339 research outputs found
Diffusive transport and self-consistent dynamics in coupled maps
The study of diffusion in Hamiltonian systems has been a problem of interest
for a number of years.
In this paper we explore the influence of self-consistency on the diffusion
properties of systems described by coupled symplectic maps. Self-consistency,
i.e. the back-influence of the transported quantity on the velocity field of
the driving flow, despite of its critical importance, is usually overlooked in
the description of realistic systems, for example in plasma physics. We propose
a class of self-consistent models consisting of an ensemble of maps globally
coupled through a mean field. Depending on the kind of coupling, two different
general types of self-consistent maps are considered: maps coupled to the field
only through the phase, and fully coupled maps, i.e. through the phase and the
amplitude of the external field. The analogies and differences of the diffusion
properties of these two kinds of maps are discussed in detail.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figure
Long-time discrete particle effects versus kinetic theory in the self-consistent single-wave model
The influence of the finite number N of particles coupled to a monochromatic
wave in a collisionless plasma is investigated. For growth as well as damping
of the wave, discrete particle numerical simulations show an N-dependent long
time behavior resulting from the dynamics of individual particles. This
behavior differs from the one due to the numerical errors incurred by Vlasov
approaches. Trapping oscillations are crucial to long time dynamics, as the
wave oscillations are controlled by the particle distribution inhomogeneities
and the pulsating separatrix crossings drive the relaxation towards thermal
equilibrium.Comment: 11 pages incl. 13 figs. Phys. Rev. E, in pres
Fractional reaction-diffusion equations
In a series of papers, Saxena, Mathai, and Haubold (2002, 2004a, 2004b)
derived solutions of a number of fractional kinetic equations in terms of
generalized Mittag-Leffler functions which provide the extension of the work of
Haubold and Mathai (1995, 2000). The subject of the present paper is to
investigate the solution of a fractional reaction-diffusion equation. The
results derived are of general nature and include the results reported earlier
by many authors, notably by Jespersen, Metzler, and Fogedby (1999) for
anomalous diffusion and del-Castillo-Negrete, Carreras, and Lynch (2003) for
reaction-diffusion systems with L\'evy flights. The solution has been developed
in terms of the H-function in a compact form with the help of Laplace and
Fourier transforms. Most of the results obtained are in a form suitable for
numerical computation.Comment: LaTeX, 17 pages, corrected typo
Nyquist method for Wigner-Poisson quantum plasmas
By means of the Nyquist method, we investigate the linear stability of
electrostatic waves in homogeneous equilibria of quantum plasmas described by
the Wigner-Poisson system. We show that, unlike the classical Vlasov-Poisson
system, the Wigner-Poisson case does not necessarily possess a Penrose
functional determining its linear stability properties. The Nyquist method is
then applied to a two-stream distribution, for which we obtain an exact,
necessary and sufficient condition for linear stability, as well as to a
bump-in-tail equilibrium.Comment: 6 figure
Generalized Central Limit Theorem and Renormalization Group
We introduce a simple instance of the renormalization group transformation in
the Banach space of probability densities. By changing the scaling of the
renormalized variables we obtain, as fixed points of the transformation, the
L\'evy strictly stable laws. We also investigate the behavior of the
transformation around these fixed points and the domain of attraction for
different values of the scaling parameter. The physical interest of a
renormalization group approach to the generalized central limit theorem is
discussed.Comment: 16 pages, to appear in J. Stat. Phy
Recommendations for ophthalmologic practice during the easing of COVID-19 control measures
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper provides recommendations for medical eye care during the easing of control measures after lockdown. The guidelines presented are based on a literature review and consensus among all Spanish Ophthalmology Societies regarding protection measures recommended for the ophthalmologic care of patients with or without confirmed COVID-19 in outpatient, inpatient, emergency and surgery settings. We recommend that all measures be adapted to the circumstances and availability of personal protective equipment at each centre and also highlight the need to periodically update recommendations as we may need to readopt more restrictive measures depending on the local epidemiology of the virus. These guidelines are designed to avoid the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 among both patients and healthcare staff as we gradually return to normal medical practice, to prevent postoperative complications and try to reduce possible deficiencies in the diagnosis, treatment and follow-up of the ophthalmic diseases. With this update (5th) the Spanish Society of Ophthalmology is placed as one of the major ophthalmology societies providing periodic and systematized recommendations for ophthalmic care during the COVID-19 pandemic
A novel path to runaway electron mitigation via deuterium injection and current-driven MHD instability
