3,057 research outputs found
In situ imaging of field emission from individual carbon nanotubes and their structural damage
©2002 American Institute of Physics. The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://link.aip.org/link/?APPLAB/80/856/1DOI:10.1063/1.1446994Field emission of individual carbon nanotubes was observed by in situ
transmission electron microscopy. A fluctuation in emission current was due to a
variation in distance between the nanotube tip and the counter electrode owing
to a "head-shaking" effect of the nanotube during field emission. Strong
field-induced structural damage of a nanotube occurs in two ways: a
piece-by-piece and segment-by-segment pilling process of the graphitic layers,
and a concentrical layer-by-layer stripping process. The former is believed
owing to a strong electrostatic force, and the latter is likely due to heating
produced by emission current that flowed through the most outer graphitic
layers
Photonic Clusters
We show through rigorous calculations that dielectric microspheres can be
organized by an incident electromagnetic plane wave into stable cluster
configurations, which we call photonic molecules. The long-range optical
binding force arises from multiple scattering between the spheres. A photonic
molecule can exhibit a multiplicity of distinct geometries, including
quasicrystal-like configurations, with exotic dynamics. Linear stability
analysis and dynamical simulations show that the equilibrium configurations can
correspond with either stable or a type of quasi-stable states exhibiting
periodic particle motion in the presence of frictional dissipation.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Alterations in the processing of non-drug-related affective stimuli in abstinent heroin addicts.
Long-term exposure to drug may alter the neural system associated with affective processing, as evidenced by both clinical observations and behavioral data documenting dysfunctions in emotional experiences and processing in drug addicts. Although many imaging studies examined neural responses to drug or drug-related cues in addicts, there have been few studies explicitly designed to reveal their neural abnormalities in processing non-drug-related natural affective materials. The present study asked abstinent heroin addicts and normal controls to passively view standardized affective pictures of positive, negative, or neutral valence and compared their brain activities with functional MRI. Compared to normal controls, addicts showed reduced activation in right amygdala in response to the affective pictures, consistent with previous reports of blunted subjective experience for affective stimuli in addicts. Furthermore, in two visual cortical areas BA 19 and 37, while the controls showed greater responses to positive pictures than to negative ones replicating literature findings, the addicts showed the opposite pattern. The results reveal a complex pattern of altered processing of non-drug-related affective materials in addicts showing both heightened and blunted neural responses in different brain regions and for different stimulus valence. The present study highlights the importance of brain imaging research on drug addicts' processing of affective stimuli in understanding disruptions in their emotion circuitry
Effects of dimers on cooperation in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game
We investigate the evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game in structured
populations by introducing dimers, which are defined as that two players in
each dimer always hold a same strategy. We find that influences of dimers on
cooperation depend on the type of dimers and the population structure. For
those dimers in which players interact with each other, the cooperation level
increases with the number of dimers though the cooperation improvement level
depends on the type of network structures. On the other hand, the dimers, in
which there are not mutual interactions, will not do any good to the
cooperation level in a single community, but interestingly, will improve the
cooperation level in a population with two communities. We explore the
relationship between dimers and self-interactions and find that the effects of
dimers are similar to that of self-interactions. Also, we find that the dimers,
which are established over two communities in a multi-community network, act as
one type of interaction through which information between communities is
communicated by the requirement that two players in a dimer hold a same
strategy.Comment: 12 pages and 3 figure
Metropolis simulations of Met-Enkephalin with solvent-accessible area parameterizations
We investigate the solvent-accessible area method by means of Metropolis
simulations of the brain peptide Met-Enkephalin at 300. For the energy
function ECEPP/2 nine atomic solvation parameter (ASP) sets are studied. The
simulations are compared with one another, with simulations with a distance
dependent electrostatic permittivity , and with vacuum
simulations (). Parallel tempering and the biased Metropolis
techniques RM are employed and their performance is evaluated. The measured
observables include energy and dihedral probability densities (pds), integrated
autocorrelation times, and acceptance rates. Two of the ASP sets turn out to be
unsuitable for these simulations. For all other systems selected configurations
are minimized in search of the global energy minima, which are found for the
vacuum and the system, but for none of the ASP models. Other
observables show a remarkable dependence on the ASPs. In particular, we find
three ASP sets for which the autocorrelations at 300K are considerably
smaller than for vacuum simulations.Comment: 10 pages and 8 figure
c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase-dependent upregulation of DR5 mediates cooperative induction of apoptosis by perifosine and TRAIL
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Perifosine, an alkylphospholipid tested in phase II clinical trials, modulates the extrinsic apoptotic pathway and cooperates with tumor necrosis factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) to augment apoptosis. The current study focuses on revealing the mechanisms by which perifosine enhances TRAIL-induced apoptosis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The combination of perifosine and TRAIL was more active than each single agent alone in inducing apoptosis of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma cells and inhibiting the growth of xenografts. Interestingly, perifosine primarily increased cell surface levels of DR5 although it elevated the expression of both DR4 and DR5. Blockade of DR5, but not DR4 upregulation, via small interfering RNA (siRNA) inhibited perifosine/TRAIL-induced apoptosis. Perifosine increased phosphorylated c-Jun NH<sub>2</sub>-terminal kinase (JNK) and c-Jun levels, which were paralleled with DR4 and DR5 induction. However, only DR5 upregulaiton induced by perifosine could be abrogated by both the JNK inhibitor SP600125 and JNK siRNA. The antioxidants, N-acetylcysteine and glutathione, but not vitamin C or tiron, inhibited perifosine-induced elevation of p-c-Jun, DR4 and DR5. Moreover, no increased production of reactive oxygen species was detected in perifosine-treated cells although reduced levels of intracellular GSH were measured.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>DR5 induction plays a critical role in mediating perifosine/TRAIL-induced apoptosis. Perifosine induces DR5 expression through a JNK-dependent mechanism independent of reactive oxygen species.</p
Theoretic specific heat from spin wave in comparison with experimental results in Fe-oxide superconductors
Low temperature electrical measurements of the resistivity, the Hall effect and the magnetoconductivity were performed on an InGaN sample having an electron concentration far above the critical value for the metalinsulator transition. Weak localization effect and two-band model were used to analyze the magnetoconductivity data. The temperature dependence of the inelastic scattering time was extracted from the magnetoconductivity data at low temperatures. It was found that the inelastic scattering time is proportional to T⁻¹.⁶³, suggesting that electron–electron interactions are dominant
The NLO QCD Corrections to Meson Production in Decays
The decay width of to meson is evaluated at the next-to-leading
order(NLO) accuracy in strong interaction. Numerical calculation shows that the
NLO correction to this process is remarkable. The quantum
chromodynamics(QCD)renormalization scale dependence of the results is obviously
depressed, and hence the uncertainties lying in the leading order calculation
are reduced.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures; references added; expressions and typos ammende
Observation of and confirmation of its large branching fraction
The baryonic decay is observed, and the
corresponding branching fraction is measured to be
, where the first uncertainty is statistical
and second systematic. The data sample used in this analysis was collected with
the BESIII detector operating at the BEPCII double-ring collider with
a center-of-mass energy of 4.178~GeV and an integrated luminosity of
3.19~fb. The result confirms the previous measurement by the CLEO
Collaboration and is of greatly improved precision, which may deepen our
understanding of the dynamical enhancement of the W-annihilation topology in
the charmed meson decays
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