A case of eosinophilic fasciitis and generalized morphea overlap

A 60-year old man developed skin hardening and edema on his extremities. Although he had been treated with oral prednisolone at another hospital, skin stiffness relapsed during tapering of prednisolone. At the initial visit to our department, physical examination showed skin hardening of the extremities and also symmetric erythematous macules on the back. Histological examination revealed fasciitis on the forearm and morphea on the back. Eosinophilic fasciitis is occasionally associated with morphea. However, cases of concurrent eosinophilic fasciitis and generalized morphea are rare. In the present case, CD34 was differentially expressed in both lesions, suggesting eosinophilic fasciitis and morphea are separate diseases with different origin of mesenchymal cells

Nonequilibrium Green's Function Approach to Phonon Transport in Defective Carbon Nanotubes

We have developed a new theoretical formalism for phonon transport in nanostructures using the nonequilibrium phonon Green's function technique and have applied it to thermal conduction in defective carbon nanotubes. The universal quantization of low-temperature thermal conductance in carbon nanotubes can be observed even in the presence of local structural defects such as vacancies and Stone-Wales defects, since the long wavelength acoustic phonons are not scattered by local defects. At room temperature, however, thermal conductance is critically affected by defect scattering since incident phonons are scattered by localized phonons around the defects. We find a remarkable change from quantum to classical features for the thermal transport through defective CNTs with increasing temperature.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

Linear Programming Relaxations for Goldreich's Generators over Non-Binary Alphabets

Goldreich suggested candidates of one-way functions and pseudorandom generators included in $\mathsf{NC}^0$. It is known that randomly generated Goldreich's generator using $(r-1)$-wise independent predicates with $n$ input variables and $m=C n^{r/2}$ output variables is not pseudorandom generator with high probability for sufficiently large constant $C$. Most of the previous works assume that the alphabet is binary and use techniques available only for the binary alphabet. In this paper, we deal with non-binary generalization of Goldreich's generator and derives the tight threshold for linear programming relaxation attack using local marginal polytope for randomly generated Goldreich's generators. We assume that $u(n)\in \omega(1)\cap o(n)$ input variables are known. In that case, we show that when $r\ge 3$, there is an exact threshold $\mu_\mathrm{c}(k,r):=\binom{k}{r}^{-1}\frac{(r-2)^{r-2}}{r(r-1)^{r-1}}$ such that for $m=\mu\frac{n^{r-1}}{u(n)^{r-2}}$, the LP relaxation can determine linearly many input variables of Goldreich's generator if $\mu>\mu_\mathrm{c}(k,r)$, and that the LP relaxation cannot determine $\frac1{r-2} u(n)$ input variables of Goldreich's generator if $\mu<\mu_\mathrm{c}(k,r)$. This paper uses characterization of LP solutions by combinatorial structures called stopping sets on a bipartite graph, which is related to a simple algorithm called peeling algorithm.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figur

Electronic Transport in Fullerene C20 Bridge Assisted by Molecular Vibrations

The effect of molecular vibrations on electronic transport is investigated with the smallest fullerene C20 bridge, utilizing the Keldysh nonequilibrium Green's function techniques combined with the tight-binding molecular-dynamics method. Large discontinuous steps appear in the differential conductance when the applied bias-voltage matches particular vibrational energies. The magnitude of the step is found to vary considerably with the vibrational mode and to depend on the local electronic states besides the strength of electron-vibration coupling. On the basis of this finding, a novel way to control the molecular motion by adjusting the gate voltage is proposed.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

Fermi Surface and Magnetism in the Kondo lattice: A Continuum Field Theory Approach

We consider the Fermi surface inside the antiferromagnetic ordered region of a Kondo lattice system in an arbitrary dimension higher than one. We establish the existence of ${\rm AF_S}$, an antiferromagnetic phase whose Fermi surface is ``small,'' in the sense that the local moments do not participate in the Fermi-surface formation. This is in contrast to the ``large'' Fermi surface that is typically assumed for heavy fermion metals. We extend our earlier work to the case that the Fermi surface of the conduction electrons intersects the antiferromagnetic Brillouin zone boundary. Our results provide a new perspective on local quantum criticality. In addition, our results imply that, for the ${\rm AF_S}$ phase, it is important to keep track of the dynamical screening processes; we suggest that this effect is not captured in a recent variational Monte-Carlo study of the Kondo lattice.Comment: 2 pages, 1 embedded eps figure, proceedings of SCES'0

D∗D^{\ast} polarization vs. RD(∗)R_{D^{(\ast)}} anomalies in the leptoquark models

Polarization measurements in $\bar{B} \to D^{(\ast)} \tau \overline{\nu}$ are useful to check consistency in new physics explanations for the $R_{D}$ and $R_{D^{\ast}}$ anomalies. In this paper, we investigate the $D^{\ast}$ and $\tau$ polarizations and focus on the new physics contributions to the fraction of a longitudinal $D^{\ast}$ polarization ($F_{L}^{D^{\ast}}$), which is recently measured by the Belle collaboration $F_{L}^{D^{\ast}} = 0.60 \pm 0.09$, in model-independent manner and in each single leptoquark model (${\rm R}_2$, ${\rm S}_1$ and ${\rm U}_1$) that can naturally explain the $R_{D^{(\ast)}}$ anomalies. It is found that $\mathcal{B}(B_c^{+} \to \tau^{+} \nu)$ severely restricts deviation from the Standard Model (SM) prediction of $F_{L, \textrm{SM}}^{D^{\ast}} = 0.46 \pm 0.04$ in the leptoquark models: [0.43, 0.44], [0.42, 0.48], and [0.43, 0.47] are predicted as a range of $F_{L}^{D^{\ast}}$ for the ${\rm R}_2$, ${\rm S}_1$, and ${\rm U}_1$ leptoquark models, respectively, where the current data of $R_{D^{(\ast)}}$ is satisfied at $1\,\sigma$ level. It is also shown that the $\tau$ polarization observables can much deviate from the SM predictions. The Belle II experiment, therefore, can check such correlations between $R_{D^{(\ast)}}$ and the polarization observables, and discriminate among the leptoquark models.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures, 1 table; references added, version published in JHE