Topology on the Lattice

We review the method developed in Pisa to determine the topological susceptibility in lattice QCD and present a collection of new and old results obtained by the method.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures. Contribution to "Sense of Beauty in Physics - a volume in honour of Adriano Di Giacomo" (Pisa University Press, Pisa, 2006), on the occasion of his 70th birthda

Substrate specificity of amine oxidase

The tyramine oxidase activity of liver extracts found by Hare (1), the aliphatic amine oxidase activity of brain, kidney, and liver extracts observed by Pugh and Quastel (2), and the adrenalin oxidase activity of similar extracts noted by Blaschko, Richter, and Schlossman (3) were brought under a common enzyme view-point by the latter authors. They were able to show (4) that extracts of brain, instestine, kindey, and liver from a number of mammals or representatives of the birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes all acted to absorb oxygen in the presence of several amine substrates. Hare (1) had shown that tyramine and phenethylamine form ammonia in the course of such oxidations, and Richter (5) showed that an ethylamino and a dimethylamino compound, as well as a number of methylamino and amino compounds, all yield the corresponding alkyl-amines or ammonia in the enzymic oxidation. The conslusion that the demonstrated variey of such enzymic activity can be acribed to the presence of a single type pf amine oxidase was dependent in large part on observations that the relative activities of a preparation from one source on a series of substrates bear some relation to the relative activities exhibited by a preparation from another source. Further evidence depended on the action of certain amines as inihibitors and apparent competition between substrates when two oxidizable substrates are present in the system. The degree to which relative activities of different enzyme preparations were constant in a series of substrates was not good in the data reported, and the fact that Hare (1) had not been able to note activity of the liver preparations she used upon adrenalin as the substrate appeared to require special explanations

Inhibitor specificity of amine oxidase

Although at the present time it appears clear that amine oxidase oxidation of adrenalin, or other o-diphenolic pressor amines such as were studied by Richter (6), does not play a significant physiological role, it is equally clear that the inactivation of aliphatic amines, phenethylamine and probably 4-hydroxyphenethylamine (tyramine), does predominantly take place by amine oxidase oxidation. In view of the evidence from the experiments of Ewins and Laidlaw (8) and a later study by Guggenheim and Löffler (9), such amine oxidations chiefly occur in the liver. In the present studies, an attempt was made to value quantitatively the inhibition of some of these particular type compounds by certain types of amines which are not themselves oxidized by the enzyme system (see Alles and Heegaard (10))

Oxidation of glucose by iodine in the presence of insulin

This investigation was undertaken with the purpose of determining whether insulin, alone or in the presence of certain animal fluids, has any influence upon glucose in vitro. The establishment of such an influence might have much significance in relation both to the study of carbohydrate metabolism and to the development of methods of assaying insulin

Maximal entanglement from quantum random walks

The conditions under which entanglement becomes maximal are sought in the general one--dimensional quantum random walk with two walkers. Moreover, a one--dimensional shift operator for the two walkers is introduced and its performance in generating entanglement is analyzed as a function of several free parameters, some of them coming from the shift operator itself and some others from the coin operator. To simplify the investigation an averaged entanglement is defined.Comment: Latex source, 9 pages, 6 figures (revised version, identical to published one

Topological properties of QCD with two dynamical fermions

We investigate the topological susceptibility of the QCD vacuum with two flavours of dynamical staggered fermions on the lattice both at zero and finite temperature. At zero temperature we study the dependence of the signal on the fermion mass and at finite temperature we analyze the behaviour across the phase transition.Comment: LATTICE99(finite temperature and density). 3 pages, contains espcrc2.sty fil