168 research outputs found
Exact diagonalization of cubic lattice models in commensurate Abelian magnetic fluxes and translational invariant non-Abelian potentials
No full textDouble Weyl points and Fermi arcs of topological semimetals in non-Abelian gauge potentials
No full textWe study the effect of a non-Abelian SU(2) gauge potential mimicking spin-orbit coupling on the topological semimetal induced by a magnetic field having pi flux per plaquette and acting on fermions in a three-dimensional (3D) cubic lattice. The Abelian pi-flux term gives rise to a spectrum characterized by Weyl points. The non-Abelian term is chosen to be gauge equivalent to both a 2D Rashba and a Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling. As a result of the anisotropic nature of the coupling between spin and momentum and of the presence of a C-4 rotation symmetry, when the non-Abelian part is turned on, the Weyl points assume a quadratic dispersion along two directions and constitute double monopoles for the Berry curvature. We examine the main features of this system both analytically and numerically, focusing on its gapless surface modes, the so-called Fermi arcs. We discuss the stability of the system under confining hard-wall and harmonic potentials, relevant for the implementation in ultracold atom settings, and the effect of rotation symmetry breaking. © 2016 American Physical Society
GUT MICROBIOTA CROSSTALK WITH CONVENTIONAL AND NON-CONVENTIONAL T CELLS: A GAME OF MANY PLAYERS.
No full textThe presence of microbial commensals in the gut requires the establishment of a complex network of reciprocal interactions between the microbiota and the host immune system to allow nutrient absorption while preventing undesired mucosal immune responses. Despite these homeostatic mechanisms, during intestinal inflammation alterations of the microbiota composition, namely dysbiosis, trigger abnormal immune responses.
Here, we aimed at investigating the functional crosstalk between gut microbiota and the mucosal immune system during inflammation and upon induction of microbial dysbiosis.
We observed that inflammation-induced and antibiotic-driven types of dysbiosis are phenotypically and functionally modifying CD4+ T and iNKT cells activity. Moreover, during intestinal inflammation, the experimental manipulation of the microbiota community through Faecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT) reduces colonic inflammation and initiates the restoration of intestinal homeostasis through the induction of IL-10 production by immune cells.
Further, we performed a comprehensive analysis on intestinal iNKT cells isolated from surgical specimens of active Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) patients and non-IBD donors. We report that the exposure to mucosa-associated microbiota drives iNKT cell pro-inflammatory activation, inducing direct pathogenicity against the intestinal epithelium.
Collectively, we provided solid evidence that a strict crosstalk between the gut microbiota and the intestinal conventional and non-conventional T cells exists. Antibiotic-associated dysbiosis has immunostimulatory functions. Moreover, FMT can therapeutically control intestinal experimental colitis and this poses FMT as a valuable therapeutic option in immune-related pathologies. In addition, we generated fundamental knowledge about the pathogenic functions exerted by human intestinal iNKT cells upon the interaction with mucosa-associated microbiota communities
Topological Kondo model out of equilibrium
No full textThe topological Kondo effect is a genuine manifestation of the nonlocality of Majorana modes. We investigate its out-of-equilibrium signatures in a model with a Cooper-pair box hosting four of these topological modes, each connected to a metallic lead. Through an advanced matrix-product-state approach tailored to study the dynamics of superconductors, we simulate the relaxation of the Majorana magnetization, which allows us to determine the related Kondo temperature, and we analyze the onset of electric transport after a quantum quench of a lead voltage. Our results apply to Majorana Cooper-pair boxes fabricated in double nanowire devices and provide nonperturbative evidence of the crossover from weak-coupling states to the strongly correlated topological Kondo regime. The latter dominates at the superconductor charge degeneracy points and displays the expected universal fractional zero-bias conductance
Simulations of the dynamics of quantum impurity problems with matrix product states
No full textThe Anderson impurity model is a paradigmatic example in the study of strongly correlated quantum systems and describes an interacting quantum dot coupled to electronic leads. Here we investigate its dynamics following a quantum quench based on matrix product state simulations. We examine the behavior of its impurity magnetization. Its relaxation allows us to extract the predicted scaling of the Kondo temperature as a function of the impurity-lead hybridization and quantum dot repulsion. Additionally, our simulations provide estimates of the currents in the nonequilibrium quasisteady state appearing after the quench. Through their values, we examine the dependence of the conductance on the voltage bias Vb and on the impurity chemical potential Vg, which displays a zero-bias Kondo peak. Our results are relevant for transport measurements in Coulomb blockaded devices, and, in particular, in quantum dots induced in nanowires
PT invariant Weyl semimetals in gauge symmetric systems
