973 research outputs found
Origin of the Immirzi Parameter
Using quadratic spinor techniques we demonstrate that the Immirzi parameter
can be expressed as ratio between scalar and pseudo-scalar contributions in the
theory and can be interpreted as a measure of how Einstein gravity differs from
a generally constructed covariant theory for gravity. This interpretation is
independent of how gravity is quantized. One of the important advantage of
deriving the Immirzi parameter using the quadratic spinor techniques is to
allow the introduction of renormalization scale associated with the Immirzi
parameter through the expectation value of the spinor field upon quantization
Exact Master Equation and Quantum Decoherence of Two Coupled Harmonic Oscillators in a General Environment
In this paper we derive an exact master equation for two coupled quantum
harmonic oscillators interacting via bilinear coupling with a common
environment at arbitrary temperature made up of many harmonic oscillators with
a general spectral density function. We first show a simple derivation based on
the observation that the two-harmonic oscillator model can be effectively
mapped into that of a single harmonic oscillator in a general environment plus
a free harmonic oscillator. Since the exact one harmonic oscillator master
equation is available [Hu, Paz and Zhang, Phys. Rev. D \textbf{45}, 2843
(1992)], the exact master equation with all its coefficients for this two
harmonic oscillator model can be easily deduced from the known results of the
single harmonic oscillator case. In the second part we give an influence
functional treatment of this model and provide explicit expressions for the
evolutionary operator of the reduced density matrix which are useful for the
study of decoherence and disentanglement issues. We show three applications of
this master equation: on the decoherence and disentanglement of two harmonic
oscillators due to their interaction with a common environment under Markovian
approximation, and a derivation of the uncertainty principle at finite
temperature for a composite object, modeled by two interacting harmonic
oscillators. The exact master equation for two, and its generalization to ,
harmonic oscillators interacting with a general environment are expected to be
useful for the analysis of quantum coherence, entanglement, fluctuations and
dissipation of mesoscopic objects towards the construction of a theoretical
framework for macroscopic quantum phenomena.Comment: 35 pages, revtex, no figures, 2nd version, references added, to
appear in PR
High expression FUT1 and B3GALT5 is an independent predictor of postoperative recurrence and survival in hepatocellular carcinoma.
Cancer may arise from dedifferentiation of mature cells or maturation-arrested stem cells. Previously we reported that definitive endoderm from which liver was derived, expressed Globo H, SSEA-3 and SSEA-4. In this study, we examined the expression of their biosynthetic enzymes, FUT1, FUT2, B3GALT5 and ST3GAL2, in 135 hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tissues by qRT-PCR. High expression of either FUT1 or B3GALT5 was significantly associated with advanced stages and poor outcome. Kaplan Meier survival analysis showed significantly shorter relapse-free survival (RFS) for those with high expression of either FUT1 or B3GALT5 (P = 0.024 and 0.001, respectively) and shorter overall survival (OS) for those with high expression of B3GALT5 (P = 0.017). Combination of FUT1 and B3GALT5 revealed that high expression of both genes had poorer RFS and OS than the others (P < 0.001). Moreover, multivariable Cox regression analysis identified the combination of B3GALT5 and FUT1 as an independent predictor for RFS (HR: 2.370, 95% CI: 1.505-3.731, P < 0.001) and OS (HR: 2.153, 95% CI: 1.188-3.902, P = 0.012) in HCC. In addition, the presence of Globo H, SSEA-3 and SSEA-4 in some HCC tissues and their absence in normal liver was established by immunohistochemistry staining and mass spectrometric analysis
i-Genome: A database to summarize oligonucleotide data in genomes
BACKGROUND: Information on the occurrence of sequence features in genomes is crucial to comparative genomics, evolutionary analysis, the analyses of regulatory sequences and the quantitative evaluation of sequences. Computing the frequencies and the occurrences of a pattern in complete genomes is time-consuming. RESULTS: The proposed database provides information about sequence features generated by exhaustively computing the sequences of the complete genome. The repetitive elements in the eukaryotic genomes, such as LINEs, SINEs, Alu and LTR, are obtained from Repbase. The database supports various complete genomes including human, yeast, worm, and 128 microbial genomes. CONCLUSIONS: This investigation presents and implements an efficiently computational approach to accumulate the occurrences of the oligonucleotides or patterns in complete genomes. A database is established to maintain the information of the sequence features, including the distributions of oligonucleotide, the gene distribution, the distribution of repetitive elements in genomes and the occurrences of the oligonucleotides. The database can provide more effective and efficient way to access the repetitive features in genomes
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