Relativistic electron (RE) beams at high current density (low safety factor, q ( a )) yet very low free-electron density accessed with D-2 secondary injection in the DIII-D and JET tokamak are found to exhibit large-scale MHD instabilities that benignly terminate the RE beam. In JET, this technique has enabled termination of MA-level RE currents without measurable first-wall heating. This scenario thus offers an unexpected alternate pathway to achieve RE mitigation without collisional dissipation. Benign termination is explained by two synergistic effects. First, during the MHD-driven RE loss events both experiment and MHD orbit-loss modeling supports a significant increase in the wetted area of the RE loss. Second, as previously identified at JET and DIII-D, the fast kink loss timescale precludes RE beam regeneration and the resulting dangerous conversion of magnetic to RE kinetic energy. During the termination, the RE kinetic energy is lost to the wall, but the current fully transfers to the cold bulk thus enabling benign Ohmic dissipation of the magnetic energy on longer timescales via a conventional current quench. Hydrogenic (D-2) secondary injection is found to be the only injected species that enables access to the benign termination. D-2 injection: (1) facilitates access to low q ( a ) in existing devices (via reduced collisionality & resistivity), (2) minimizes the RE avalanche by 'purging' the high-Z atoms from the RE beam, (3) drives recombination of the background plasma, reducing the density and Alfven time, thus accelerating the MHD growth. This phenomenon is found to be accessible when crossing the low q ( a ) stability boundary with rising current, falling toroidal field, or contracting minor radius-the latter being the expected scenario for vertically unstable RE beams in ITER. While unexpected, this path scales favorably to fusion-grade tokamaks and offers a novel RE mitigation scenario in principle accessible with the day-one disruption mitigation system of ITER
Cutoff Scanning Matrix (CSM): structural classification and function prediction by protein inter-residue distance patterns
BACKGROUND: The unforgiving pace of growth of available biological data has increased the demand for efficient and scalable paradigms, models and methodologies for automatic annotation. In this paper, we present a novel structure-based protein function prediction and structural classification method: Cutoff Scanning Matrix (CSM). CSM generates feature vectors that represent distance patterns between protein residues. These feature vectors are then used as evidence for classification. Singular value decomposition is used as a preprocessing step to reduce dimensionality and noise. The aspect of protein function considered in the present work is enzyme activity. A series of experiments was performed on datasets based on Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers and mechanistically different enzyme superfamilies as well as other datasets derived from SCOP release 1.75. RESULTS: CSM was able to achieve a precision of up to 99% after SVD preprocessing for a database derived from manually curated protein superfamilies and up to 95% for a dataset of the 950 most-populated EC numbers. Moreover, we conducted experiments to verify our ability to assign SCOP class, superfamily, family and fold to protein domains. An experiment using the whole set of domains found in last SCOP version yielded high levels of precision and recall (up to 95%). Finally, we compared our structural classification results with those in the literature to place this work into context. Our method was capable of significantly improving the recall of a previous study while preserving a compatible precision level. CONCLUSIONS: We showed that the patterns derived from CSMs could effectively be used to predict protein function and thus help with automatic function annotation. We also demonstrated that our method is effective in structural classification tasks. These facts reinforce the idea that the pattern of inter-residue distances is an important component of family structural signatures. Furthermore, singular value decomposition provided a consistent increase in precision and recall, which makes it an important preprocessing step when dealing with noisy data
Model for screening of resonant magnetic perturbations by plasma in a realistic tokamak geometry and its impact on divertor strike points
This work addresses the question of the relation between strike-point
splitting and magnetic stochasticity at the edge of a poloidally diverted
tokamak in the presence of externally imposed magnetic perturbations. More
specifically, ad-hoc helical current sheets are introduced in order to mimic a
hypothetical screening of the external resonant magnetic perturbations by the
plasma. These current sheets, which suppress magnetic islands, are found to
reduce the amount of splitting expected at the target, which suggests that
screening effects should be observable experimentally. Multiple screening
current sheets reinforce each other, i.e. less current relative to the case of
only one current sheet is required to screen the perturbation.Comment: Accepted in the Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on
Plasma Surface Interactions, to be published in Journal of Nuclear Materials.
Version 2: minor formatting and text improvements, more results mentioned in
the conclusion and abstrac
- âŠ