Recruiting researchers: Survey of employer practice 2009

This report sets out the findings of a piece of research conducted by Vitae into the experiences and attitudes of employers towards doctoral graduates. The research surveyed 104 employers who represent a diverse mix of sectors, organisation size and orientation towards doctoral graduates.Vitae is supported by Research Councils UK (RCUK), managed by CRAC: The Career Development Organisatio

Incoherent Exciton Trapping in Self-Similar Aperiodic Lattices

Incoherent exciton dynamics in one-dimensional perfect lattices with traps at sites arranged according to aperiodic deterministic sequences is studied. We focus our attention on Thue-Morse and Fibonacci systems as canonical examples of self-similar aperiodic systems. Excitons progressively extend over the lattice on increasing time and, in this sense, they act as a probe of the particular arrangements of traps in each system considered. The analysis of the characteristic features of their time decay indicates that exciton dynamics in self-similar aperiodic arrangements of traps is quite close to that observed in periodic ones, but differs significatively from that corresponding to random lattices. We also report on characteristic features of exciton motion suggesting that Fibonacci and Thue-Morse orderings might be clearly observed by appropriate experimental measurements. In the conclusions we comment on the implications of our work on the way towards a unified theory of the orderings of matter.Comment: REVTeX 3.0, 10 pages, 2 figures on request from FD-A ([email protected]). Submitted to Phys Rev B. MA/UC3M/11/9

Transposable Elements, Inflammation, and Neurological Disease.

Transposable Elements (TE) are mobile DNA elements that can replicate and insert themselves into different locations within the host genome. Their propensity to self-propagate has a myriad of consequences and yet their biological significance is not well-understood. Indeed, retrotransposons have evaded evolutionary attempts at repression and may contribute to somatic mosaicism. Retrotransposons are emerging as potent regulatory elements within the human genome. In the diseased state, there is mounting evidence that endogenous retroelements play a role in etiopathogenesis of inflammatory diseases, with a disposition for both autoimmune and neurological disorders. We postulate that active mobile genetic elements contribute more to human disease pathogenesis than previously thought

Excitation decay in one-dimensional disordered systems with paired traps

Incoherent transport of excitations in one-dimensional disordered lattices with pairs of traps placed at random is studied by numerically solving the corresponding master equation. Results are compared to the case of lattices with the same concentration of unpaired traps, and it is found that pairing of traps causes a slowdown of the decay rate of both the mean square displacement and the survival probability of excitations. We suggest that this result is due to the presence of larger trap-free segments in the lattices with paired disorder, which implies that pairing of traps causes less disruption on the dynamics of excitations. In the conclusion we discuss the implications of our work, placing it in a more general context.Comment: REVTeX 3.0, 10 pages, 7 figures available on request from FD-A ([email protected]), Universidad Carlos III preprint MA/UC3M/08/9

Multifractal scaling of electronic transmission resonances in perfect and imperfect Fibonacci δ\delta-function potentials

We present here a detailed multifractal scaling study for the electronic transmission resonances with the system size for an infinitely large one dimensional perfect and imperfect quasiperiodic system represented by a sequence of $\delta$-function potentials. The electronic transmission resonances in the energy minibands manifest more and more fragmented nature of the transmittance with the change of system sizes. We claim that when a small perturbation is randomly present at a few number of sites, the nature of electronic states will change and this can be understood by studying the electronic transmittance with the change of system size. We report the different critical states manifested in the size variation of the transmittance corresponding to the resonant energies for both perfect and imperfect cases through multifractal scaling study for few of these resonances.Comment: 7 pages, (Hard copies of 5 figures available on request from [email protected]

Contractions of sigma models and integration of massive modes

We show how the integration of massive modes after a spontaneous symmetry breaking in a sigma model can often be interpreted as a contraction, induced by a group contraction, of the target space of the sigma model.Comment: 9 pages. Prepared for the porceedings of the 4-th International Symposium Quantum Theory and Symmetries. Varna, Bulgaria, 15-21 August 200