464 research outputs found
Friction force on slow charges moving over supported graphene
We provide a theoretical model that describes the dielectric coupling of a 2D
layer of graphene, represented by a polarization function in the Random Phase
Approximation, and a semi-infinite 3D substrate, represented by a surface
response function in a non-local formulation. We concentrate on the role of the
dynamic response of the substrate for low-frequency excitations of the combined
graphene-substrate system, which give rise to the stopping force on slowly
moving charges above graphene. A comparison of the dielectric loss function
with experimental HREELS data for graphene on a SiC substrate is used to
estimate the damping rate in graphene and to reveal the importance of phonon
excitations in an insulating substrate. A signature of the hybridization
between graphene's pi plasmon and the substrate's phonon is found in the
stopping force. A friction coefficient that is calculated for slow charges
moving above graphene on a metallic substrate shows an interplay between the
low-energy single-particle excitations in both systems.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Nanotechnology for a special issue
related to the NGC 2009 conference (http://asdn.net/ngc2009/index.shtml
Plasma biomarkers of brain injury in COVID-19 patients with neurological symptoms
Objective: Neurological symptoms (NS) were often reported in COVID-19 infection. We examined the plasma levels of glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) and S100B together, as brain injury biomarkers, in relation to persistent NS in a cohort of patients with COVID-19 during the acute phase of the disease.Methods: A total of 20 healthy controls and 58 patients with confirmed COVID-19 were enrolled in this prospective study. Serum GFAP and S100B levels were measured by using enzymle linked immunoassay method from blood samples.Results: Serum GFAP levels were found to be significantly higher in the severe group than in the controls (p = 0.007). However, serum S100B levels were similar between control and disease groups (p > 0.05). No significant results for GFAP and S100B were obtained between the disease groups depending on whether the sampling time was below or above 5 days (p > 0.05). We did not find a correlation between serum GFAP and S100B levels and the presence of NS (p > 0.05). However, serum S100B levels were slightly higher in patients with multiple NS than in those with a single symptom (p = 0.044).Conclusions: Elevated GFAP was associated with disease severity but not with NS in COVID-19 patients. Whereas, high serum S100B was associated with the multipl NS in these patients. Our data suggest that GFAP and S100B may be of limited value currently in order to represent the neuronal damage, though serving a basis for the future work
Groundwater depletion embedded in international food trade
Recent hydrological modelling1 and Earth observations2,3 have located and quantified alarming rates of groundwater depletion worldwide. This depletion is primarily due to water withdrawals for irrigation1,2,4, but its connection with the main driver of irrigation, global food consumption, has not yet been explored. Here we show that approximately eleven per cent of non-renewable groundwater use for irrigation is embedded in international food trade, of which two-thirds are exported by Pakistan, the USA and India alone. Our quantification of groundwater depletion embedded in the world’s food trade is based on a combination of global, cropspecific estimates of non-renewable groundwater abstraction and international food trade data. A vast majority of the world’s population lives in countries sourcing nearly all their staple crop imports from partners who deplete groundwater to produce these crops, highlighting risks for global food and water security. Some countries, such as the USA, Mexico, Iran and China, are particularly exposed to these risks because they both produce and import food irrigated from rapidly depleting aquifers. Our results could help to improve the sustainability of global food production and groundwater resource management by identifying priority regions and agricultural products at risk as well as the end consumers of these products
Absorption of Electro-magnetic Waves in a Magnetized Medium
In continuation to our earlier work, in which the structure of the vacuum
polarisation tensor in a medium was analysed in presence of a background
electro-magnetic field, we discuss the absorptive part of the vacuum
polarization tensor. Using the real time formalism of finite temperature field
theory we calculate the absorptive part of 1-loop vacuum polarisation tensor in
the weak field limit (). Estimates of the absorption probability are
also made for different physical conditions of the background medium.Comment: 9 Pages. One figure. LaTe
Measuring Invisible Particle Masses Using a Single Short Decay Chain
We consider the mass measurement at hadron colliders for a decay chain of two
steps, which ends with a missing particle. Such a topology appears as a
subprocess of signal events of many new physics models which contain a dark
matter candidate. From the two visible particles coming from the decay chain,
only one invariant mass combination can be formed and hence it is na\"ively
expected that the masses of the three invisible particles in the decay chain
cannot be determined from a single end point of the invariant mass
distribution. We show that the event distribution in the
vs. invariant mass-squared plane, where , are the transverse
energies of the two visible particles, contains the information of all three
invisible particle masses and allows them to be extracted individually. The
experimental smearing and combinatorial issues pose challenges to the mass
measurements. However, in many cases the three invisible particle masses in the
decay chain can be determined with reasonable accuracies.Comment: 45 pages, 32 figure
Relating the Kick Velocities of Young Pulsars with Magnetic Field Growth Timescales Inferred From Braking Indices
