Local structures of free-standing AlₓGa₁ˍₓN thin films studied by extended x-ray absorption fine structure

Local structural information for the first two atomic shells surrounding Ga atoms in free standing AlₓGa₁ˍₓN alloy films has been obtained by extended x-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy. For an AlN mole fraction ranging from 0 to 0.6, we found that the first shell Ga–N bond length had only a weak composition dependence, roughly one quarter of that predicted by Vegard’s Law. In the second shell, the Ga–Ga bond length was significantly longer than that of Ga–Al (Δ∼0.04–0.065 Å). A bond-type specific composition dependence was observed for the second shell cation–cation distances. While the composition dependence of the Ga–Ga bond length is ∼70% of that predicted by Vegard’s Law, the Ga–Al bond length was essentially composition independent. These results suggested that local strain in AlₓGa₁ˍₓN was also accommodated by lattice distortion in the Al cation sublattice.This work was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Of- fice of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Science Division of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098. The LLO work was performed at the UC Berkeley Integrated Materials Laboratory which was supported in part by the National Science Foundation. C.J.G. and M.C.R. were supported by the Australian Synchrotron Research Program, funded by the Commonwealth of Australia via the Major National Research Facilities Program. SSRL was supported by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. Department of Energy

'Obligate' anaerobic Salmonella strain YB1 suppresses liver tumor growth and metastasis in nude mice

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SOAP3-dp: Fast, Accurate and Sensitive GPU-based Short Read Aligner

To tackle the exponentially increasing throughput of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS), most of the existing short-read aligners can be configured to favor speed in trade of accuracy and sensitivity. SOAP3-dp, through leveraging the computational power of both CPU and GPU with optimized algorithms, delivers high speed and sensitivity simultaneously. Compared with widely adopted aligners including BWA, Bowtie2, SeqAlto, GEM and GPU-based aligners including BarraCUDA and CUSHAW, SOAP3-dp is two to tens of times faster, while maintaining the highest sensitivity and lowest false discovery rate (FDR) on Illumina reads with different lengths. Transcending its predecessor SOAP3, which does not allow gapped alignment, SOAP3-dp by default tolerates alignment similarity as low as 60 percent. Real data evaluation using human genome demonstrates SOAP3-dp's power to enable more authentic variants and longer Indels to be discovered. Fosmid sequencing shows a 9.1 percent FDR on newly discovered deletions. SOAP3-dp natively supports BAM file format and provides a scoring scheme same as BWA, which enables it to be integrated into existing analysis pipelines. SOAP3-dp has been deployed on Amazon-EC2, NIH-Biowulf and Tianhe-1A.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, submitted to PLoS ONE, additional files available at "https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bhclhxpoiubh371/O5CO_CkXQE". Comments most welcom

Spin excitations and the Fermi surface of superconducting FeS

High-temperature superconductivity occurs near antiferromagnetic instabilities and nematic state. Debate remains on the origin of nematic order in FeSe and its relation with superconductivity. Here, we use transport, neutron scatter- ing and Fermi surface measurements to demonstrate that hydro-thermo grown superconducting FeS, an isostructure of FeSe, is a tetragonal paramagnet without nematic order and with a quasiparticle mass significantly reduced from that of FeSe. Only stripe-type spin excitation is observed up to 100 meV. No direct coupling between spin excitation and superconductivity in FeS is found, suggesting that FeS is less correlated and the nematic order in FeSe is due to competing checkerboard and stripe spin fluctuations.Comment: 11 pages, 4 page

Efficient electronic entanglement concentration assisted with single mobile electron

We present an efficient entanglement concentration protocol (ECP) for mobile electrons with charge detection. This protocol is quite different from other ECPs for one can obtain a maximally entangled pair from a pair of less-entangled state and a single mobile electron with a certain probability. With the help of charge detection, it can be repeated to reach a higher success probability. It also does not need to know the coefficient of the original less-entangled states. All these advantages may make this protocol useful in current distributed quantum information processing.Comment: 6pages, 3figure

Quantum secure direct communication network with superdense coding and decoy photons

A quantum secure direct communication network scheme is proposed with quantum superdense coding and decoy photons. The servers on a passive optical network prepare and measure the quantum signal, i.e., a sequence of the $d$-dimensional Bell states. After confirming the security of the photons received from the receiver, the sender codes his secret message on them directly. For preventing a dishonest server from eavesdropping, some decoy photons prepared by measuring one photon in the Bell states are used to replace some original photons. One of the users on the network can communicate any other one. This scheme has the advantage of high capacity, and it is more convenient than others as only a sequence of photons is transmitted in quantum line.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figur

In vitro and in vivo delivery of a sustained release nanocarrier-based formulation of an MRTF/SRF inhibitor in conjunctival fibrosis

Abstract Background Sustained drug delivery is a large unmet clinical need in glaucoma. Here, we incorporated a Myocardin-Related Transcription Factor/Serum Response Factor inhibitor, CCG-222740, into slow release large unilamellar vesicles derived from the liposomes DOTMA (1,2-di-O-octadecenyl-3-trimethylammonium propane) and DOPC (1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine), and tested their effects in vitro and in vivo. Results The vesicles were spherical particles of around 130 nm and were strongly cationic. A large amount of inhibitor could be incorporated into the vesicles. We showed that the nanocarrier CCG-222740 formulation gradually released the inhibitor over 14 days using high performance liquid chromatography. Nanocarrier CCG-222740 significantly decreased ACTA2 gene expression and was not cytotoxic in human conjunctival fibroblasts. In vivo, nanocarrier CCG-222740 doubled the bleb survival from 11.0 ± 0.6 days to 22.0 ± 1.3 days (p = 0.001), decreased conjunctival scarring and did not have any local or systemic adverse effects in a rabbit model of glaucoma filtration surgery. Conclusions Our study demonstrates proof-of-concept that a nanocarrier-based formulation efficiently achieves a sustained release of a Myocardin-Related Transcription Factor/Serum Response Factor inhibitor and prevents conjunctival fibrosis in an established rabbit model of glaucoma filtration surgery.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146540/1/12951_2018_Article_425.pd