56,958 research outputs found
Aggregation of Red Blood Cells: From Rouleaux to Clot Formation
Red blood cells are known to form aggregates in the form of rouleaux. This
aggregation process is believed to be reversible, but there is still no full
understanding on the binding mechanism. There are at least two competing
models, based either on bridging or on depletion. We review recent experimental
results on the single cell level and theoretical analyses of the depletion
model and of the influence of the cell shape on the binding strength. Another
important aggregation mechanism is caused by activation of platelets. This
leads to clot formation which is life saving in the case of wound healing but
also a major cause of death in the case of a thrombus induced stroke. We review
historical and recent results on the participation of red blood cells in clot
formation
Spin coating of an evaporating polymer solution
We consider a mathematical model of spin coating of a single polymer blended in a solvent. The model describes the one-dimensional development of the thin layer of the mixture as the layer thins due to flow created by a balance of viscous forces and centrifugal forces and due to evaporation of the solvent. In the model both the diffusivity of the solvent in the polymer and the viscosity of the mixture are very rapidly varying functions of the solvent volume fraction. Guided by numerical solutions an asymptotic analysis reveals a number of different possible behaviours of the thinning layer dependent on the nondimensional parameters describing the system.\ud
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The main practical interest is in controlling the appearance and development of a ``skin'' on the polymer where the solvent concentration reduces rapidly on the outer surface leaving the bulk of the layer still with high concentrations of solvent. The critical parameters controlling this behaviour are found to be the ratio of the diffusion to advection time scales, the ratio of the evaporation to advection time scales and , the ratio of the diffusivity of the initial mixture and the pure polymer. In particular, our analysis shows that for very small evaporation with skin formation can be prevented
Conjugate gradient solvers on Intel Xeon Phi and NVIDIA GPUs
Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics simulations typically spend most of the
runtime in inversions of the Fermion Matrix. This part is therefore frequently
optimized for various HPC architectures. Here we compare the performance of the
Intel Xeon Phi to current Kepler-based NVIDIA Tesla GPUs running a conjugate
gradient solver. By exposing more parallelism to the accelerator through
inverting multiple vectors at the same time, we obtain a performance greater
than 300 GFlop/s on both architectures. This more than doubles the performance
of the inversions. We also give a short overview of the Knights Corner
architecture, discuss some details of the implementation and the effort
required to obtain the achieved performance.Comment: 7 pages, proceedings, presented at 'GPU Computing in High Energy
Physics', September 10-12, 2014, Pisa, Ital
Interfacial Tension of Electrolyte Solutions
A theory is presented to account for the increase in surface tension of water
in the presence of electrolyte. Unlike the original ``grand-canonical''
calculation of Onsager and Samaras, which relied on the Gibbs adsorption
isotherm and lead to a result which could only be expressed as an infinite
series, our approach is ``canonical'' and produces an analytic formula for the
excess surface tension. For small concentrations of electrolyte, our result
reduces to the Onsager-Samaras limiting law.Comment: contains two figures. Journal of Chemical Physics, in pres
Transition metal oxides using quantum Monte Carlo
The transition metal-oxygen bond appears prominently throughout chemistry and
solid-state physics. Many materials, from biomolecules to ferroelectrics to the
components of supernova remnants contain this bond in some form. Many of these
materials' properties strongly depend on fine details of the TM-O bond and
intricate correlation effects, which make accurate calculations of their
properties very challenging. We present quantum Monte Carlo, an explicitly
correlated class of methods, to improve the accuracy of electronic structure
calculations over more traditional methods like density functional theory. We
find that unlike s-p type bonding, the amount of hybridization of the d-p bond
in TM-O materials is strongly dependant on electronic correlation.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, to appear as a topical review in J. Physics:
Condensed Matte
Superstructure high efficiency photovoltaics
A novel class of photovoltaic cascade structures is introduced which features multijunction upper subcells. These superstructure high efficiency photovoltaics (SHEP's) exhibit enhanced upper subcell spectral response because of the additional junctions which serve to reduce bulk recombination losses by decreasing the mean collection distance for photogenerated minority carriers. Two possible electrical configurations were studied and compared: a three-terminal scheme that allows both subcells to be operated at their individual maximum power points and a two-terminal configuration with an intercell ohmic contact for series interconnection. The three-terminal devices were found to be superior both in terms of beginning-of-life expectancy and radiation tolerance. Realistic simulations of three-terminal AlGaAs/GaAs SHEP's show that one sun AMO efficiencies in excess of 26 percent are possible
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