The PANDA Detector at FAIR

The PANDA detector is under design to be installed at the HESR storage ring for antiproton of the future FAIR facility in Darmstadt, Germany. Fundamental questions of hadron and nuclear physics interactions of antiprotons with nucleons and nuclei will be pursued using a multipurpose set-up which includes innovative detectors. Here, the FAIR facility and the PANDA detector are described.Comment: Parallel talk at ICHEP08, Philadelphia USA, July 2008. 4 pages, 2 figure

Ultrarelativistic boost of the black ring

We investigate the ultrarelativistic boost of the five-dimensional Emparan-Reall non-rotating black ring. Following the classical method of Aichelburg and Sexl, we determine the gravitational field generated by a black ring moving ``with the speed of light'' in an arbitrary direction. In particular, we study in detail two different boosts along axes orthogonal and parallel to the plane of the ring circle, respectively. In both cases, after the limit one obtains a five-dimensional impulsive pp-wave propagating in Minkowski spacetime. The curvature singularity of the original static spacetime becomes a singular source within the wave front, in the shape of a ring or a rod according to the direction of the boost. In the case of an orthogonal boost, the wave front contains also a remnant of the original disk-shaped membrane as a component of the Ricci tensor (which is everywhere else vanishing). We also analyze the asymptotic properties of the boosted black ring at large spatial distances from the singularity, and its behaviour near the sources. In the limit when the singularity shrinks to a point, one recovers the well known five-dimensional analogue of the Aichelburg-Sexl ``monopole'' solution.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, REVTeX 4. v2: added boost in an arbitrary direction, one new figure, one new reference. To appear in Phys. Rev.

The generalized identification of truly interfacial molecules (ITIM) algorithm for nonplanar interfaces

We present a generalized version of the ITIM algorithm for the identification of interfacial molecules, which is able to treat arbitrarily shaped interfaces. The algorithm exploits the similarities between the concept of probe sphere used in ITIM and the circumsphere criterion used in the α-shapes approach, and can be regarded either as a reference-frame independent version of the former, or as an extended version of the latter that includes the atomic excluded volume. The new algorithm is applied to compute the intrinsic orientational order parameters of water around a dodecylphosphocholine and a cholic acid micelle in aqueous environment, and to the identification of solvent-reachable sites in four model structures for soot. The additional algorithm introduced for the calculation of intrinsic density profiles in arbitrary geometries proved to be extremely useful also for planar interfaces, as it allows to solve the paradox of smeared intrinsic profiles far from the interface. © 2013 American Institute of Physics

Molecular dissection of Phaseolus vulgaris polygalacturonase-inhibiting protein 2 reveals the presence of hold/release domains affecting protein trafficking toward the cell wall

The plant endomembrane system is massively involved in the synthesis, transport and secretion of cell wall polysaccharides and proteins; however, the molecular mechanisms underlying trafficking toward the apoplast are largely unknown. Besides constitutive, the existence of a regulated secretory pathway has been proposed. A polygalacturonase inhibitor protein (PGIP2), known to move as soluble cargo and reach the cell wall through a mechanism distinguishable from default, was dissected in its main functional domains (A, B, C, D), and C sub-fragments (C1–10), to identify signals essential for its regulated targeting. The secretion patterns of the fluorescent chimeras obtained by fusing different PGIP2 domains to the green fluorescent protein (GFP) were analyzed. PGIP2 N-terminal and leucine-rich repeat domains (B and C, respectively) seem to operate as holding/releasing signals, respectively, during PGIP2 transit through the Golgi. The B domain slows down PGIP2 secretion by transiently interacting with Golgi membranes. Its depletion leads, in fact, to the secretion via default (Sp2-susceptible) of the ACD-GFP chimera faster than PGIP2. Depending on its length (at least the first 5 leucine-rich repeats are required), the C domain modulates B interaction with Golgi membranes allowing the release of chimeras and their extracellular secretion through a Sp2 independent pathway. The addition of the vacuolar sorting determinant Chi to PGIP2 diverts the path of the protein from cell wall to vacuole, suggesting that C domain is a releasing rather than a cell wall sorting signal

A Non-Local Mean Curvature Flow and its semi-implicit time-discrete approximation

We address in this paper the study of a geometric evolution, corresponding to a curvature which is non-local and singular at the origin. The curvature represents the first variation of the energy recently proposed as a variant of the standard perimeter penalization for the denoising of nonsmooth curves. To deal with such degeneracies, we first give an abstract existence and uniqueness result for viscosity solutions of non-local degenerate Hamiltonians, satisfying suitable continuity assumption with respect to Kuratowsky convergence of the level sets. This abstract setting applies to an approximated flow. Then, by the method of minimizing movements, we also build an "exact" curvature flow, and we illustrate some examples, comparing the results with the standard mean curvature flow