A nascent neutron star may be exposed to fallback accretion soon after the
proto-neutron star stage. This high accretion episode can submerge the magnetic
field deep in the crust. The diffusion of the magnetic field back to the
surface will take hundreds to millions of years depending on the amount of mass
accreted and the consequent depth the field is buried. Neutron stars with large
kick velocities will accrete less amount of fallback material leading to
shallower submergence of their fields and shorter time-scales for the growth of
their fields. We obtain the relation between
the space velocity of the neutron star and Ohmic time-scale for the growth of
the magnetic field. We compare this with the relation between the measured
transverse velocities, and the field growth time-scales,
, inferred from the measured braking indices. We find that the
observational data is consistent with the theoretical prediction though the
small number of data precludes a strong conclusion. Measurement of the
transverse velocities of pulsars B150958, J18460258, J11196127 and
J17343333 would increase the number of the data and strongly contribute to
understanding whether pulsar fields grow following fallback accretion.Comment: Accepted to MNRAS Letters. Title and abstract are change
A complete solution classification and unified algorithmic treatment for the one- and two-step asymmetric S-transverse mass M ˜ T 2 event scale statistic
Stop the Top Background of the Stop Search
The main background for the supersymmetric stop direct production search
comes from Standard Model ttbar events. For the single-lepton search channel,
we introduce a few kinematic variables to further suppress this background by
focusing on its dileptonic and semileptonic topologies. All are defined to have
end points in the background, but not signal distributions. They can
substantially improve the stop signal significance and mass reach when combined
with traditional kinematic variables such as the total missing transverse
energy. Among them, our variable M^W_T2 has the best overall performance
because it uses all available kinematic information, including the on-shell
mass of both W's. We see 20%-30% improvement on the discovery significance and
estimate that the 8 TeV LHC run with 20 fb-1 of data would be able to reach an
exclusion limit of 650-700 GeV for direct stop production, as long as the stop
decays dominantly to the top quark and a light stable neutralino. Most of the
mass range required for the supersymmetric solution of the naturalness problem
in the standard scenario can be covered.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure
The r-modes in accreting neutron stars with magneto-viscous boundary layers
We explore the dynamics of the r-modes in accreting neutron stars in two
ways. First, we explore how dissipation in the magneto-viscous boundary layer
(MVBL) at the crust-core interface governs the damping of r-mode perturbations
in the fluid interior. Two models are considered: one assuming an
ordinary-fluid interior, the other taking the core to consist of superfluid
neutrons, type II superconducting protons, and normal electrons. We show,
within our approximations, that no solution to the magnetohydrodynamic
equations exists in the superfluid model when both the neutron and proton
vortices are pinned. However, if just one species of vortex is pinned, we can
find solutions. When the neutron vortices are pinned and the proton vortices
are unpinned there is much more dissipation than in the ordinary-fluid model,
unless the pinning is weak. When the proton vortices are pinned and the neutron
vortices are unpinned the dissipation is comparable or slightly less than that
for the ordinary-fluid model, even when the pinning is strong. We also find in
the superfluid model that relatively weak radial magnetic fields ~ 10^9 G (10^8
K / T)^2 greatly affect the MVBL, though the effects of mutual friction tend to
counteract the magnetic effects. Second, we evolve our two models in time,
accounting for accretion, and explore how the magnetic field strength, the
r-mode saturation amplitude, and the accretion rate affect the cyclic evolution
of these stars. If the r-modes control the spin cycles of accreting neutron
stars we find that magnetic fields can affect the clustering of the spin
frequencies of low mass x-ray binaries (LMXBs) and the fraction of these that
are currently emitting gravitational waves.Comment: 19 pages, 8 eps figures, RevTeX; corrected minor typos and added a
referenc
Human-water interface in hydrological modeling: Current status and future directions
Over the last decades, the global population has been rapidly increasing and human activities have altered terrestrial water fluxes at an unprecedented scale. The phenomenal growth of the human footprint has significantly modified hydrological processes in various ways (e.g., irrigation, artificial dams, and water diversion) and at various scales (from a watershed to the globe). During the early 1990s, awareness of the potential water scarcity led to the first detailed global water resource assessments. Shortly thereafter, in order to analyse the human perturbation on terrestrial water resources, the first generation of large-scale hydrological models (LHMs) was produced. However, at this early stage few models considered the interaction between terrestrial water fluxes and human activities, including water use and reservoir regulation, and even fewer models distinguished water use from surface water and groundwater resources. Since the early 2000s, a growing number of LHMs are incorporating human impacts on hydrological cycle, yet human representations in hydrological models remain challenging. In this paper we provide a synthesis of progress in the development and application of human impact modeling in LHMs. We highlight a number of key challenges and discuss possible improvements in order to better represent the human-water interface in hydrological models
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