Proton Cumulants and Correlation Functions in Au + Au Collisions at sNN\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}}=7.7-200 GeV from UrQMD Model

We studied the acceptance dependence of proton cumulants (up to fourth order) and correlation functions in 0--5\% most central Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_\text{NN}}$=7.7, 11.5, 19.6, 27, 39, 62.4 and 200 GeV from UrQMD model. We found that high order proton cumulants show suppressions at large acceptance. By decomposing the proton cumulants into linear combination of multi-proton correlation functions, we observed the two-proton correlation functions always show negative values due to the effects of baryon number conservations. The three and four-proton correlation functions are close to zero and show negligible acceptance dependence. We further observed that the proton cumulants and correlation functions follow similar trends and show a scaling behavior when plotting the results versus mean number of protons. The comparisons between experimental data and the UrQMD calculations show that the non-monotonic energy dependence of proton correlation functions measured by STAR experiment cannot be described by the UrQMD model. The UrQMD calculations can provide us baselines for the experimental studies of the proton cumulants and correlation functions. Finally, we propose to measure the rapidity dependence of the reduced proton correlation functions to search for the QCD critical point in heavy-ion collisions.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, Accepted by Physics Letters

A 14-mW PLL-less receiver in 0.18-μm CMOS for Chinese electronic toll collection standard

This is the accepted manuscript version of the following article: Xiaofeng He, et al., “A 14-mW PLL-less receiver in 0.18-μm CMOS for Chinese electronic toll collection standard”, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs, Vol. 61(10): 763-767, August 2014. The final published version is available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6871304/ © 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The design of a 14-mW receiver without phase-locked loop for the Chinese electronic toll collection (ETC) system in a standard 0.18-μm CMOS process is presented in this brief. Since the previously published work was mainly based on vehicle-powered systems, low power consumption was not the primary goal of such a system. In contrast, the presented system is designed for a battery-powered system. Utilizing the presented receiver architecture, the entire receiver only consumes 7.8 mA, at the supply voltage of 1.8 V, which indicates a power saving of at least 38% compared with other state-of-the-art designs for the same application. To verify the performance, the bit error rate is measured to be better than 10-6, which well satisfies the Chinese ETC standard. Moreover, the sensitivity of the designed receiver can be readjusted to -50 dBm, which is required by the standard.Peer reviewe

The efficacy of Ozone Therapy on different types of lumbar disc herniation : Proposal for guidance updates [abstract]

Objective. To explore the possible mechanisms of pain relief by ozone therapy in patients with different types of lumbar intervertebral disc protrusion. Methods. The medical records of a total of 250 patients with protrusion of lumbar intervertebral disc (159 males, 91 females, aged 14?85 years) admitted in the South Hospital from January 2009 to June 2014 were retrospectively reviewed. Patients with protrusion of lumbar intervertebral disc were divided into four groups according to T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging and digital subtraction angiography findings during ozone injection: - type I, fibrous ring rupture without nucleus pulposus protrusion, - type II, fibrous ring rupture with nucleus pulposus protrusion, - type III, non-ruptured fibrous ring without nucleus pulposus protrusion, - type IV, non-ruptured fibrous ring with nucleus pulposus protrusion. Visual analogue scale (VAS) pain scores were used to evaluate treatment efficacy among patients with different types of lumbar intervertebral disc protrusion before surgery, and at 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, and 12 months after surgery. Results. Atrophy of the nucleus pulposus was observed in 63% of type II and IV patients within 1 year after surgery. The VAS scores at 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, and 12 months after surgery decreased by an average of 4.47, 4.41, 4.77, and 4.85 for type I to IV disease, respectively. More specifically, scores of type I patients were decreased by 4.57, 4.72, 4.98, and 4.93, respectively, during the follow-up period. Scores of type II patients were decreased by 4.78, 461, 5.08, and 5; type III cases by 3.72, 377, 3.97, and 4.84, respectively; and type IV cases by 4.24, 4.10, 4.45, and 4.41, respectively. In addition, the postoperative VAS score of 94.4%, 91.6%, 89.6% and 90.8% of patients were decreased by > 25%, i.e., the pain was alleviated, with type I patients demonstrating a pain relief rate of 96.3% during the entire follow-up period, along with 93.5% and 89.8%, and 89.8%, respectively for type II patients, 76.9%, 84.6%, 76.9%, and 87.2%, respectively for type III patients, and 77.6%, 79.6%, 79.6%, and 79.6%, respectively for type IV patients. Conclusion. Ozone therapy is an effective pain-relief therapy for lumbar intervertebral disc protrusion. The degree of pain relief was closely related to rupture of the fibrous ring and protrusion of the nucleus pulposus. Pain relief efficacy was improved in patients with fibrous ring rupture and nucleus pulposus, while the pain relief effects in patients without fibrous ring rupture or nucleus pulposus protrusion were poor

