744 research outputs found
Fluctuations of the Josephson current and electron-electron interactions in superconducting weak links
We derive a microscopic effective action for superconducting contacts with
arbitrary transmission distribution of conducting channels. Provided
fluctuations of the Josephson phase remain sufficiently small our formalism
allows to fully describe fluctuation and interaction effects in such systems.
As compared to the well studied tunneling limit our analysis yields a number of
qualitatively new features which occur due to the presence of subgap Andreev
bound states in the system. We investigate the equilibrium supercurrent noise
and evaluate the electron-electron interaction correction to the Josephson
current across superconducting contacts. At T=0 this correction is found to
vanish for fully transparent contacts indicating the absence of Coulomb effects
in this limit.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure
Triplet superconductivity in a ferromagnetic vortex
We argue that odd-frequency triplet superconductivity can be conveniently
realized in hybrid superconductor-ferromagnet (SF) structures with a
ferromagnetic vortex. We demonstrate that due to proximity-induced long-range
triplet pairing such SFS junctions can sustain appreciable supercurrent which
can be directly measured in experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Towards quantitative prediction of proteasomal digestion patterns of proteins
We discuss the problem of proteasomal degradation of proteins. Though
proteasomes are important for all aspects of the cellular metabolism, some
details of the physical mechanism of the process remain unknown. We introduce a
stochastic model of the proteasomal degradation of proteins, which accounts for
the protein translocation and the topology of the positioning of cleavage
centers of a proteasome from first principles. For this model we develop the
mathematical description based on a master-equation and techniques for
reconstruction of the cleavage specificity inherent to proteins and the
proteasomal translocation rates, which are a property of the proteasome specie,
from mass spectroscopy data on digestion patterns. With these properties
determined, one can quantitatively predict digestion patterns for new
experimental set-ups. Additionally we design an experimental set-up for a
synthetic polypeptide with a periodic sequence of amino acids, which enables
especially reliable determination of translocation rates.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, submitted to J. Stat. Mech. (Special issue for
proceedings of 5th Intl. Conf. on Unsolved Problems on Noise and Fluctuations
in Physics, Biology & High Technology, Lyon (France), June 2-6, 2008
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