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Periodic striped ground states in Ising models with competing interactions
Get PDFWe consider Ising models in two and three dimensions, with short range ferromagnetic and long range, power-law decaying, antiferromagnetic interactions. We let J be the ratio between the strength of the ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic interactions. The competition between these two kinds of interactions induces the system to form domains of minus spins in a background of plus spins, or vice versa. If the decay exponent p of the long range interaction is larger than d + 1, with d the space dimension, this happens for all values of J smaller than a critical value Jc(p), beyond which the ground state is homogeneous. In this paper, we give a characterization of the infinite volume ground states of the system, for p > 2d and J in a left neighborhood of Jc(p). In particular, we prove that the quasi-one-dimensional states consisting of infinite stripes (d = 2) or slabs (d = 3), all of the same optimal width and orientation, and alternating magnetization, are infinite volume ground states. Our proof is based on localization bounds combined with reflection positivity
Plant hormones in interactions with the environment
Get PDFPlants are continuously exposed to a myriad of external signals such as fluctuating nutrients availability, drought, heat, cold, high salinity, or pathogen/pest attacks that can severely affect their development, growth, and fertility. As sessile organisms, plants must therefore be able to sense and rapidly react to these external inputs, activate efficient responses, and adjust development to changing conditions. In recent years, significant progress has been made towards understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying the intricate and complex communication between plants and the environment. It is now becoming increasingly evident that hormones have an important regulatory role in plant adaptation and defense mechanisms
Triviality of a model of particles with point interactions in the thermodynamic limit
Get PDFWe consider a model of fermions interacting via point interactions, defined via a certain weighted Dirichlet form. While for two particles the interaction corresponds to infinite scattering length, the presence of further particles effectively decreases the interaction strength. We show that the model becomes trivial in the thermodynamic limit, in the sense that the free energy density at any given particle density and temperature agrees with the corresponding expression for non-interacting particles
"...beyond the invisible barrier at Portage and Main": Liminality in John Marlyn’s Under the Ribs of Death
Get PDFSandor Hunyadi grows up in the working-class community of Winnipeg’s North End. As the teenage son of immigrants, he is faced with poverty at home and prejudice at school. Feeling estranged from his Hungarian parents and excluded from Anglo-Canadian society, he is set on gaining wealth and recognition. In order to become a successful businessman he adopts an English name, takes commercial courses at night school and starts working as assistant manager in a real-estate office. Although his career takes him to “the very threshold of everything he had hoped to achieve”, Alex Hunter loses employment and prosperity when the Great Depression hits Canada.
Liminality is a central motif of John Marlyn’s Under the Ribs of Death. First published in 1957, this two-part novel focuses on the development of Sandor Hunyadi/Alex Hunter in pre-World War I and interwar Winnipeg. The young foreign-born Canadian is portrayed in a variety of liminal spaces, ranging from the meeting place of the neighborhood gang to the local railroad station where immigrants arrive. More significantly, he experiences change and transition at multiple levels, passing from boyhood to adulthood, crossing from minority to mainstream culture, and moving from his family home in the slums to the business world on Main Street. In short, his life is marked by permanent liminality
A microfluidic device for measuring cell migration towards substrate bound and soluble chemokine gradients
Get PDFCellular locomotion is a central hallmark of eukaryotic life. It is governed by cell-extrinsic molecular factors, which can either emerge in the soluble phase or as immobilized, often adhesive ligands. To encode for direction, every cue must be present as a spatial or temporal gradient. Here, we developed a microfluidic chamber that allows measurement of cell migration in combined response to surface immobilized and soluble molecular gradients. As a proof of principle we study the response of dendritic cells to their major guidance cues, chemokines. The majority of data on chemokine gradient sensing is based on in vitro studies employing soluble gradients. Despite evidence suggesting that in vivo chemokines are often immobilized to sugar residues, limited information is available how cells respond to immobilized chemokines. We tracked migration of dendritic cells towards immobilized gradients of the chemokine CCL21 and varying superimposed soluble gradients of CCL19. Differential migratory patterns illustrate the potential of our setup to quantitatively study the competitive response to both types of gradients. Beyond chemokines our approach is broadly applicable to alternative systems of chemo- and haptotaxis such as cells migrating along gradients of adhesion receptor ligands vs. any soluble cue
Approximation and convergence of the intrinsic volume
