A new one-pot, four-component synthesis of 1,2-amino alcohols: TiCl3/t-BuOOH-mediated radical hydroxymethylation of imines

An amine, an aldehyde, and methanol can be readily assembled in one pot under very mild conditions through a free-radical multicomponent reaction by using an aqueous acidic TiCl3/t-BuOOH system to afford 1,2-amino alcohols in fair to excellent yields.     

Protein-assisted one-pot synthesis and biofunctionalization of spherical gold nanoparticles for selective targeting of cancer cells

All bound up: A small variant of protein?A was used as a biotemplate for the synthesis and biofunctionalization of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs). These functionalized AuNPs were able to bind to antibodies (green blocks, trastuzumab; TZ) with a defined orientation, thus showing promise as bio-nanoparticle systems suitable for selective cell labeling by membrane-receptor-specific recognition.     

Nonlocal Tug‐of‐War and the Infinity Fractional Laplacian

Motivated by the “tug‐of‐war” game studied by Peres et al. in 2009, we consider a nonlocal version of the game that goes as follows: at every step two players pick, respectively, a direction and then, instead of flipping a coin in order to decide which direction to choose and then moving a fixed amount ϵ > 0 (as is done in the classical case), it is an s‐stable Levy process that chooses at the same time both the direction and the distance to travel. Starting from this game, we heuristically derive a deterministic nonlocal integrodifferential equation that we call the “infinity fractional Laplacian.” We study existence, uniqueness, and regularity, both for the Dirichlet problem and for a double‐obstacle problem, both problems having a natural interpretation as tug‐of‐war games. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Centrality in networks of urban streets

Centrality has revealed crucial for understanding the structural properties of complex relational networks. Centrality is also relevant for various spatial factors affecting human life and behaviors in cities. Here, we present a comprehensive study of centrality distributions over geographic networks of urban streets. Five different measures of centrality, namely degree, closeness, betweenness, straightness and information, are compared over 18 1-square-mile samples of different world cities. Samples are represented by primal geographic graphs, i.e., valued graphs defined by metric rather than topologic distance where intersections are turned into nodes and streets into edges. The spatial behavior of centrality indices over the networks is investigated graphically by means of color-coded maps. The results indicate that a spatial analysis, that we term multiple centrality assessment, grounded not on a single but on a set of different centrality indices, allows an extended comprehension of the city structure, nicely capturing the skeleton of most central routes and subareas that so much impacts on spatial cognition and on collective dynamical behaviors. Statistically, closeness, straightness and betweenness turn out to follow similar functional distribution in all cases, despite the extreme diversity of the considered cities. Conversely, information is found to be exponential in planned cities and to follow a power-law scaling in self-organized cities. Hierarchical clustering analysis, based either on the Gini coefficients of the centrality distributions, or on the correlation between different centrality measures, is able to characterize classes of cities.     

Multimode uncertainty relations and separability of continuous variable states

A multimode uncertainty relation (generalizing the Robertson-Schr?dinger relation) is derived as a necessary constraint on the second moments of n pairs of canonical operators. In turn, necessary conditions for the separability of multimode continuous variable states under (m+n)-mode bipartitions are derived from the uncertainty relation. These conditions are proven to be necessary and sufficient for (1+n)-mode Gaussian states and for (m+n)-mode bisymmetric Gaussian states.     

Distributed quantum computation via optical fibers

We investigate the possibility of realizing effective quantum gates between two atoms in distant cavities coupled by an optical fiber. We show that highly reliable swap and entangling gates are achievable. We exactly study the stability of these gates in the presence of imperfections in coupling strengths and interaction times and prove them to be robust. Moreover, we analyze the effect of spontaneous emission and losses and show that such gates are very promising in view of the high level of coherent control currently achievable in optical cavities.     

2D supramolecular assemblies of benzene-1,3,5-triyl-tribenzoic acid: temperature-induced phase transformations and hierarchical organization with macrocyclic molecules

Two-dimensional supramolecular honeycomb networks with cavities of an internal diameter of 2.95 nm were formed by the self-assembly of 4,4',4' '-benzene-1,3,5-triyl-tribenzoic acid (BTA) on a Ag(111) surface at room temperature. Annealing to higher temperatures resulted in two sequential phase transformations into closer-packed supramolecular arrangements. The phase transformations are associated with stepwise deprotonation of the carboxylic acid groups. The voids of the honeycomb network of BTA have a suitable size for the construction of hierarchical structures with guest molecules. Single molecules of the macrocyclic compound mt-33 were successfully confined inside 2D nanocavities of the honeycomb networks and released when the phase was transformed to the close-packed structure.