Charge transport in a polypeptide chain

Charge transport is one important example of signal transduction in a protein which is responsible for action at a distance, and is a fundamental process in biochemical action. A model is presented in which electronic effects interact with motional processes to combine into a bifunctional model. This model is investigated with new detailed molecular dynamics calculations and successfully explains such action at a distance. Received 1st February 2002 / Received in final form 26 May 2002 Published online 13 September 2002     

The electrical resistivity of some uranium tellurides

Electrical resistivity of U₃Tein4, U₂Te₃ (cubic) and UTe₃ has been measured over temperature range 4.2–300 K. The two former compounds appear to be semimetallic conductors while the last one has semiconducting character. The results are discussed in the terms of available magnetic data.     

Magneto-optical Cotton—Mouton effect of molecular oxygen. A comparison

Measurements of the magneto-optical Cotton—Mouton effect at 632.8 nm of O₂(³Σ) over a range of temperature (≈299–464 K) and pressure (up to 613 kPa) are reported and analysed. The study enables a useful comparison to be made of data obtained under different conditions by the two groups that have undertaken systematic measurements of this effect. Agreement between the experimental results and also the derived molecular properties is found to be satisfactory.     

Invertible point transformations,Painlevé test,and the second Painlevé transcendent

The techniques of invertible point transformations and the Painlevé analysis can be used to construct integrable ordinary differential equations. We compare both techniques for the second Painlevé transcendent.     

A search technique for global optimization in a chaotic environment

We describe a new algorithm which uses the trajectories of a discrete dynamical system to sample the domain of an unconstrained objective function in search of global minima. The algorithm is unusually adept at avoiding nonoptimal local minima and successfully converging to a global minimum. Trajectories generated by the algorithm for objective functions with many local minima exhibit chaotic behavior, in the sense that they are extremely sensitive to changes in initial conditions and system parameters. In this context, chaos seems to have a beneficial effect: failure to converge to a global minimum from a given initial point can often be rectified by making arbitrarily small changes in the system parameters.     

Enantiodiscrimination of racemic electrophiles by diketopiperazine enolates: asymmetric synthesis of methyl 2-amino-3-aryl-butanoates and 3-methyl-aspartates

Enolates of (S)-N,N′-bis-(p-methoxybenzyl)-3-iso-propylpiperazine-2,5-dione exhibit high levels of enantiodiscrimination in alkylations with (RS)-1-aryl-1-bromoethanes and (RS)-2-bromoesters, affording substituted diketopiperazines containing two new stereogenic centres in high de. Deprotection and hydrolysis of the resultant substituted diketopiperazines provides a route to the asymmetric synthesis of homochiral methyl 2-amino-3-aryl-butanoates and 3-methyl-aspartates in high de and ee.     

Wavelength and power monitoring of DWDM systems using scanning F–P filter calibrated with a F–P laser

A novel technique to overcome the long-term drift and hysteresis of a scanning Fabry–Perot filter was developed and applied to wavelength and power monitoring of DWDM system. By using the comb peaks generated by a temperature-stabilized, near threshold-biased Fabry–Perot diode laser as wavelength reference for the scanning Fabry–Perot filter, wavelength and power measurement accuracy of better than ±10 pm and 0.2 dB, respectively, were achieved.     

The push-out region of an immersed manifold

We consider immersions: and construct a subspace of which corresponds to a set of embedded manifolds which are either parallel to f, tubes around f or, in general, partial tubes around f. This space is invariant under the action of the normal holonomy group, We investigate the case where is non-trivial and obtain some results on the number of connected components of . Received 24 March 2000.