4,718 research outputs found
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and Hyperfine Structure
Contains research objectives and reports on one research project
Membrane shape as a reporter for applied forces
Recent advances have enabled 3-dimensional reconstructions of biological structures in vivo, ranging in size and complexity from single proteins to multicellular structures. In particular, tomography and confocal microscopy have been exploited to capture detailed 3-dimensional conformations of membranes in cellular processes ranging from viral budding and organelle maintenance to phagocytosis. Despite the wealth of membrane structures available, there is as yet no generic, quantitative method for their interpretation. We propose that by modeling these observed biomembrane shapes as fluid lipid bilayers in mechanical equilibrium, the externally applied forces as well as the pressure, tension, and spontaneous curvature can be computed directly from the shape alone. To illustrate the potential power of this technique, we apply an axial force with optical tweezers to vesicles and explicitly demonstrate that the applied force is equal to the force computed from the membrane conformation
Why Might Stratospheric Sudden Warmings Occur with Similar Frequency in El Niño and La Niña Winters?
The effect of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on the frequency and character of Northern Hemisphere major mid-winter stratospheric sudden warmings (SSWs) is evaluated using a meteorological reanalysis data set and comprehensive chemistry-climate models. There is an apparent inconsistency between the impact of opposite phases of ENSO on the seasonal mean vortex and on SSWs: El Niño leads to an anomalously warm, and La Niña leads to an anomalously cool, seasonal mean polar stratospheric state, but both phases of ENSO lead to an increased SSW frequency. A resolution to this apparent paradox is here proposed: the region in the North Pacific most strongly associated with precursors of SSWs is not strongly influenced by El Niño and La Niña teleconnections. In the observational record, both La Niña and El Niño lead to similar anomalies in the region associated with precursors of SSWs and, consistent with this, there is a similar SSW frequency in La Niña and El Niño winters. A similar correspondence between the penetration of ENSO teleconnections into the SSW precursor region and SSW frequency is found in the comprehensive chemistry-climate models. The inability of some of the models to capture the observed relationship between La Niña and SSW frequency appears related to whether the modeled ENSO teleconnections result in extreme anomalies in the region most closely associated with SSWs. Finally, it is confirmed that the seasonal mean polar vortex response to ENSO is only weakly related to the relative frequency of SSWs during El Niño and La Niña
The role of the equation of state and the space-time dimension in spherical collapse
We study the spherically symmetric collapse of a fluid with non-vanishing
radial pressure in higher dimensional space-time. We obtain the general exact
solution in the closed form for the equation of state ()
which leads to the explicit construction of the root equation governing the
nature (black hole versus naked singularity) of the central singularity. A
remarkable feature of the root equation is its invariance for the three cases:
(),
() and () where is the
dimension of space-time. That is, for the ultimate end result of the collapse,
-dimensional dust, - AdS (anti de Sitter)-like and - dS-like
are absolutely equivalent.Comment: 4 Pages, RevTeX, no figures, minor changes, new references added,
Detailed version to follo
Quantum Computation with Quantum Dots
We propose a new implementation of a universal set of one- and two-qubit
gates for quantum computation using the spin states of coupled single-electron
quantum dots. Desired operations are effected by the gating of the tunneling
barrier between neighboring dots. Several measures of the gate quality are
computed within a newly derived spin master equation incorporating decoherence
caused by a prototypical magnetic environment. Dot-array experiments which
would provide an initial demonstration of the desired non-equilibrium spin
dynamics are proposed.Comment: 12 pages, Latex, 2 ps figures. v2: 20 pages (very minor corrections,
substantial expansion), submitted to Phys. Rev.
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and Hyeprfine Structure
Contains research objectives and reports on four research projects
Isolating the Roles of Different Forcing Agents in Global Stratospheric Temperature Changes Using Model Integrations with Incrementally Added Single Forcings
Satellite instruments show a cooling of global stratospheric temperatures over the whole data record (1979-2014). This cooling is not linear and includes two descending steps in the early 1980s and mid-1990s. The 1979-1995 period is characterized by increasing concentrations of ozone depleting substances (ODS) and by the two major volcanic eruptions of El Chichon (1982) and Mount Pinatubo (1991). The 1995-present period is characterized by decreasing ODS concentrations and by the absence of major volcanic eruptions. Greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations increase over the whole time period. In order to isolate the roles of different forcing agents in the global stratospheric temperature changes, we performed a set of AMIP-style simulations using the NASA Goddard Earth Observing System Chemistry-Climate Model (GEOSCCM). We find that in our model simulations the cooling of the stratosphere from 1979 to present is mostly driven by changes in GHG concentrations in the middle and upper stratosphere and by GHG and ODS changes in the lower stratosphere. While the cooling trend caused by increasing GHGs is roughly constant over the satellite era, changing ODS concentrations cause a significant stratospheric cooling only up to the mid-1990s, when they start to decrease because of the implementation of the Montreal Protocol. Sporadic volcanic events and the solar cycle have a distinct signature in the time series of stratospheric temperature anomalies but do not play a statistically significant role in the long-term trends from 1979 to 2014. Several factors combine to produce the step-like behavior in the stratospheric temperatures: in the lower stratosphere, the flattening starting in the mid-1990s is due to the decrease in ozone-depleting substances; Mount Pinatubo and the solar cycle cause the abrupt steps through the aerosol-associated warming and the volcanically induced ozone depletion. In the middle and upper stratosphere, changes in solar irradiance are largely responsible for the step-like behavior of global temperature anomalies, together with volcanically induced ozone depletion and water vapor increases in the post-Pinatubo years
Force balance and membrane shedding at the Red Blood Cell surface
During the aging of the red-blood cell, or under conditions of extreme
echinocytosis, membrane is shed from the cell plasma membrane in the form of
nano-vesicles. We propose that this process is the result of the
self-adaptation of the membrane surface area to the elastic stress imposed by
the spectrin cytoskeleton, via the local buckling of membrane under increasing
cytoskeleton stiffness. This model introduces the concept of force balance as a
regulatory process at the cell membrane, and quantitatively reproduces the rate
of area loss in aging red-blood cells.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Coulomb Blockade of Tunneling Through a Double Quantum Dot
We study the Coulomb blockade of tunneling through a double quantum dot. The
temperature dependence of the linear conductance is strongly affected by the
inter-dot tunneling. As the tunneling grows, a crossover from
temperature-independent peak conductance to a power-law suppression of
conductance at low temperatures is predicted. This suppression is a
manifestation of the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe associated with the
charge re-distribution between the dots, which accompanies the tunneling of an
electron into a dot. We find analytically the shapes of the Coulomb blockade
peaks in conductance as a function of gate voltage.Comment: 11 pages, revtex3.0 and multicols.sty, 4 figures uuencode
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