Questioni di realità sulle curve trigonali reali

Sunto. In relazione a curve trigonali reali (di genere e specie assegnati) vengono svolte alcune questioni di realità, ed in particolare quella concernente il numero dei circuiti della parte reale ed il loro comportamento rispetto alla g ₃ ⁴ il che dà luogo ad una classificazione di tali curve. Sono perciò riprese od introdotte svariate considerazioni che potrebbero anche venire più largamente utilizzate.     

Effects of nonionic,cationic, and anionic micelles on the kinetics of the complexation reaction of nickel (II) with pyridine-2-azo-p-dimethylaniline

The stopped-flow technique has been used to study the effect of cationic (CTAN), nonionic (Triton X-100), andanionic (SDS) micelles on the rate of the reaction between nickel(II) ion and the ligand pyridine-2-azo-p-dimethylaniline (PADA) at 20.0°C and ionic strength 0.03 mol dm^?3. The complex formation reaction is markedly inhibited by both CTAN and Triton X-100 micelles. The kinetic dataare found to conform to a reaction mechanism which implies only partitioning of the ligand between water and the micellar phase, the estimated bindingconstant of PADA being significantly larger in the presence of CTAN aggregates. Anionic micelles strongly speed the complexation reaction, Which occurs in the micellar phase with the same rate and the same mechanism as in water. The extent of binding of PADA to anionic micelles is similar to that found for the cationic micellar aggregates.     

A scattering polarimeter for X-ray astronomy

Summary We describe a high sensitivity X-ray Thomson polarimeter for astrophysical research, particularly designed for the XMM mission. The efficiency, the modulation factor and the performances of this instrument have been estimated by means of a Monte Carlo simulation. The predicted sensitivity for the high eccentricity Orbit of XMM should allow the detection of the Crab Nebula polarization (3σ, (5÷11)keV) in 15 seconds only. To speed up publication, the proofs were not sent to the authors and were supervised by the Scientific Committee.     

Floating and sinking: the imprint of massive scalars around rotating black holes

We study the coupling of massive scalar fields to matter in orbit around rotating black holes. It is generally expected that orbiting bodies will lose energy in gravitational waves, slowly inspiraling into the black hole. Instead, we show that the coupling of the field to matter leads to a surprising effect: because of superradiance, matter can hover into "floating orbits" for which the net gravitational energy loss at infinity is entirely provided by the black hole's rotational energy. Orbiting bodies remain floating until they extract sufficient angular momentum from the black hole, or until perturbations or nonlinear effects disrupt the orbit. For slowly rotating and nonrotating black holes floating orbits are unlikely to exist, but resonances at orbital frequencies corresponding to quasibound states of the scalar field can speed up the inspiral, so that the orbiting body sinks. These effects could be a smoking gun of deviations from general relativity.     

Ultrastructural architecture of colonies of different morphologies produced by phenotypic switching of a clinical strain of Candida tropicalis and biofilm formation by variant phenotypes

Candida tropicalis has been identified as one of the most prevalent pathogenic yeast species of the Candida-non-albicans (CNA) group. Study of switching in C. tropicalis has not been the subject of extensive research. Therefore, we investigated switching event and characterized the ultrastructural architecture of different phenotypes and biofilm produced in a C. tropicalis clinical strain. Cells switched heritably, reversibly, and at a high frequency between four phenotypes readily distinguishable by the shape of colonies formed on agar at 25°C. SEM analysis was used to verify the architecture of whole Candida colonies at ultrastructural level. The smooth phenotype (parental phenotype) colony showed a hemispherical shape character, while the semi-smooth was characterized by the presence of shallow marginal depressions. The ring and rough phenotypes exhibited more complex architecture and were characterized by the presence of deep central and peripheral depressions areas. The biofilm-forming ability varied among the switch phenotypes. After 12h incubation, the smooth phenotype formed less biofilm compared to the other phenotypes (P<0.05). The electron microscopy analysis revealed that filamentation (pseudohyphae) was associated with ring and rough colonies. The ultrastructural analysis allowed the observation of the arrangement of individual cells within the colonies. At the deep central and peripheral depressions areas of the ring and rough colonies extracellular material was seen in different arrangements. The data presented here open new avenues to study a possible role for extracellular material in the formation and maintenance of the architecture of switch phenotypes in C. tropicalis. It is therefore essential that more strains be investigated to determine the biological significance of extracellular material in C. tropicalis phenotypic switching phenomenon.     

Reverse mathematics and initial intervals

In this paper we study the reverse mathematics of two theorems by Bonnet about partial orders. These results concern the structure and cardinality of the collection of initial intervals. The first theorem states that a partial order has no infinite antichains if and only if its initial intervals are finite unions of ideals. The second one asserts that a countable partial order is scattered and does not contain infinite antichains if and only if it has countably many initial intervals. We show that the left to right directions of these theorems are equivalent to _ACA0${\mathsf{ACA}}_0$ and _ATR0${\mathsf{ATR}}_0$, respectively. On the other hand, the opposite directions are both provable in _WKL0${\mathsf{WKL}}_0$, but not in _RCA0${\mathsf{RCA}}_0$. We also prove the equivalence with _ACA0${\mathsf{ACA}}_0$ of the following result of Erdös and Tarski: a partial order with no infinite strong antichains has no arbitrarily large finite strong antichains.     

A note on Griffiths infinitesimal invariant for curves

Given a generic curve of genus $g\ge 4$ and a smooth point $L\in W_{g-1}^{1}(C)$ , whose linear system is base-point free, we consider the Abel–Jacobi normal function associated with $L^{\otimes 2}\otimes \omega _{C}^{-1}$ , when $(C,L)$ varies in moduli. We prove that its infinitesimal invariant reconstructs the couple $(C,L)$ . When $g=4$ , we obtain the generic Torelli theorem proved by Griffiths.     

Inner solvers for interior point methods for large scale nonlinear programming

This paper deals with the solution of nonlinear programming problems arising from elliptic control problems by an interior point scheme. At each step of the scheme, we have to solve a large scale symmetric and indefinite system; inner iterative solvers, with an adaptive stopping rule, can be used in order to avoid unnecessary inner iterations, especially when the current outer iterate is far from the solution. In this work, we analyse the method of multipliers and the preconditioned conjugate gradient method as inner solvers for interior point schemes. We discuss the convergence of the whole approach, the implementation details and report the results of numerical experimentation on a set of large scale test problems arising from the discretization of elliptic control problems. A comparison with other interior point codes is also reported. This research was supported by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research (MIUR) projects: FIRB Project: “Parallel Nonlinear Numerical Optimization PN ² O” (grant n. RBAU01JYPN, ) and COFIN/PRIN04 Project “Numerical Methods and Mathematical Software for Applications” (grant n. 2004012559, ).