1,179 research outputs found
On Sasaki-Einstein manifolds in dimension five
We prove the existence of Sasaki-Einstein metrics on certain simply connected
5-manifolds where until now existence was unknown. All of these manifolds have
non-trivial torsion classes. On several of these we show that there are a
countable infinity of deformation classes of Sasaki-Einstein structures.Comment: 18 pages, Exposition was expanded and a reference adde
Absence of Metastable States in Strained Monatomic Cubic Crystals
A tetragonal (Bain path) distortion of a metal with an fcc (bcc) ground state
will initially cause an increase in energy, but at some point along the Bain
path the energy will again decrease until a local minimum is reached. Using a
combination of parametrized tight-binding and first-principles LAPW
calculations we show that this local minimum is unstable with respect to an
elastic distortion, except in the rare case that the minimum is at the bcc
(fcc) point on the Bain path. This shows that body-centered tetragonal phases
of these materials, which have been seen in epitaxially grown thin films, must
be stabilized by the substrate and cannot be free-standing films.Comment: 7 pages, 5 postscript figures, REVTEX, submitted to Phys. Rev.
Eligibility of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer for phase III chemotherapy trials
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Evidence that chemotherapy improves survival and quality of life in patients with stage IIIB & IV non small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is based on large randomized controlled trials. The purpose of this study was to determine eligibility of patients with advanced NSCLC for major chemotherapy trials.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Physicians treating stage IIIB/IV NSCLC at Sydney Cancer Centre assessed patient eligibility for the E1594, SWOG9509 and TAX326 trials for patients presenting from October 2001 to December 2002. A review of the centre's registry was used to obtain missing data.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>199 patients with advanced NSCLC were registered during the 14-month period. Characteristics of 100 patients were defined prospectively, 85 retrospectively: 77% males, median age 68 (range 32–88), 64% stage IV disease. Only 35% met trial eligibility for E1594 and 28% for SWOG9509 and TAX326. Common reasons for ineligibility were: co-morbidities 75(40%); ECOG Performance Status ≥2 72(39%); symptomatic brain metastasis 15(8%); and previous cancers 21(11%). Many patients were ineligible by more than one criterion.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The majority of patients with advanced NSCLC were ineligible for the large chemotherapy trials. The applicability of trial results to advanced lung cancer populations may be limited. Future trials should be conducted in a more representative population.</p
A note on monopole moduli spaces
We discuss the structure of the framed moduli space of Bogomolny monopoles
for arbitrary symmetry breaking and extend the definition of its stratification
to the case of arbitrary compact Lie groups. We show that each stratum is a
union of submanifolds for which we conjecture that the natural metric is
hyperKahler. The dimensions of the strata and of these submanifolds are
calculated, and it is found that for the latter, the dimension is always a
multiple of four.Comment: 17 pages, LaTe
An entanglement monotone derived from Grover's algorithm
This paper demonstrates that how well a state performs as an input to
Grover's search algorithm depends critically upon the entanglement present in
that state; the more entanglement, the less well the algorithm performs. More
precisely, suppose we take a pure state input, and prior to running the
algorithm apply local unitary operations to each qubit in order to maximize the
probability P_max that the search algorithm succeeds. We prove that, for pure
states, P_max is an entanglement monotone, in the sense that P_max can never be
decreased by local operations and classical communication.Comment: 7 page
Seasonal variability of the warm Atlantic Water layer in the vicinity of the Greenland shelf break
The warmest water reaching the east and west coast of Greenland is found between 200?m and 600?m. Whilst important for melting Greenland's outlet glaciers, limited winter observations of this layer prohibit determination of its seasonality. To address this, temperature data from Argo profiling floats, a range of sources within the World Ocean Database and unprecedented coverage from marine-mammal borne sensors have been analysed for the period 2002-2011. A significant seasonal range in temperature (~1-2?°C) is found in the warm layer, in contrast to most of the surrounding ocean. The phase of the seasonal cycle exhibits considerable spatial variability, with the warmest water found near the eastern and southwestern shelf-break towards the end of the calendar year. High-resolution ocean model trajectory analysis suggest the timing of the arrival of the year's warmest water is a function of advection time from the subduction site in the Irminger Basin
Extraterrestrial Prebiotic Molecules: Photochemistry vs. Radiation Chemistry of Interstellar Ices
