Some Cholesteric Derivatives of S-(+)-4-(2′-Methylbutyl) Phenol

A facile synthesis of S-(+)-4-(2′-methylbutyl)phenol and its interaction with a number of different acids are used to provide a wide variety of new chiral nematic liquid crystals. These new cholesterogens display a range of liquid crystal and other physical properties, and are potentially useful for application in display device and other technologies. Of particular interest in this respect are the materials containing two chiral centres and which therefore have very small helical pitch lengths-as low as 0.1 μm.     

Liquid Crystal Compounds Incorporating the Trans-1,4-Substituted Cyclohexane Ring System

A number of esters and other compounds containing a trans-1,4-substituted cyclohexane ring system-have been prepared, and the liquid crystal thermal stabilities of these new mesogens are discussed in relation to those of their analogues containing the 1,4-phenylene ring. The observed effects are discussed in terms of a possible thermal energy absorption by the cyclohexane ring in causing minor conformational changes.

Other physical properties of these new mesogens are also discussed with particular reference to their potential in applications. In relation to electro-optical display devices, such properties as birefringence, dielectric anistropy, viscosity etc., are important parameters, and the new materials have been assessed in this context as possible additives to the 4-n-alkyl- and 4-n-alkyloxy-4′-cyanobiphenyls for producing a favorable combination of physical parameters.

Also reported is a liquid crystal mixture which has a 100°C nematic range and which contains only materials which are aliphatic. This mixture is assessed for its potential application as an anistropic solvent in analytical techniques such as ultra-violet spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.     

Maximally informative stimuli and tuning curves for sigmoidal rate-coding neurons and populations

A general method for deriving maximally informative sigmoidal tuning curves for neural systems with small normalized variability is presented. The optimal tuning curve is a nonlinear function of the cumulative distribution function of the stimulus and depends on the mean-variance relationship of the neural system. The derivation is based on a known relationship between Shannon's mutual information and Fisher information, and the optimality of Jeffrey's prior. It relies on the existence of closed-form solutions to the converse problem of optimizing the stimulus distribution for a given tuning curve. It is shown that maximum mutual information corresponds to constant Fisher information only if the stimulus is uniformly distributed. As an example, the case of sub-Poisson binomial firing statistics is analyzed in detail.     

Restoring parts of scenes from blurred photographs

Digital restorations are reported of parts of scenes photographed so badly out of focus that essential details in the scene are unrecognisable. The photographs are taken with a standard 35 mm camera using ordinary film. The part of the degraded image of interest is preprocessed by first compensating (on the basis of the known development time) for the gamma of the film and then applying our (recently reported) edge extension method. The out of focus point-spread function is determined experimentally and the final restoration is obtained by Wiener filtering. The blurred and restored versions of the number plate of a vehicle are presented.     

Application of the porous-sphere hydrodynamic model to dilute polymer solutions

The porous-sphere model of Debye–Brinkman–Bueche is applied to predict the limiting frictional coefficient f₀ and intrinsic viscosity [η] of polystyrene fractions in tetrahydrofuran and random protein coils in 6M guanidine hydrochloride. Following the formulation of Wiegel and Mijnlieff, the molecular permeability is modeled to increase exponentially as the square of the distance from the center of the molecule. A method is developed to obtain this permeability from the translational diffusion coefficient. The experimental values of f₀ and [η] are in satisfactory agreement with the calculated values. Also, this analysis predicts values of the Mandelkern–Flory–Scheraga parameter for flexible coils which are significantly smaller than the minimum values permitted by the Kirkwood–Riseman theory. This is in accord with the experimental evidence.     

A laser extraction/combustion technique for in situ delta(13)C analysis of organic and inorganic materials

A CO(2) laser extraction system is described for in situ delta(13)C analysis of organic and inorganic materials. Carbonaceous compounds volatilized by the laser are quantitatively converted to CO(2) gas by a combustion furnace mounted after the sample chamber. Gases produced by the laser and combustion processes are swept by helium carrier gas and separated by a packed gas chromatography column prior to their introduction to an isotope ratio monitoring mass spectrometer. A sample of lentil bean was analyzed at a spatial resolution of 200 μm and yielded delta(13)C values with precision of +/- 0.3 per thousand. The accuracy of delta(13)C measurements was better than +/- 0.5 per thousand from NBS 22 (mineral oil), USGS 24 (graphite), and IAEA CO-1 (calcium carbonate). Copyright 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Rotational viscosity of uniaxial molecules

Non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) are used to calculate the vortex or rotational viscosity of fluids composed of uniaxial molecules. It is shown that the NEMD homogeneous spin flow algorithm proposed by Edberg, R., Evans, D. J., and Moriss, G. P., 1987, Molec. Phys., 62, 1357 considerably underestimates the vortex viscosity. A modified version of this algorithm is proposed and applied to liquid chlorine and nitrogen. The results are in good agreement with previous work using equilibrium or other NEMD methods, and also show that at high spin rates the vortex viscosity decreases with increase in magnitude of the external torque used to drive the spin flow.     

THE HADAMARD INEQUALITY FOR CONVEX FUNCTION VIA FRACTIONAL INTEGRALS

In this paper, we establish several inequalities for some differantiable mappings that are connected with the Riemann-Liouville fractional integrals. The analysis used in the proofs is fairly elementar...     

On the role of the definition of potential models in Gibbs ensemble phase equilibria simulations of the H2S-pentane mixture

The effect of treating explicitly the coulombic and polarization interactions is investigated through the calculation of the coexistence curve of the pentane-H₂S binary mixture. In this work, potential models have been developed for hydrogen sulphide and pentane, which include electrostatic sites—estimated from ab initio calculations—and polarizable sites—estimated from experimental data—in addition to Lennard-Jones sites. Compared to existing models, these new models have the same number of fitting parameters to experimental thermodynamic data. They are shown to correctly describe the coexistence curve of the pure compounds. When applied to the case of mixtures, together with Lorentz-Berthelot combining rules, they allow one to obtain a more accurate prediction of the coexisting compositions of the mixture. Furthermore, it is shown that the interaction energy in this kind of mixture cannot be properly described by using effective potential models usually considered for pure compounds.