Crease Formation in the Processing of Thin Web Material

A mathematical model is developed to describe the conditions for buckling of steel strip between transport rolls due to strip camber, together with conditions necessary for the subsequent “ironing-in” of the buckle as it passes over the downstream roll. For a permanent crease to form, the buckle must be sufficiently stable so that it is prohibited by friction to spread laterally, and the stresses from the buckle defect must be large enough for plastic deformation to occur as it travels over the downstream roll. Once the conditions to produce a permanent crease are known they can be avoided in plant operations

Lifting of Steel Coils in Bore-Vertical Orientation

Lifting of coils with the bore in the vertical orientation could give rise to safety issues if the coil integrity is compromised during the slitting and packing operation. Coil telescoping (whereby the inner wraps of the coil spiral out) is known to occur during lifting, which could pose as a serious threat to the safety of personnel involved. In this type of incident, the coil straps are also broken when their breaking strength is exceeded and the whole coil would unwrap itself at an elevated position. Back tension is applied to the strip while shearing wide strip into narrower slits; this allows sufficient radial pressure to be built up within the bulk of the narrow coils. Upon unloading, the radial pressures at the innermost and outermost wraps decrease to zero but the bulk of the inter-wrap pressure within the coil remains largely unchanged. The interwrap frictional forces developed within the coil enable the coil to retain its integrity under its own weight. It is found that the radial pressures developed within the slit coil play the most crucial role in providing sufficient frictional resistance to support the weight of the coil wraps during lifting with the bore in the vertical orientation. In addition, the inter-wrap pressures near the footprint of the mechanical lifting device, near the bore, have the most significant influence in preventing coil telescoping

Light atom quantum oscillations in UC and US

High energy vibrational scattering in the binary systems UC and US is measured using time-of-flight inelastic neutron scattering. A clear set of well-defined peaks equally separated in energy is observed in UC, corresponding to harmonic oscillations of the light C atoms in a cage of heavy U atoms. The scattering is much weaker in US and only a few oscillator peaks are visible. We show how the difference between the materials can be understood by considering the neutron scattering lengths and masses of the lighter atoms. Monte Carlo ray tracing is used to simulate the scattering, with near quantitative agreement with the data in UC, and some differences with US. The possibility of observing anharmonicity and anisotropy in the potentials of the light atoms is investigated in UC. Overall the observed data is well accounted for by considering each light atom as a single atom isotropic quantum harmonic oscillator.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

Nonlinear multidimensional scaling and visualization of earthquake clusters over space, time and feature space

International audienceWe present a novel technique based on a multi-resolutional clustering and nonlinear multi-dimensional scaling of earthquake patterns to investigate observed and synthetic seismic catalogs. The observed data represent seismic activities around the Japanese islands during 1997-2003. The synthetic data were generated by numerical simulations for various cases of a heterogeneous fault governed by 3-D elastic dislocation and power-law creep. At the highest resolution, we analyze the local cluster structures in the data space of seismic events for the two types of catalogs by using an agglomerative clustering algorithm. We demonstrate that small magnitude events produce local spatio-temporal patches delineating neighboring large events. Seismic events, quantized in space and time, generate the multi-dimensional feature space characterized by the earthquake parameters. Using a non-hierarchical clustering algorithm and nonlinear multi-dimensional scaling, we explore the multitudinous earthquakes by real-time 3-D visualization and inspection of the multivariate clusters. At the spatial resolutions characteristic of the earthquake parameters, all of the ongoing seismicity both before and after the largest events accumulates to a global structure consisting of a few separate clusters in the feature space. We show that by combining the results of clustering in both low and high resolution spaces, we can recognize precursory events more precisely and unravel vital information that cannot be discerned at a single resolution

Relating Quantum Information to Charged Black Holes

Quantum non-cloning theorem and a thought experiment are discussed for charged black holes whose global structure exhibits an event and a Cauchy horizon. We take Reissner-Norstr\"{o}m black holes and two-dimensional dilaton black holes as concrete examples. The results show that the quantum non-cloning theorem and the black hole complementarity are far from consistent inside the inner horizon. The relevance of this work to non-local measurements is briefly discussed.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure

The quantum mechanical geometric phase of a particle in a resonant vibrating cavity