In 2016, unambiguous evidence for the presence of the amino acid glycine, an important prebiotic molecule, was deduced based on in situ mass-spectral studies of the coma surrounding cometary ice. This finding is significant because comets are thought to have preserved the icy grains originally found in the interstellar medium prior to solar system formation. Energetic processing of cosmic ices via photochemistry and radiation chemistry is thought to be the dominant mechanism for the extraterrestrial synthesis of prebiotic molecules. Radiation chemistry is defined as the “study of the chemical changes produced by the absorption of radiation of sufficiently high energy to produce ionization.” Ionizing radiation in cosmic chemistry includes high-energy particles (e.g., cosmic rays) and high-energy photons (e.g., extreme-UV). In contrast, photochemistry is defined as chemical processes initiated by photon-induced electronic excitation not involving ionization. Vacuum-UV (6.2 –12.4 eV) light may, in addition to photochemistry, initiate radiation chemistry because the threshold for producing secondary electrons is lower in the condensed phase than in the gas phase. Unique to radiation chemistry are four phenomena: (1) production of a cascade of low-energy (\u3c 20 eV) secondary electrons which are thought to be the dominant driving force for radiation chemistry, (2) reactions initiated by cations, (3) non-uniform distribution of reaction intermediates, and (4) non-selective chemistry leading to the production of multiple reaction products. The production of low-energy secondary electrons during radiation chemistry may also lead to new reaction pathways not available to photochemistry. In addition, low-energy electron-induced radiation chemistry may predominate over photochemistry because of the sheer number of low-energy secondary electrons. Moreover, reaction cross-sections can be several orders of magnitude larger for electrons than for photons. Discerning the role of photochemistry vs. radiation chemistry in astrochemistry is challenging because astrophysical photoninduced chemistry studies have almost exclusively used light sources that produce \u3e 10 eV photons. Because a primary objective of chemistry is to provide molecular-level mechanistic explanations for macroscopic phenomena, our ultimate goal in this review paper is to critically evaluate our current understanding of cosmic ice energetic processing which likely leads to the synthesis of extraterrestrial prebiotic molecules
Relative energetics and structural properties of zirconia using a self-consistent tight-binding model
We describe an empirical, self-consistent, orthogonal tight-binding model for
zirconia, which allows for the polarizability of the anions at dipole and
quadrupole levels and for crystal field splitting of the cation d orbitals.
This is achieved by mixing the orbitals of different symmetry on a site with
coupling coefficients driven by the Coulomb potentials up to octapole level.
The additional forces on atoms due to the self-consistency and polarizabilities
are exactly obtained by straightforward electrostatics, by analogy with the
Hellmann-Feynman theorem as applied in first-principles calculations. The model
correctly orders the zero temperature energies of all zirconia polymorphs. The
Zr-O matrix elements of the Hamiltonian, which measure covalency, make a
greater contribution than the polarizability to the energy differences between
phases. Results for elastic constants of the cubic and tetragonal phases and
phonon frequencies of the cubic phase are also presented and compared with some
experimental data and first-principles calculations. We suggest that the model
will be useful for studying finite temperature effects by means of molecular
dynamics.Comment: to be published in Physical Review B (1 march 2000
Methane Throughout the Atmosphere of the Warm Exoplanet WASP-80b
The abundances of major carbon and oxygen bearing gases in the atmospheres of
giant exoplanets provide insights into atmospheric chemistry and planet
formation processes. Thermochemistry suggests that methane should be the
dominant carbon-bearing species below 1000 K over a range of plausible
atmospheric compositions; this is the case for the Solar System planets and has
been confirmed in the atmospheres of brown dwarfs and self-luminous directly
imaged exoplanets. However, methane has not yet been definitively detected with
space-based spectroscopy in the atmosphere of a transiting exoplanet, but a few
detections have been made with ground-based, high-resolution transit
spectroscopy including a tentative detection for WASP-80b. Here we report
transmission and emission spectra spanning 2.4-4.0 micrometers of the 825 K
warm Jupiter WASP-80b taken with JWST's NIRCam instrument, both of which show
strong evidence for methane at greater than 6-sigma significance. The derived
methane abundances from both viewing geometries are consistent with each other
and with solar to sub-solar C/O and ~5 solar metallicity, which is
consistent with theoretical predictions.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables. This preprint has been submitted to
and accepted in principle for publication in Nature without significant
change
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