Get PDFWe introduce a modification of the classic notion of intrinsic volume using persistence moments of height functions. Evaluating the modified first intrinsic volume on digital approximations of a compact body with smoothly embedded boundary in Rn, we prove convergence to the first intrinsic volume of the body as the resolution of the approximation improves. We have weaker results for the other modified intrinsic volumes, proving they converge to the corresponding intrinsic volumes of the n-dimensional unit ball
Safety assured formal model driven design of the multifunction vehicle bus controller
Get PDFIn this paper, we present a formal model-driven engineering approach to establishing a safety-assured implementation of Multifunction vehicle bus controller (MVBC) based on the generic reference models and requirements described in the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standard IEC-61375. First, the generic models described in IEC-61375 are translated into a network of timed automata, and some safety requirements tested in IEC-61375 are formalized as timed computation tree logic (TCTL) formulas. With the help of Uppaal, we check and debug whether the timed automata satisfy the formulas or not. Within this step, several logic inconsistencies in the original standard are detected and corrected. Then, we apply the tool Times to generate C code from the verified model, which was later synthesized into a real MVBC chip. Finally, the runtime verification tool RMOR is applied to verify some safety requirements at the implementation level. We set up a real platform with worldwide mostly used MVBC D113, and verify the correctness and the scalability of the synthesized MVBC chip more comprehensively. The errors in the standard has been confirmed and the resulted MVBC has been deployed in real train communication network
Termination of shoot gravitropic responses by auxin feedback on PIN3 polarity
Get PDFPlants adjust their growth according to gravity. Gravitropism involves gravity perception, signal transduction, and asymmetric growth response, with organ bending as a consequence [1]. Asymmetric growth results from the asymmetric distribution of the plant-specific signaling molecule auxin [2] that is generated by lateral transport, mediated in the hypocotyl predominantly by the auxin transporter PIN-FORMED3 (PIN3) [3–5]. Gravity stimulation polarizes PIN3 to the bottom sides of endodermal cells, correlating with increased auxin accumulation in adjacent tissues at the lower side of the stimulated organ, where auxin induces cell elongation and, hence, organ bending. A curvature response allows the hypocotyl to resume straight growth at a defined angle [6], implying that at some point auxin symmetry is restored to prevent overbending. Here, we present initial insights into cellular and molecular mechanisms that lead to the termination of the tropic response. We identified an auxin feedback on PIN3 polarization as underlying mechanism that restores symmetry of the PIN3-dependent auxin flow. Thus, two mechanistically distinct PIN3 polarization events redirect auxin fluxes at different time points of the gravity response: first, gravity-mediated redirection of PIN3-mediated auxin flow toward the lower hypocotyl side, where auxin gradually accumulates and promotes growth, and later PIN3 polarization to the opposite cell side, depleting this auxin maximum to end the bending. Accordingly, genetic or pharmacological interference with the late PIN3 polarization prevents termination of the response and leads to hypocotyl overbending. This observation reveals a role of auxin feedback on PIN polarity in the termination of the tropic response. © 2016 Elsevier Lt
Algorithms for Algebraic Path Properties in Concurrent Systems of Constant Treewidth Components
Get PDFWe study algorithmic questions for concurrent systems where the transitions are labeled from a complete, closed semiring, and path properties are algebraic with semiring operations. The algebraic path properties can model dataflow analysis problems, the shortest path problem, and many other natural problems that arise in program analysis. We consider that each component of the concurrent system is a graph with constant treewidth, a property satisfied by the controlflow graphs of most programs. We allow for multiple possible queries, which arise naturally in demand driven dataflow analysis. The study of multiple queries allows us to consider the tradeoff between the resource usage of the one-time preprocessing and for each individual query. The traditional approach constructs the product graph of all components and applies the best-known graph algorithm on the product. In this approach, even the answer to a single query requires the transitive closure (i.e., the results of all possible queries), which provides no room for tradeoff between preprocessing and query time. Our main contributions are algorithms that significantly improve the worst-case running time of the traditional approach, and provide various tradeoffs depending on the number of queries. For example, in a concurrent system of two components, the traditional approach requires hexic time in the worst case for answering one query as well as computing the transitive closure, whereas we show that with one-time preprocessing in almost cubic time, each subsequent query can be answered in at most linear time, and even the transitive closure can be computed in almost quartic time. Furthermore, we establish conditional optimality results showing that the worst-case running time of our algorithms cannot be improved without achieving major breakthroughs in graph algorithms (i.e., improving the worst-case bound for the shortest path problem in general graphs). Preliminary experimental results show that our algorithms perform favorably on several benchmarks