Persistent current in a ring coupled to an external fermionic reservoir

We study the energy spectrum and the persistent current in an ideal one-dimensional mesoscopic ring coupled to a fermionic reservoir. We find that the tunnel coupling in general leads to the suppression of the persistent current. However, with increasing coupling, the effective level structure of the ring coupled to the reservoir changes and quasistates with a sharp eigenenergy develop. Depending on the number of ring states coupled to the reservoir this results in a nonzero persistent current even at very large tunneling between the ring and the reservoir.Comment: this is a short version of cond-mat/030713

Metal-insulator transition in a sliding Luttinger liquid with line defects

We investigate the effect of both strong and weak potential scattering caused by local impurities and extended (line) defects in an array of Luttinger liquid wires. We find that in both cases a finite range interwire interaction stabilizes the metallic state. Based on calculations of the scaling dimensions of one-particle scattering operators, we construct a phase diagram for low-temperature transport along the array.We find that unlike the local impurity case where only conducting and insulating states are realized (metal-insulator transition driven by interactions), the extended line defects may bring the system into a mixed state where conducting or insulating behavior can be observed depending on bare strength of the scatterer (metal-insulator transition driven by disorder)

Host-Protozoan Interactions Protect from Mucosal Infections through Activation of the Inflammasome

"While conventional pathogenic protists have been extensively studied, there is an underappreciated constitutive protist microbiota that is an integral part of the vertebrate microbiome. The impact of these species on the host and their potential contributions to mucosal immune homeostasis remain poorly studied. Here, we show that the protozoan Tritrichomonas musculis activates the host epithelial inflammasome to induce IL-18 release. Epithelialderived IL-18 promotes dendritic cell-driven Th1 and Th17 immunity and confers dramatic protection from mucosal bacterial infections. Along with its role as a "protistic'' antibiotic, colonization with T. musculis exacerbates the development of T-cell-driven colitis and sporadic colorectal tumors. Our findings demonstrate a novel mutualistic host-protozoan interaction that increases mucosal host defenses at the cost of an increased risk of inflammatory disease.

The 2008 Public Release of the International Multi-tokamak Confinement Profile Database

This paper documents the public release PR08 of the International Tokamak Physics Activity (ITPA) profile database, which should be of particular interest to the magnetic confinement fusion community. Data from a wide variety of interesting discharges from many of the world\u27s leading tokamak experiments are now made available in PR08, which also includes predictive simulations of an initial set of operating scenarios for ITER. In this paper we describe the discharges that have been included and the tools that are available to the reader who is interested in accessing and working with the data. Most discharge descriptions refer to more detailed previous publications. In addition, we review physics analyses that have already made use of the profile database discharges. Public access to PR08 data is unconditional, but this paper should be cited by any publication that makes use of PR08 data