of
this feature and argue that the most plausible scenario that may lead to an
observed excess of massive white dwarfs is the merger of the degenerate core of
a giant star with a main sequence or a white dwarf companion during or shortly
after a common envelope event.Comment: Accepted for publication by MNRA
Crossover from Kramers to phase-diffusion switching in hysteretic DC-SQUIDs
We have measured and propose a model for switching rates in hysteretic
DC-SQUID in the regime where phase diffusion processes start to occur. We show
that the switching rates in this regime are smaller than the rates given by
Kramers' formula due to retrapping of Josephson phase. The retrapping process,
which is affected by the frequency dependent impedance of the environment of
the DC-SQUID, leads to a peaked second moment of the switching distribution as
a function of temperature. The temperature where the peaks occur are
proportional to the critical current of the DC- SQUID.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Combined wind turbine fatigue and ultimate load reduction by individual blade control
If each blade of the wind turbine has individual pitch actuator, there is possibility of employing the pitch system to mitigate structural loads through advanced control methods. Previously, considerable reduction of blade lifetime equivalent fatigue loads has been achieved by Individual Blade Control (IBC) and in addition, it has also been shown the potential in blade ultimate loads reduction. However, both fatigue and ultimate loads impact on the design and life of wind turbine blades. In this paper, the design and application of IBC that concurrently reduce both blade fatigue and ultimate loads is investigated. The contributions of blade load spectral components, which are 1P, 2P and edgewise mode from blade in-plane and/or out-of-plane bending moments, are firstly explored. Four different control options for reducing various combinations of these load components are compared. In response to the different spectral peaks of both fatigue and ultimate loads, the controller has been designed so that it can act on different frequency components which vary with wind speed. The performance of the IBC controller on fatigue and ultimate load reduction is assessed by simulating a 5MW exemplar wind turbine. Simulation results show that with a proper selection of controlling inputs at different wind speed, the use of a single combined IBC can achieve satisfactory reduction on both fatigue and ultimate loads
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