We study the general-setting quantum geometric phase acquired by a particle in a vibrating cavity. Solving the two-level theory with the rotating-wave approximation and the SU(2) method, we obtain analytic formulae that give excellent descriptions of the geometric phase, energy, and wavefunction of the resonating system. In particular, we observe a sudden $\pi$-jump in the geometric phase when the system is in resonance. We found similar behaviors in the geometric phase of a spin-1/2 particle in a rotating magnetic field, for which we developed a geometrical model to help visualize its evolution.Comment: 15pages,6figure

Violations of Bell Inequalities for Measurements with Macroscopic Uncertainties: What does it Mean to Violate Macroscopic Local Realism?

We suggest to test the premise of ``macroscopic local realism'' which is sufficient to derive Bell inequalities when measurements of photon number are only accurate to an uncertainty of order $n$ photons, where $n$ is macroscopic. Macroscopic local realism is only sufficient to imply, in the context of the original Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument, fuzzy ``elements of reality'' which have a macroscopic indeterminacy. We show therefore how the violation of local realism in the presence of macroscopic uncertainties implies the failure of ``macroscopic local realism''. Quantum states violating this macroscopic local realism are presented.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures- new version is unchanged but tightened-20 pages, 5 figure

Stokes Parameters as a Minkowskian Four-vector

It is noted that the Jones-matrix formalism for polarization optics is a six-parameter two-by-two representation of the Lorentz group. It is shown that the four independent Stokes parameters form a Minkowskian four-vector, just like the energy-momentum four-vector in special relativity. The optical filters are represented by four-by-four Lorentz-transformation matrices. This four-by-four formalism can deal with partial coherence described by the Stokes parameters. A four-by-four matrix formulation is given for decoherence effects on the Stokes parameters, and a possible experiment is proposed. It is shown also that this Lorentz-group formalism leads to optical filters with a symmetry property corresponding to that of two-dimensional Euclidean transformations.Comment: RevTeX, 22 pages, no figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Requirement of CRTC1 coactivator for hepatitis B virus transcription

Transcription of hepatitis B virus (HBV) from the covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA) template is essential for its replication. Suppressing the level and transcriptional activity of cccDNA might have anti-HBV effect. Although cellular transcription factors, such as CREB, which mediate HBV transcription, have been well described, transcriptional coactivators that facilitate this process are incompletely understood. In this study we showed that CREB-regulated transcriptional coactivator 1 (CRTC1) is required for HBV transcription and replication. The steady-state levels of CRTC1 protein were elevated in HBV-positive hepatoma cells and liver tissues. Ectopic expression of CRTC1 or its homolog CRTC2 or CRTC3 in hepatoma cells stimulated the activity of the preS2/S promoter of HBV, whereas overexpression of a dominant inactive form of CRTC1 inhibited HBV transcription. CRTC1 interacts with CREB and they are mutually required for the recruitment to the preS2/S promoter on cccDNA and for the activation of HBV transcription. Accumulation of pregenomic RNA (pgRNA) and cccDNA was observed when CRTC1 or its homologs were overexpressed, whereas the levels of pgRNA, cccDNA and secreted HBsAg were diminished when CRTC1 was compromised. In addition, HBV transactivator protein HBx stabilized CRTC1 and promoted its activity on HBV transcription. Our work reveals an essential role of CRTC1 coactivator in facilitating and supporting HBV transcription and replication.published_or_final_versio

The Haroche-Ramsey experiment as a generalized measurement

A number of atomic beam experiments, related to the Ramsey experiment and a recent experiment by Brune et al., are studied with respect to the question of complementarity. Three different procedures for obtaining information on the state of the incoming atom are compared. Positive operator-valued measures are explicitly calculated. It is demonstrated that, in principle, it is possible to choose the experimental arrangement so as to admit an interpretation as a joint non-ideal measurement yielding interference and ``which-way'' information. Comparison of the different measurements gives insight into the question of which information is provided by a (generalized) quantum mechanical measurement. For this purpose the subspaces of Hilbert-Schmidt space, spanned by the operators of the POVM, are determined for different measurement arrangements and different values of the parameters.Comment: REVTeX, 22 pages, 5 figure