The Galactic Cosmic Ray Ionization Rate Dalgarno, A.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
08/2006, Letnik:
103, Številka:
33
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The chemistry that occurs in the interstellar medium in response to cosmic ray ionization is summarized, and a review of the ionization rates that have been derived from measurements of molecular ...abundances is presented. The successful detection of large abundances of H₃⁺ in diffuse clouds and the recognition that dissociative recombination of H₃⁺ is fast has led to an upward revision of the derived ionization rates. In dense clouds the molecular abundances are sensitive to the depletion of carbon monoxide, atomic oxygen, nitrogen, water, and metals and the presence of large molecules and grains. Measurements of the relative abundances of deuterated species provide information about the ion removal mechanisms, but uncertainties remain. The models, both of dense and diffuse clouds, that are used to interpret the observations may be seriously inadequate. Nevertheless, it appears that the ionization rates differ in dense and diffuse clouds and in the intercloud medium.
Coherent Single-Hole Spin in a Semiconductor Brunner, Daniel; Gerardot, Brian D; Dalgarno, Paul A ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
07/2009, Letnik:
325, Številka:
5936
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Semiconductors have uniquely attractive properties for electronics and photonics. However, it has been difficult to find a highly coherent quantum state in a semiconductor for applications in quantum ...sensing and quantum information processing. We report coherent population trapping, an optical quantum interference effect, on a single hole. The results demonstrate that a hole spin in a quantum dot is highly coherent.
A conventional microscope produces a sharp image from just a single object-plane. This is often a limitation, notably in cell biology. We present a microscope attachment which records sharp images ...from several object-planes simultaneously. The key concept is to introduce a distorted diffraction grating into the optical system, establishing an order-dependent focussing power in order to generate several images, each arising from a different object-plane. We exploit this multiplane imaging not just for bio-imaging but also for nano-particle tracking, achieving approximately 10 nm z position resolution by parameterising the images with an image sharpness metric.
The spin of an electron is a natural two-level system for realizing a quantum bit in the solid state. For an electron trapped in a semiconductor quantum dot, strong quantum confinement highly ...suppresses the detrimental effect of phonon-related spin relaxation. However, this advantage is offset by the hyperfine interaction between the electron spin and the 104 to 106 spins of the host nuclei in the quantum dot. Random fluctuations in the nuclear spin ensemble lead to fast spin decoherence in about ten nanoseconds. Spin-echo techniques have been used to mitigate the hyperfine interaction, but completely cancelling the effect is more attractive. In principle, polarizing all the nuclear spins can achieve this but is very difficult to realize in practice. Exploring materials with zero-spin nuclei is another option, and carbon nanotubes, graphene quantum dots and silicon have been proposed. An alternative is to use a semiconductor hole. Unlike an electron, a valence hole in a quantum dot has an atomic p orbital which conveniently goes to zero at the location of all the nuclei, massively suppressing the interaction with the nuclear spins. Furthermore, in a quantum dot with strong strain and strong quantization, the heavy hole with spin-3/2 behaves as a spin-1/2 system and spin decoherence mechanisms are weak. We demonstrate here high fidelity (about 99 per cent) initialization of a single hole spin confined to a self-assembled quantum dot by optical pumping. Our scheme works even at zero magnetic field, demonstrating a negligible hole spin hyperfine interaction. We determine a hole spin relaxation time at low field of about one millisecond. These results suggest a route to the realization of solid-state quantum networks that can intra-convert the spin state with the polarization of a photon.
Multifocal microscopy (MUM), a technique to capture multiple fields of view (FOVs) from distinct axial planes simultaneously and on one camera, was used to perform micro-particle image velocimetry ...(µPIV) to reconstruct velocity and shear stress fields imposed by a liquid flowing around a cell. A diffraction based multifocal relay was used to capture images from three different planes with 630 nm axial spacing from which the axial positions of the flow-tracing particles were calculated using the image sharpness metric. It was shown that MUM can achieve an accuracy on the calculated velocity of around (0.52 ± 0.19) µm/s. Using fixed cells, MUM imaged the flow perturbations at sub-cellular level, which showed characteristics similar to those observed in the literature. Using live cells as an exemplar, MUM observed the effect of changing cell morphology on the local flow during perfusion. Compared to standard confocal laser scanning microscope, MUM offers a clear advantage in acquisition speed for µPIV (over 300 times faster). This is an important characteristic for rapidly evolving biological systems where there is the necessity to monitor in real time entire volumes to correlate the sample responses to the external forces.
