P2X receptors: epithelial ion channels and regulators of salt and water transport.

When the results from electrophysiological studies of renal epithelial cells are combined with data from in vivo tubule microperfusion experiments and immunohistochemical surveys of the nephron, the accumulated evidence suggests that ATP-gated ion channels, P2X receptors, play a specialized role in the regulation of ion and water movement across the renal tubule and are integral to electrolyte and fluid homeostasis. In this short review, we discuss the concept of P2X receptors as regulators of salt and water salvage pathways, as well as acknowledging their accepted role as ATP-gated ion channels

Star Formation in Violent and Normal Evolutionary Phases

Mergers of massive gas-rich galaxies trigger violent starbursts that - over timescales of $> 100$ Myr and regions $> 10$ kpc - form massive and compact star clusters comparable in mass and radii to Galactic globular clusters. The star formation efficiency is higher by 1 - 2 orders of magnitude in these bursts than in undisturbed spirals, irregulars or even BCDs. We ask the question if star formation in these extreme regimes is just a scaled-up version of the normal star formation mode of if the formation of globular clusters reveals fundamentally different conditions.Comment: 4 pages To appear in The Evolution of Galaxies. II. Basic building blocks, eds. M. Sauvage, G. Stasinska, L. Vigroux, D. Schaerer, S. Madde

Fermion correlators in non-abelian holographic superconductors

We consider fermion correlators in non-abelian holographic superconductors. The spectral function of the fermions exhibits several interesting features such as support in displaced Dirac cones and an asymmetric distribution of normal modes. These features are compared to similar ones observed in angle resolved photoemission experiments on high T_c superconductors. Along the way we elucidate some properties of p-wave superconductors in AdS_4 and discuss the construction of SO(4) superconductors.Comment: 49 pages, 11 figure

Magnetic coupling properties of rare-earth metals (Gd, Nd) doped ZnO: first-principles calculations

The electronic structure and magnetic coupling properties of rare-earth metals (Gd, Nd) doped ZnO have been investigated using first-principles methods. We show that the magnetic coupling between Gd or Nd ions in the nearest neighbor sites is ferromagnetic. The stability of the ferromagnetic coupling between Gd ions can be enhanced by appropriate electron doping into ZnO:Gd system and the room-temperature ferromagnetism can be achieved. However, for ZnO:Nd system, the ferromagnetism between Nd ions can be enhanced by appropriate holes doping into the sample. The room-temperature ferromagnetism can also be achieved in the \emph{n}-conducting ZnO:Nd sample. Our calculated results are in good agreement with the conclusions of the recent experiments. The effect of native defects (V$_{\rm{Zn}}$, V$_{\rm{O}}$) on the ferromagnetism is also discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Refractive index in holographic superconductors

With the probe limit, we investigate the behavior of the electric permittivity and effective magnetic permeability and related optical properties in the s-wave holographic superconductors. In particular, our result shows that unlike the strong coupled systems which admit a gravity dual of charged black holes in the bulk, the electric permittivity and effective magnetic permeability are unable to conspire to bring about the negative Depine-Lakhtakia index at low frequencies, which implies that the negative phase velocity does not appear in the holographic superconductors under such a situation.Comment: JHEP style, 1+15 pages, 11 figures, version to appear in JHE

High expression of biglycan is associated with poor prognosis in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

published_or_final_versio

Holographic Phase Transition to Topological Dyons

The dynamical stability of a Julia-Zee solution in the AdS background in a four dimensional Einstein-Yang-Mills-Higgs theory is studied. We find that the model with a vanishing scalar field develops a non-zero value for the field at a certain critical temperature which corresponds to a topological dyon in the bulk and a topological phase transition at the boundary.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, sections 2 and 4 are shortened, an error in the last part of section 5 is corrected and equations are modified. This version to be published in JHE

Valley polarization in graphene-silicene-graphene heterojunction in zigzag nanoribbon

published_or_final_versio

A Similarity Measure for GPU Kernel Subgraph Matching

Accelerator architectures specialize in executing SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) in lockstep. Because the majority of CUDA applications are parallelized loops, control flow information can provide an in-depth characterization of a kernel. CUDAflow is a tool that statically separates CUDA binaries into basic block regions and dynamically measures instruction and basic block frequencies. CUDAflow captures this information in a control flow graph (CFG) and performs subgraph matching across various kernel's CFGs to gain insights to an application's resource requirements, based on the shape and traversal of the graph, instruction operations executed and registers allocated, among other information. The utility of CUDAflow is demonstrated with SHOC and Rodinia application case studies on a variety of GPU architectures, revealing novel thread divergence characteristics that facilitates end users, autotuners and compilers in generating high performing code

Electric Field Effects on Graphene Materials

Understanding the effect of electric fields on the physical and chemical properties of two-dimensional (2D) nanostructures is instrumental in the design of novel electronic and optoelectronic devices. Several of those properties are characterized in terms of the dielectric constant which play an important role on capacitance, conductivity, screening, dielectric losses and refractive index. Here we review our recent theoretical studies using density functional calculations including van der Waals interactions on two types of layered materials of similar two-dimensional molecular geometry but remarkably different electronic structures, that is, graphene and molybdenum disulphide (MoS$_2$). We focus on such two-dimensional crystals because of they complementary physical and chemical properties, and the appealing interest to incorporate them in the next generation of electronic and optoelectronic devices. We predict that the effective dielectric constant ($\varepsilon$) of few-layer graphene and MoS$_2$ is tunable by external electric fields ($E_{\rm ext}$). We show that at low fields ($E_{\rm ext}^{}<0.01$ V/\AA) $\varepsilon$ assumes a nearly constant value $\sim$4 for both materials, but increases at higher fields to values that depend on the layer thickness. The thicker the structure the stronger is the modulation of $\varepsilon$ with the electric field. Increasing of the external field perpendicular to the layer surface above a critical value can drive the systems to an unstable state where the layers are weakly coupled and can be easily separated. The observed dependence of $\varepsilon$ on the external field is due to charge polarization driven by the bias, which show several similar characteristics despite of the layer considered.Comment: Invited book chapter on Exotic Properties of Carbon Nanomatter: Advances in Physics and Chemistry, Springer Series on Carbon Materials. Editors: Mihai V. Putz and Ottorino Ori (11 pages, 4 figures, 30 references