Entanglement Efficiencies in PT-Symmetric Quantum Mechanics

The degree of entanglement is determined for an arbitrary state of a broad class of PT-symmetric bipartite composite systems. Subsequently we quantify the rate with which entangled states are generated and show that this rate can be characterized by a small set of parameters. These relations allow one in principle to improve the ability of these systems to entangle states. It is also noticed that many relations resemble corresponding ones in conventional quantum mechanics.Comment: Published version with improved figures, 5 pages, 2 figure

WormBase 2012: more genomes, more data, new website

Since its release in 2000, WormBase (http://www.wormbase.org) has grown from a small resource focusing on a single species and serving a dedicated research community, to one now spanning 15 species essential to the broader biomedical and agricultural research fields. To enhance the rate of curation, we have automated the identification of key data in the scientific literature and use similar methodology for data extraction. To ease access to the data, we are collaborating with journals to link entities in research publications to their report pages at WormBase. To facilitate discovery, we have added new views of the data, integrated large-scale datasets and expanded descriptions of models for human disease. Finally, we have introduced a dramatic overhaul of the WormBase website for public beta testing. Designed to balance complexity and usability, the new site is species-agnostic, highly customizable, and interactive. Casual users and developers alike will be able to leverage the public RESTful application programming interface (API) to generate custom data mining solutions and extensions to the site. We report on the growth of our database and on our work in keeping pace with the growing demand for data, efforts to anticipate the requirements of users and new collaborations with the larger science community

Climate Diagnostics of the Extreme Floods in Peru During Early 2017

From January through March 2017, a series of extreme precipitation events occurred in coastal Peru, causing severe floods with hundreds of human casualties and billions of dollars in economic losses. The extreme precipitation was a result of unusually strong recurrent patterns of atmospheric and oceanic conditions, including extremely warm coastal sea surface temperatures (SST) and weakened trade winds. These climatic features and their causal relationship with the Peruvian precipitation were examined. Diagnostic analysis and model experiments suggest that an atmospheric forcing in early 2017, which was moderately linked to the Trans-Niño Index (TNI), initiated the local SST warming along coastal Peru that later expanded to the equator. In January 2017, soil moisture was increased by an unusual expansion of Amazonian rainfall. By March, localized and robust SST warming provided positive feedback to the weakening of the trade winds, leading to increased onshore wind and a subsequent enhancement in rainfall. The analysis points to a tendency towards more frequent and stronger variations in the water vapor flux convergence along the equator, which is associated with the increased precipitation in coastal Peru

Periodic bouncing of a plasmonic bubble in a binary liquid by competing solutal and thermal Marangoni forces

The physicochemical hydrodynamics of bubbles and droplets out of equilibrium, in particular with phase transitions, displays surprisingly rich and often counterintuitive phenomena. Here we experimentally and theoretically study the nucleation and early evolution of plasmonic bubbles in a binary liquid consisting of water and ethanol. Remarkably, the submillimeter plasmonic bubble is found to be periodically attracted to and repelled from the nanoparticle-decorated substrate, with frequencies of around a few kHz. We identify the competition between solutal and thermal Marangoni forces as origin of the periodic bouncing. The former arises due to the selective vaporization of ethanol at the substrate's side of the bubble, leading to a solutal Marangoni flow towards the hot substrate, which pushes the bubble away. The latter arises due to the temperature gradient across the bubble, leading to a thermal Marangoni flow away from the substrate which sucks the bubble towards it. We study the dependence of the frequency of the bouncing phenomenon from the control parameters of the system, namely the ethanol fraction and the laser power for the plasmonic heating. Our findings can be generalized to boiling and electrolytically or catalytically generated bubbles in multicomponent liquids.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

Worldline Instantons II: The Fluctuation Prefactor

In a previous paper [1], it was shown that the worldline expression for the nonperturbative imaginary part of the QED effective action can be approximated by the contribution of a special closed classical path in Euclidean spacetime, known as a worldline instanton. Here we extend this formalism to compute also the prefactor arising from quantum fluctuations about this classical closed path. We present a direct numerical approach for determining this prefactor, and we find a simple explicit formula for the prefactor in the cases where the inhomogeneous electric field is a function of just one spacetime coordinate. We find excellent agreement between our semiclassical approximation, conventional WKB, and recent numerical results using numerical worldline loops.Comment: 28 pages, 1 figure; v2 references added, version in PR

Glucocorticoid-Induced TNF Receptor Family-Related Protein Ligand is Requisite for Optimal Functioning of Regulatory CD4+ T Cells

Glucocorticoid-induced tumor necrosis factor receptor family-related protein (TNFRSF18, CD357) is constitutively expressed on regulatory T cells (Tregs) and is inducible on effector T cells. In this report, we examine the role of glucocorticoid-induced TNF receptor family-related protein ligand (GITR-L), which is expressed by antigen presenting cells, on the development and expansion of Tregs. We found that GITR-L is dispensable for the development of naturally occurring FoxP3+ Treg cells in the thymus. However, the expansion of Treg in GITR-L−/− mice is impaired after injection of the dendritic cells (DCs) inducing factor Flt3 ligand. Furthermore, DCs from the liver of GITR-L−/− mice were less efficient in inducing proliferation of antigen-specific Treg cells in vitro than the same cells from WT littermates. Upon gene transfer of ovalbumin into hepatocytes of GITR-L−/−FoxP3(GFP) reporter mice using adeno-associated virus (AAV8-OVA) the number of antigen-specific Treg in liver and spleen is reduced. The reduced number of Tregs resulted in an increase in the number of ovalbumin specific CD8+ T effector cells. This is highly significant because proliferation of antigen-specific CD8+ cells itself is dependent on the presence of GITR-L, as shown by in vitro experiments and by adoptive transfers into GITR-L−/−Rag−/− and Rag−/− mice that had received AAV8-OVA. Surprisingly, administering αCD3 significantly reduced the numbers of FoxP3+ Treg cells in the liver and spleen of GITR-L−/− but not WT mice. Because soluble Fc-GITR-L partially rescues αCD3 induced in vitro depletion of the CD103+ subset of FoxP3+CD4+ Treg cells, we conclude that expression of GITR-L by antigen presenting cells is requisite for optimal Treg-mediated regulation of immune responses including those in response during gene transfer