Autophagy is an intracellular degradation pathway that transports cytoplasmic material to the lysosome for hydrolysis. It is completed by SNARE-mediated fusion of the autophagosome and endolysosome ...membranes. This process must be carefully regulated to maintain the organization of the membrane system and prevent mistargeted degradation. As yet, models of autophagosomal fusion have not been verified within a cellular context because of difficulties with assessing protein interactions in situ. Here, we used high-resolution fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM)-FRET of HeLa cells to identify protein interactions within the spatiotemporal framework of the cell. We show that autophagosomal syntaxin 17 (Stx17) heterotrimerizes with synaptosome-associated protein 29 (SNAP29) and vesicle-associated membrane protein 7 (VAMP7) in situ, highlighting a functional role for VAMP7 in autophagosome clearance that has previously been sidelined in favor of a role for VAMP8. Additionally, we identified multimodal regulation of SNARE assembly by the Sec1/Munc18 (SM) protein VPS33A, mirroring other syntaxin–SM interactions and therefore suggesting a unified model of SM regulation. Contrary to current theoretical models, we found that the Stx17 N-peptide appears to interact in a positionally conserved, but mechanistically divergent manner with VPS33A, providing a late “go, no-go” step for autophagic fusion via a phosphoserine master-switch. Our findings suggest that Stx17 fusion competency is regulated by a phosphosite in its N-peptide, representing a previously unknown regulatory step in mammalian autophagy.
We introduce a novel 3D microrheology system that combines for the first time Optical Tweezers with Integrated Multiplane Microscopy (OpTIMuM). The system allows the 3D tracking of an optically ...trapped bead, with ~ 20 nm accuracy along the optical axis. This is achieved without the need for a high precision z-stage, separate calibration sample, nor a priori knowledge of either the bead size or the optical properties of the suspending medium. Instead, we have developed a simple yet effective in situ spatial calibration method using image sharpness and exploiting the fact we image at multiple planes simultaneously. These features make OpTIMuM an ideal system for microrheology measurements, and we corroborate the effectiveness of this novel microrheology tool by measuring the viscosity of water in three dimensions, simultaneously.
A KINETIC DATABASE FOR ASTROCHEMISTRY (KIDA) Wakelam, V; Herbst, E; Loison, J-C ...
The Astrophysical journal. Supplement series,
03/2012, Letnik:
199, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We present a novel chemical database for gas-phase astrochemistry. Named the KInetic Database for Astrochemistry (KIDA), this database consists of gas-phase reactions with rate coefficients and ...uncertainties that will be vetted to the greatest extent possible. Submissions of measured and calculated rate coefficients are welcome, and will be studied by experts before inclusion into the database. Besides providing kinetic information for the interstellar medium, KIDA is planned to contain such data for planetary atmospheres and for circumstellar envelopes. each year, a subset of the reactions in the database (kida.uva) will be provided as a network for the simulation of the chemistry of dense interstellar clouds with temperatures between 10 K and 300 K. We also provide a code, named Nahoon, to study the time-dependent gas-phase chemistry of zero-dimensional and one-dimensional interstellar sources.
An efficient method is presented for rigorous quantum calculations of atom-molecule and molecule-molecule collisions in a magnetic field. The method is based on the expansion of the wave function of ...the collision complex in basis functions with well-defined total angular momentum in the body-fixed coordinate frame. We outline the general theory of the method for collisions of diatomic molecules in the (2)Σ and (3)Σ electronic states with structureless atoms and with unlike (2)Σ and (3)Σ molecules. The cross sections for elastic scattering and Zeeman relaxation in low-temperature collisions of CaH((2)Σ(+)) and NH((3)Σ(-)) molecules with (3)He atoms converge quickly with respect to the number of total angular momentum states included in the basis set, leading to a dramatic (>10-fold) enhancement in computational efficiency compared to the previously used methods A. Volpi and J. L. Bohn, Phys. Rev. A 65, 052712 (2002); R. V. Krems and A. Dalgarno, J. Chem. Phys. 120, 2296 (2004). Our approach is thus well suited for theoretical studies of strongly anisotropic molecular collisions in the presence of external electromagnetic fields.
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