No full textWeyl semimetals typically appear in systems in which either time-reversal (T) or inversion (P) symmetry is broken. Here we show that in the presence of gauge potentials these topological states of matter can also arise in fermionic lattices preserving both T and P. We analyze in detail the case of a cubic lattice model with π fluxes, discussing the role of gauge symmetries in the formation of Weyl points and the difference between the physical and the canonical T and P symmetries. We examine the robustness of this PT-invariant Weyl semimetal phase against perturbations that remove the chiral sublattice symmetries, and we discuss further generalizations. Finally, motivated by advances in ultracold-atom experiments and by the possibility of using synthetic magnetic fields, we study the effect of random perturbations of the magnetic fluxes, which can be compared to a local disorder in realistic scenarios. © 2016 American Physical Society
Gauge theories with ultracold atoms
No full textWe discuss and review, in this chapter, the developing field of research of quantum simulation of gauge theories with ultracold atoms.</p
Exact diagonalization of cubic lattice models in commensurate Abelian magnetic fluxes and translational invariant non-Abelian potentials
No full textWe present a general analytical formalism to determine the energy spectrum of a quantum particle in a cubic lattice subject to translationally invariant commensurate magnetic fluxes and in the presence of a general spaceindependent non-Abelian gauge potential. We first review and analyze the case of purely Abelian potentials, showing also that the so-called Hasegawa gauge yields a decomposition of the Hamiltonian into sub-matrices having minimal dimension. Explicit expressions for such matrices are derived, also for general anisotropic fluxes. Later on, we show that the introduction of a translational invariant non-Abelian coupling for multi-component spinors does not affect the dimension of the minimal Hamiltonian blocks, nor the dimension of the magnetic Brillouin zone. General formulas are presented for the U(2) case and explicit examples are investigated involving Ï\u80 and 2Ï\u80/3 magnetic fluxes. Finally, we numerically study the effect of random flux perturbations
Circulating extracellular vesicles as non-invasive biomarker of rejection in heart transplant
No full text[Formula presented] BACKGROUND: Circulating extracellular vesicles (EVs) are raising considerable interest as a non-invasive diagnostic tool, as they are easily detectable in biologic fluids and contain a specific set of nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids reflecting pathophysiologic conditions. We aimed to investigate differences in plasma-derived EV surface protein profiles as a biomarker to be used in combination with endomyocardial biopsies (EMBs) for the diagnosis of allograft rejection. METHODS: Plasma was collected from 90 patients (53 training cohort, 37 validation cohort) before EMB. EV concentration was assessed by nanoparticle tracking analysis. EV surface antigens were measured using a multiplex flow cytometry assay composed of 37 fluorescently labeled capture bead populations coated with specific antibodies directed against respective EV surface epitopes. RESULTS: The concentration of EVs was significantly increased and their diameter decreased in patients undergoing rejection as compared with negative ones. The trend was highly significant for both antibody-mediated rejection and acute cellular rejection (p < 0.001). Among EV surface markers, CD3, CD2, ROR1, SSEA-4, human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-I, and CD41b were identified as discriminants between controls and acute cellular rejection, whereas HLA-II, CD326, CD19, CD25, CD20, ROR1, SSEA-4, HLA-I, and CD41b discriminated controls from patients with antibody-mediated rejection. Receiver operating characteristics curves confirmed a reliable diagnostic performance for each single marker (area under the curve range, 0.727–0.939). According to differential EV-marker expression, a diagnostic model was built and validated in an external cohort of patients. Our model was able to distinguish patients undergoing rejection from those without rejection. The accuracy at validation in an independent external cohort reached 86.5%. Its application for patient management has the potential to reduce the number of EMBs. Further studies in a higher number of patients are required to validate this approach for clinical purposes. CONCLUSIONS: Circulating EVs are highly promising as a new tool to characterize cardiac allograft rejection and to be complementary to EMB monitoring
Exploring Scalable, Distributed Real-Time Anomaly Detection for Bridge Health Monitoring
No full textModern real-time Structural Health Monitoring systems can generate a considerable amount of information that must be processed and evaluated for detecting early anomalies and generating prompt warnings and alarms about the civil infrastructure conditions. The current cloud-based solutions cannot scale if the raw data has to be collected from thousands of buildings. This paper presents a full-stack deployment of an efficient and scalable anomaly detection pipeline for SHM systems which does not require sending raw data to the cloud but relies on edge computation. First, we benchmark three algorithmic approaches of anomaly detection, i.e., Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fully-Connected AutoEncoder (FC-AE), and Convolutional AutoEncoder (C-AE). Then, we deploy them on an edge-sensor, the STM32L4, with limited computing capabilities. Our approach decreases network traffic by ≈ 8·105×, from 780KB/hour to less than 10 Bytes/hour for a single installation and minimize network and cloud resource utilization, enabling the scaling of the monitoring infrastructure. A real-life case study, a highway bridge in Italy, demonstrates that combining near-sensor computation of anomaly detection algorithms, smart pre-processing, and low-power wide-area network protocols (LPWAN) we can greatly reduce data communication and cloud computing costs, while anomaly detection accuracy is not adversely affected
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