Decoupled, Linear, and Energy Stable Finite Element Method for the Cahn-Hilliard-Navier-Stokes-Darcy Phase Field Model

In this paper, we consider the numerical approximation for a phase field model of the coupled two-phase free flow and two-phase porous media flow. This model consists of Cahn—Hilliard—Navier—Stokes equations in the free flow region and Cahn—Hilliard—Darcy equations in the porous media region that are coupled by seven interface conditions. The coupled system is decoupled based on the interface conditions and the solution values on the interface from the previous time step. A fully discretized scheme with finite elements for the spatial discretization is developed to solve the decoupled system. In order to deal with the difficulties arising from the interface conditions, the decoupled scheme needs to be constructed appropriately for the interface terms, and a modified discrete energy is introduced with an interface component. Furthermore, the scheme is linearized and energy stable. Hence, at each time step one need only solve a linear elliptic system for each of the two decoupled equations. Stability of the model and the proposed method is rigorously proved. Numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the features of the proposed numerical method and verify the theoretical conclusions. © 2018 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

Sparse Fast Fourier Transform and its application in intelligent diagnosis system of train rolling bearing

Healthy status monitoring of train bearing online is very meaningful work. But as traditional diagnosis system does, performing Fourier spectrum with the datum from more than 200 bearings in a marshalling train is an enormous challenge. Here a healthy status monitoring system of train rolling bearing based on Sparse Fast Fourier Transform (SFFT) is proposed. The monitoring system consists two sequential parts. First, extract fault features based on SFFT spectrum and other time-domain parameters. According to train bearing working environment, altogether 7 fault features are extracted in this paper. Another part is constructing a classifier based on BP neural network. Experimental results show that the system proposed here achieves gratifying results comparing with traditional fault diagnosis syste

Osthole represses growth of multiple myeloma cells by regulating PI3K/AKT and ERK pathways

Purpose: To identify the effects of osthole on the growth of multiple myeloma cells and determine the probable molecular mechanism of action. Methods: 3-(4, 5-Dimethyl-2-thiazolyl)-2, 5-diphenyl-2-H-tetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay was used to measure multiple myeloma cell viability. Flow cytometry was used for the evaluation of cell cycle and apoptosis. For protein expression measurement, western blot analysis was employed. Results: The results show that osthole dose- and time-dependently suppressed the viability of multiple myeloma cells (p < 0.01). Osthole also dose-dependently initiated multiple myeloma cell cycle arrest in G0/G1 phase (p < 0.05) and induced multiple myeloma cell apoptosis (p < 0.01). Moreover, western blotting revealed a significant reduction in cyclin D1 (p < 0.01) and induction in p21, cleaved caspase 3 and cleaved poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (p < 0.01). Furthermore, osthole treatment significantly downregulated the phosphorylation levels of protein kinase B (AKTT308), AKTS473, and extracellular regulated protein kinase 1/2 (ERK1/2). Conclusion: These findings demonstrated that osthole inhibited viability and induced cell cycle arrest and apoptosis of multiple myeloma cells by regulating PI3K/AKT and ERK pathways. Osthole may be considered as a potential anticancer agent for the therapy of multiple myeloma