Polystyrene functionalized with EDOT oligomers

The control of the organization of polymeric films from the nano- to the meso-scale is an ongoing field and different approaches have been proposed by many authors with the aim to drive the organization and the morphology of the materials to optimize their properties. One of the driving force of the organization at the micrometric and submicrometric scale is the degree of interaction between different polymeric chains and many successful examples of ordered supramolecular organization based on nano and microphase separation have been reported by using block copolymers and polymer blends. In this work we report on a synthetic approach to prepare a copolymeric structure formed by polystyrene and 3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene (EDOT) oligomers with the aim of preparing thin polymeric films exhibiting organized morphologies.     

Exact controllability of a spherical cap: Numerical implementation of HUM

This paper deals with the numerical implementation of the exact boundary controllability of the Reissner model for shallow spherical shells (Ref. 1). The problem is attacked by the Hilbert uniqueness method (HUM, Refs. 2–4), and we propose a semidiscrete method for the numerical approximation of the minimization problem associated to the exact controllability problem. The numerical results compare well with the results obtained by a finite difference and conjugate gradient method in Ref. 5.This work was done when the first two authors were at CNR-IAC, Rome, Italy as Graduate Students.     

A parallel domain reduction method

We relate a particular version of a parallel multigrid method to a domain decomposition method, showing that the parallel multigrid method reduces computation to a small portion of the domain and then extends the solution to the entire domain using the correct reflections to get the exact solution. We extend a particular example to double the parallelism in a nonobvious manner. While the techniques of this paper are applied to twodimensional problems, they can be applied to higher dimensional problems in an obvious manner.     

Synthesis,Characterization, and Biological Evaluation of a Dual-Action Ligand Targeting αvβ3 Integrin and VEGF Receptors

A dual-action ligand targeting both integrin α_Vβ₃ and vascular endothelial growth factor receptors (VEGFRs), was synthesized via conjugation of a cyclic peptidomimetic α_Vβ₃ Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD) ligand with a decapentapeptide. The latter was obtained from a known VEGFR antagonist by acetylation at the Lys13 side chain. Functionalization of the precursor ligands was carried out in solution and in the solid phase, affording two fragments: an alkyne VEGFR ligand and the azide integrin α_Vβ₃ ligand, which were conjugated by click chemistry. Circular dichroism studies confirmed that both the RGD and VEGFR ligand portions of the dual-action compound substantially adopt the biologically active conformation. In vitro binding assays on isolated integrin α_Vβ₃ and VEGFR-1 showed that the dual-action conjugate retains a good level of affinity for both its target receptors, although with one order of magnitude (10/20 times) decrease in potency. The dual-action ligand strongly inhibited the VEGF-induced morphogenesis in Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cells (HUVECs). Remarkably, its efficiency in preventing the formation of new blood vessels was similar to that of the original individual ligands, despite the worse affinity towards integrin α_Vβ₃ and VEGFR-1.     

Enhanced nonlinear effects in pulse propagation through epsilon‐near‐zero media

In recent years, unconventional metamaterial properties have triggered a revolution of electromagnetic research which has unveiled novel scenarios of wave‐matter interaction. A very small dielectric permittivity is a leading example of such unusual features, since it produces an exotic static‐like regime where the electromagnetic field is spatially slowly‐varying over a physically large region. The so‐called epsilon‐near‐zero metamaterials thus offer an ideal platform where to manipulate the inner details of the “stretched” field. Here we theoretically prove that a standard nonlinearity is able to operate such a manipulation to the point that even a thin slab produces a dramatic nonlinear pulse transformation, if the dielectric permittivity is very small within the field bandwidth. The predicted non‐resonant releasing of full nonlinear coupling produced by the epsilon‐near‐zero condition does not resort to any field enhancement mechanism and opens novel routes to exploiting matter nonlinearity for steering the radiation by means of ultra‐compact structures.

     

Crack Localization in Stepped Beams

A method for crack localization, based on so-called Local Modal Crack Sensitivity (LMCS), has recently been proposed by one of the Authors. As a major feature, the method only involves measuring eigenfrequencies. The method has already been used for beams of uniform cross section and homogeneous boundary conditions. In this paper, the method is extended to stepped beams, with both homogeneous and non-homogeneous boundary conditions. Experimental results confirm its usefulness for crack localization. Satisfactory localization of a second crack was also possible, so confirming the effectiveness of the method.     

Multicomponent diffusion in nanosystems

We present the detailed analysis of the diffusive transport of spatially inhomogeneous fluid mixtures and the interplay between structural and dynamical properties varying on the atomic scale. The present treatment is based on different areas of liquid state theory, namely, kinetic and density functional theory and their implementation as an effective numerical method via the lattice Boltzmann approach. By combining the first two methods, it is possible to obtain a closed set of kinetic equations for the singlet phase space distribution functions of each species. The interactions among particles are considered within a self-consistent approximation and the resulting effective molecular fields are analyzed. We focus on multispecies diffusion in systems with short-range hard-core repulsion between particles of unequal sizes and weak attractive long-range interactions. As a result, the attractive part of the potential does not contribute explicitly to viscosity but to diffusivity and the thermodynamic properties. Finally, we obtain a practical scheme to solve the kinetic equations by employing a discretization procedure derived from the lattice Boltzmann approach. Within this framework, we present numerical data concerning the mutual diffusion properties both in the case of a quiescent bulk fluid and shear flow inducing Taylor dispersion.     

On the distribution of the (un)bounded sum of random variables

We propose a general treatment of random variables aggregation accounting for the dependence among variables and bounded or unbounded support of their sum. The approach is based on the extension to the concept of convolution to dependent variables, involving copula functions. We show that some classes of copula functions (such as Marshall-Olkin and elliptical) cannot be used to represent the dependence structure of two variables whose sum is bounded, while Archimedean copulas can be applied only if the generator becomes linear beyond some point. As for the application, we study the problem of capital allocation between risks when the sum of losses is bounded.