76,956 research outputs found
Measurement of surface potential decay of corona-charged polymer films using the pulsed electroacoustic method
In this paper, the pulsed electroacoustic (PEA) technique that allows the determination of space charge in a dielectric material has been used to monitor the electrical potential decay of corona-charged polyethylene films of different thicknesses. To prevent possible disturbance on the surface charge during the PEA measurements, two thin polyethylene films were placed on both sides of the corona-charged sample. Charge profiles measured at different times were used to calculate the potential across the sample. The obtained potential decay was compared with the potential measured using the conventional method. A good agreement has been obtained. More importantly, the charge profile obtained using the PEA technique indicates that bipolar charge injection has taken place
What if pulsars are born as strange stars?
The possibility and the implications of the idea, that pulsars are born as
strange stars, are explored. Strange stars are very likely to have atmospheres
with typical mass of but bare polar caps almost
throughout their lifetimes, if they are produced during supernova explosions. A
direct consequence of the bare polar cap is that the binding energies of both
positively and negatively charged particles at the bare quark surface are
nearly infinity, so that the vacuum polar gap sparking scenario as proposed by
Ruderman & Sutherland should operate above the cap, regardless of the sense of
the magnetic pole with respect to the rotational pole. Heat can not accumulate
on the polar cap region due to the large thermal conductivity on the bare quark
surface. We test this ``bare polar cap strange star'' (BPCSS) idea with the
present broad band emission data of pulsars, and propose several possible
criteria to distinguish BPCSSs from neutron stars.Comment: 31 pages in Latex. Accepted by AstroParticle Physic
The role of phosphorylation and dephosphorylation of shell matrix proteins in shell formation : an in vivo and in vitro study
Protein phosphorylation is a fundamental mechanism regulating many aspects of cellular processes. Shell matrix proteins (SMPs) control crystal nucleation, polymorphism, morphology, and organization of calcium carbonate crystallites during shell formation. SMPs phosphorylation is suggested to be important in shell formation but the mechanism is largely unknown. Here, to investigate the mechanism of phosphorylation of SMPs in biomineralization, we performed in vivo and in vitro experiment. By injection of antibody against the anti-phosphoserine/threonine /tyrosine into the extrapallial fluid of the pearl oyster Pinctada fucata, phosphorylation of matrix proteins were significantly reduced after 6 days. Newly formed prismatic layers and nacre tablet were found to grow abnormally with reduced crystallinity and possibly changed crystal orientation shown by Raman spectroscopy. In addition, regeneration of shells is also inhibited in vivo. Then, protein phosphatase was used to dephosphorylate SMPs extracted from the shells. After dephosphorylation, the ability of SMPs to inhibiting calcium carbonate formation have been reduced. Surprisingly, the ability of SMPs to modulate crystal morphology have been largely compromised although phosphorylation extent remained to be at least half of the control. Furthermore, dephosphorylation of SMPs changed the distribution of protein occlusions and decreased the amount of protein occlusions inside crystals shown by confocal imaging, indicating interaction between phosphorylated SMPs and crystals. Taken together, this study provides insight into the mechanism of phosphorylation of SMPs during shell formation
Two types of generalized integrable decompositions and new solitary-wave solutions for the modified Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation with symbolic computation
The modified Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (mKP) equation is shown in this paper to
be decomposable into the first two soliton equations of the 2N-coupled
Chen-Lee-Liu and Kaup-Newell hierarchies by respectively nonlinearizing two
sets of symmetry Lax pairs. In these two cases, the decomposed
(1+1)-dimensional nonlinear systems both have a couple of different Lax
representations, which means that there are two linear systems associated with
the mKP equation under the same constraint between the potential and
eigenfunctions. For each Lax representation of the decomposed (1+1)-dimensional
nonlinear systems, the corresponding Darboux transformation is further
constructed such that a series of explicit solutions of the mKP equation can be
recursively generated with the assistance of symbolic computation. In
illustration, four new families of solitary-wave solutions are presented and
the relevant stability is analyzed.Comment: 23 page
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