Broadband 10 Gb/s operation of graphene electro‐absorption modulator on silicon

High performance integrated optical modulators are highly desired for future optical interconnects. The ultra‐high bandwidth and broadband operation potentially offered by graphene based electro‐absorption modulators has attracted a lot of attention in the photonics community recently. In this work, we theoretically evaluate the true potential of such modulators and illustrate this with experimental results for a silicon integrated graphene optical electro‐absorption modulator capable of broadband 10 Gb/s modulation speed. The measured results agree very well with theoretical predictions. A low insertion loss of 3.8 dB at 1580 nm and a low drive voltage of 2.5 V combined with broadband and athermal operation were obtained for a 50 μm‐length hybrid graphene‐Si device. The peak modulation efficiency of the device is 1.5 dB/V. This robust device is challenging best‐in‐class Si (Ge) modulators for future chip‐level optical interconnects.     

Amorphous and crystalline states of ultrasoft colloids: a molecular dynamics study

In this work, we study the temperature-induced development of “dynamically arrested” states in dense suspensions of “soft colloids” (multi-arm star polymers and/or block-copolymers micelles) by means of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Temperature increase in marginal solvents results in “soft sphere” swelling, dynamical arrest, and eventually crystallization. However, two distinct “dynamically arrested” states were found, one almost amorphous (“glassy”) and one with a considerable degree of crystallinity, yet lower than that of the fully equilibrated crystal. It is remarkable that even that latter state permitted self-diffusion in the timescale of the simulations, an effect that underlies the importance of the “ultra-soft” nature of inter-particle potential. The “number of connections” criterion for crystallinity proved to be very successful in identifying the ultimate thermodynamic trend from the very early stages of the α-relaxation. This paper was presented at the Third Annual Rheology Conference, AERC 2006, April 27–29, 2006, Crete, Greece.     

Fluorescence Dynamics of Monocyclodextrin– and Bis(thiol‐cyclodextrin)–Coumarin C153 Complexes

The solvation and confinement of coumarin C153 within supramolecular host/guest complexes based on β‐cyclodextrin (β‐CD) and 6‐deoxy‐6‐thio‐β‐cyclodextrin (β‐CD‐SH) in water are studied by fluorescence spectroscopy. For β‐CD/C153, the 1:1 complex is proposed, and for β‐CD‐SH/C153 both the 1:1 and 2:1 complexes are believed to be formed. The 2:1 β‐CD‐SH/C153 complex has an association constant of 4.2×10⁵ M ^?1 and a C153 population of 82 %, which are interestingly high values, indicating that the proposed β‐CD‐SH dimers structure are connected by covalent disulfide bonds; this is supported by mass spectrometry. Solvation related to fast hydrogen‐bond rearrangement as a part of fluorescence relaxation is determined by the ultrafast components of time‐resolved spectroscopy to be 3 and 7 ps for the 1:1 β‐CD/C153 and 2:1 β‐CD‐SH/C153 complexes, respectively.     

Universal Singular Sets in the Calculus of Variations

For regular one-dimensional variational problems, Ball and Nadirashvilli introduced the notion of the universal singular set of a Lagrangian L and established its topological negligibility. This set is defined to be the set of all points in the plane through which the graph of some absolutely continuous L-minimizer passes with infinite derivative. Motivated by Tonelli’s partial regularity results, the question of the size of the universal singular set in measure naturally arises. Here we show that universal singular sets are characterized by being essentially purely unrectifiable—that is, they intersect most Lipschitz curves in sets of zero length and any compact purely unrectifiable set is contained within the universal singular set of some smooth Lagrangian with given superlinear growth. This gives examples of universal singular sets of Hausdorff dimension two, filling the gap between previously known one-dimensional examples and Sychëv’s result that universal singular sets are Lebesgue null. We show that some smoothness of the Lagrangian is necessary for the topological size estimate, and investigate the relationship between growth of the Lagrangian and the existence of (pathological) rectifiable pieces in the universal singular set. We also show that Tonelli’s partial regularity result is stable in that the energy of a “near” minimizer u over the set where it has large derivative is controlled by how far u is from being a minimizer.     

Surface composition of siloxane-containing polymers

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy was used to study relationships between the surface and bulk composition in block copolymers and blends of poly(dimethyl-siloxane), poly(bisphenol A sulfone) and poly(bisphenol A carbonate). In all cases the polymer surfaces were highly enriched in siloxane. At a fixed siloxane concentration in the bulk the highest enrichment was observed in the blends of homopolymers and the lowest in the copolymers. It was found that the addition of small quantities of a siloxane-rich copolymer to another copolymer having a lower siloxane content may reduce the surface siloxane concentration of the latter. This unusual surface behavior was explained by the formation of an over-layer in which the macromolecules of the siloxane-rich copolymer are oriented nearly parallel to the sample surface.     

