Electrostatic forces on charged surfaces of bilayer lipid membranes

Simulating protein-membrane interactions is an important and dynamic area of research. A proper definition of electrostatic forces on membrane surfaces is necessary for developing electromechanical models of protein-membrane interactions. Here we modeled the bilayer membrane as a continuum with general continuous distributions of lipids charges on membrane surfaces. A new electrostatic potential energy functional was then defined for this solvated protein-membrane system. We investigated the geometrical transformation properties of the membrane surfaces under a smooth velocity field. These properties allows us to apply the Hadamard-Zolesio structure theorem, and the electrostatic forces on membrane surfaces can be computed as the shape derivative of the electrostatic energy functional

Effect of Dzyaloshinskii Moriya interaction on magnetic vortex

The effect of the Dzyaloshinskii Moriya interaction on the vortex in magnetic microdisk was investigated by micro magnetic simulation based on the Landau Lifshitz Gilbert equation. Our results show that the DM interaction modifies the size of the vortex core, and also induces an out of plane magnetization component at the edge and inside the disk. The DM interaction can destabilizes one vortex handedness, generate a bias field to the vortex core and couple the vortex polarity and chirality. This DM-interaction-induced coupling can therefore provide a new way to control vortex polarity and chirality

Genetic Exponentially Fitted Method for Solving Multi-dimensional Drift-diffusion Equations

A general approach was proposed in this article to develop high-order exponentially fitted basis functions for finite element approximations of multi-dimensional drift-diffusion equations for modeling biomolecular electrodiffusion processes. Such methods are highly desirable for achieving numerical stability and efficiency. We found that by utilizing the one-one correspondence between continuous piecewise polynomial space of degree $k+1$ and the divergence-free vector space of degree $k$, one can construct high-order 2-D exponentially fitted basis functions that are strictly interpolative at a selected node set but are discontinuous on edges in general, spanning nonconforming finite element spaces. First order convergence was proved for the methods constructed from divergence-free Raviart-Thomas space $RT_0^0$ at two different node set

Scaling of nuclear modification factors for hadrons and light nuclei

The number of constituent quarks (NCQ-) scaling of hadrons and the number of constituent nucleons (NCN-) scaling of light nuclei are proposed for nuclear modification factors ($R_{cp}$) of hadrons and light nuclei, respectively, according to the experimental investigations in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Based on coalescence mechanism the scalings are performed for pions and protons in quark level, and light nuclei $d (\bar d)$ and $^3$He for nucleonic level, respectively, formed in Au + Au and Pb + Pb collisions and nice scaling behaviour emerges. NCQ or NCN scaling law of $R_{cp}$ can be respectively taken as a probe for quark or nucleon coalescence mechanism for the formation of hadron or light nuclei in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure