Raman spectroscopy of topotecan, an inhibitor of DNA topoisomerase I

Topotecan (TPT), a water-soluble derivative of camptothecin (inhibitor of human DNA topoiomerase I), has found wide application in cancer chemotherapy. The central problem in using topotecan is the presence of lactone rings in its molecules, which undergo hydrolysis at a physiological pH yielding an inactive and even toxic form of the drug. The analysis of Raman spectra of TPT in H₂O and D₂O solutions made it possible to assign the spectral bands to the vibrations of particular molecular groups. Spectral features indicative of the opening of the lactone rings of the TPT molecules, deprotonation of the hydroxyl groups in their quinoline fragments, and of possible participation of the hydroxyl and carbonyl groups in H bonding are found. The data obtained are necessary to study the molecular mechanisms of TPT-DNA interaction and the formation of ternary complexes between TPT, DNA, and DNA topoisomerase I.     

Black-hole horizon and metric singularity at the brane separating two sliding superfluids

An analogue of a black hole can be realized in the low-temperature laboratory. The horizon can be constructed for “relativistic” ripplons (surface waves) living on the brane. The brane is represented by the interface between two superfluid liquids, ³He-A and ³He-B, sliding along each other without friction. A similar experimental arrangement was recently used for the observation and investigation of the Kelvin-Helmholtz type of instability in superfluids [1]. The shear-flow instability in superfluids is characterized by two critical velocities. The lowest threshold measured in recent experiments [1] corresponds to the appearance of the ergoregion for ripplons. In the modified geometry, this will give rise to the black-hole event horizon in the effective metric experienced by ripplons. In the region behind the horizon, the brane vacuum is unstable due to interaction with the higher-dimensional world of bulk superfluids. The time of the development of instability can be made very long at low temperature. This will allow us to reach and investigate the second critical velocity—the proper Kelvin-Helmholtz instability threshold. The latter corresponds to the singularity inside the black hole, where the determinant of the effective metric becomes infinite.     

Towards Treating Correlations in Bose Condensates

 We use the adiabatic hyperspheric expansion and the Faddeev decomposition of the wave function with only s-waves. We derive for a fixed hyperradius an integro-differential equation for the angular eigenvalue and wave function. The correlations lower the interaction energy for N = 20 by about a factor of 5. Received October 22, 2001; accepted for publication November 5, 2001     

On the application of adaptive antennas to microcellularenvironments: radio channel characteristics and system performance

The possible application of adaptive antennas in microcellular operational environments is studied in this paper with the help of a site-specific ray-tracing propagation model. First are examined the statistics of propagation parameters that play an important role for the performance of adaptive antennas. Particular emphasis is put on the spatial characteristics of the radio channel under line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS conditions. For this reason, area statistics are produced for a typical small-cell environment for parameters such as the number of multipath clusters, number of rays, angular size, and excess delay of each impulse response, as well as the number of rays, angular size and power of the multipath clusters. Results show that contrary to the common belief for such environments, the signal is not "almost" uniformly distributed in the spatial domain, instead is contained in a few narrow clusters. Then the effect of the microcellular environment on the uplink performance of some well-known techniques like conventional beamforming, maximum entropy, switched beams, maximum ratio and optimum combining, and beam-space optimum combining is examined . The results show that for typical time-division multiple-access (TDMA) scenarios with one and two users, the beam space optimum combining (strongest eigenvalue version) and the switched beams methods, offer the best performance     

Portable system for data acquisition and transmission based on handheld PC technology

A portable system is developed to monitor physical activity by acquiring and storing data from body-mounted sensors; a handheld PC is used for managing data acquisition and storage, including radio-transmission to a remote host. An application related to the use of a gyro-accelerometric sensor for determining walking distance is discussed.     

Navier-Stokes approximation and problems of the Chapman-Enskog projection for kinetic equations

The purpose of this paper is to investigate problems of the Navier-Stokes approximation to kinetic equations in terms of the so-called Chapman-Enskog projection. One considers properties of the Chapman-Enskog projection for the Cauchy problem for moment approximations of the kinetic equation and primarily the Chapman-Enskog projection for the Boltzmann-Peierls kinetic equation. The existence of the Chapman-Enskog projection for the Cauchy problem is proved for the phase space of conservative variables (phenomena of nonlinear diffusion) and for the phase space of physical variables (the second sound projection). __________ Translated from Trudy Seminara imeni I. G. Petrovskogo, No. 25, pp. 184–225, 2005.     

Ground-state energy of pionic hydrogen to one loop

We investigate the ground-state energy of the atom (pionic hydrogen) in the framework of QCD + QED. In particular, we evaluate the strong energy-level shift. We perform the calculation at next-to-leading order in the low-energy expansion in the framework of the relevant effective field theory. The result provides a relation between the strong energy shift and the pion-nucleon S-wave scattering lengths - evaluated in pure QCD - at next-to-leading order in isospin-breaking and in the low-energy expansion. We compare our result with available model calculations. Received: 11 June 2002 / Published online: 9 October 2002     

Pion correlations and resonance effects in \bar{p}p annihilation to 4\pi^0 at rest

We study correlations in the exclusive reaction at rest with complete reconstruction of the kinematics for each event. The inclusive distribution is fairly flat at small invariant mass of the pion pair while a small enhancement in the double differential distribution is observed for small invariant masses of both pion pairs. Dynamical models with resonances in the final state are shown to be consistent with the data while the stochastic HBT mechanism is not supported by the present findings. Received: 26 February 2002 / Revised version: 22 July 2002 / Published online: 30 August 2002     

Quantum discreteness effects and flicker fluctuations in tunneling conductivity

An analysis of events in the tunneling junction shows that the interaction of one-electron processes in a many-electron system may be a source of scale-invariant low-frequency fluctuations of conductivity (the interaction consists in that the quantum probability of an electron transition depends on fast random changes in the environment in the course of the transition, including the changes caused by analogous transitions). The theory relates flicker fluctuations in the tunneling conductivity to the discrete character of the spectrum of electron states and explains the nonlinearity of the noise-current characteristic observed in nanocomposites.