A novel method of recording high frequency circular gratings

Interference fringes recorded on a rotating substrate through a triangular aperture have been composed to form a polygon consisting of triangular sectors with linear gratings. Such polygons can be considered as a quasi-circular diffraction gratings and serve as a Bragg reflector suitable for application in the CG SE DBR semiconductor lasers.     

Riesz basis property of root vectors of non‐self‐adjoint operators generated by aircraft wing model in subsonic airflow

This paper is the third in a series of several works devoted to the asymptotic and spectral analysis of a model of an aircraft wing in a subsonic air flow. This model has been developed in the Flight Systems Research Center of UCLA and is presented in the works by Balakrishnan. The model is governed by a system of two coupled integro‐differential equations and a two‐parameter family of boundary conditions modeling the action of the self‐straining actuators. The differential parts of the above equations form a coupled linear hyperbolic system; the integral parts are of the convolution type. The system of equations of motion is equivalent to a single operator evolution–convolution equation in the energy space. The Laplace transform of the solution of this equation can be represented in terms of the so‐called generalized resolvent operator, which is an operator‐valued function of the spectral parameter. This generalized resolvent operator is a finite‐meromorphic function on the complex plane having the branch cut along the negative real semi‐axis. Its poles are precisely the aeroelastic modes and the residues at these poles are the projectors on the generalized eigenspaces. In the first two papers (see [33, 34]) and in the present one, our main object of interest is the dynamics generator of the differential parts of the system. This generator is a non‐self‐adjoint operator in the energy space with a purely discrete spectrum. In the first paper, we have shown that the spectrum consists of two branches, and have derived their precise spectral asymptotics with respect to the eigenvalue number. In the second paper, we have derived the asymptotical approximations for the mode shapes. Based on the asymptotical results of the first two papers, in the present paper, we (a) prove that the set of the generalized eigenvectors of the aforementioned differential operator is complete in the energy space; (b) construct the set of vectors which is biorthogonal to the set of the generalized eigenvectors in the case when there might be not only eigenvectors but associate vectors as well; and (c) prove that the set of the generalized eigenvectors forms a Riesz basis in the energy space. To prove the main result of the paper, we made use of the Nagy–Foias functional model for non‐self‐adjoint operators. The results of all three papers will be important for the reconstruction of the solution of the original initial‐boundary‐value problem from its Laplace transform in the forthcoming papers. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emerging Therapeutic Agents for Colorectal Cancer

There are promising new therapeutic agents for CRC patients, including novel small-molecule inhibitors and immune checkpoint blockers. We focused on emerging CRC’s therapeutic agents that have shown the potential for progress in clinical practice. This review provides an overview of tyrosine kinase inhibitors targeting VEGF and KIT, BRAF and MEK inhibitors, TLR9 agonist, STAT3 inhibitors, and immune checkpoint blockers (PD1/PDL-1 inhibitors), for which recent advances have been reported. These new agents have the potential to provide benefits to CRC patients with unmet medical needs.     

Selective Integrin α5β1 Targeting through Spatially Constrained Multivalent DNA-Based Nanoparticles

Targeting cells specifically based on receptor expression levels remains an area of active research to date. Selective binding of receptors cannot be achieved by increasing the individual binding strength, as this does not account for differing distributions of receptor density across healthy and diseased cells. Engaging receptors above a threshold concentration would be desirable in devising selective diagnostics. Integrins are prime target candidates as they are readily available on the cell surface and have been reported to be overexpressed in diseases. Insights into their spatial organization would therefore be advantageous to design selective targeting agents. Here, we investigated the effect of activation method on integrin α₅β₁ clustering by immunofluorescence and modeled the global neighbor distances with input from an immuno-staining assay and image processing of microscopy images. This data was used to engineer spatially-controlled DNA-scaffolded bivalent ligands, which we used to compare trends in spatial-selective binding observed across HUVEC, CHO and HeLa in resting versus activated conditions in confocal microscopy images. For HUVEC and CHO, the data demonstrated an improved selectivity and localisation of binding for smaller spacings ~7 nm and ~24 nm, in good agreement with the model. A deviation from the mode predictions for HeLa was observed, indicative of a clustered, instead of homogeneous, integrin organization. Our findings demonstrate how low-technology imaging methods can guide the design of spatially controlled ligands to selectively differentiate between cell type and integrin activation state.