Excited-state intermolecular proton transfer of firefly luciferin III. Proton transfer to a mild base

Steady-state and time-resolved techniques were employed to study the excited-state proton transfer (ESPT) from d-luciferin, the natural substrate of the firefly luciferase, to the mild acetate base in aqueous solutions. We found that in 1 M aqueous solutions of acetate or higher, a proton transfer (PT) process to the acetate takes place within 30 ps in both H(2)O and D(2)O solutions. The time-resolved emission signal is composed of three components. We found that the short-time component decay time is 300 and 600 fs in H(2)O and D(2)O, respectively. This component is attributed either to a PT process via the shortest water bridged complex available, ROH··H(2)O··Ac(-), or to PT taking place within a contact ion pair. The second time component of 2000 and 3000 fs for H(2)O and D(2)O, respectively, is attributed to ROH* acetate complex, whose proton wire is longer by one water molecule. The decay rate of the third, long-time component is proportional to the acetate concentration. We attribute it to the diffusion-assisted reaction as well as to PT process to the solvent.     

Practical anodes for Li-ion batteries comprising metallurgical silicon particles and multiwall carbon nanotubes

Journal of Solid State Electrochemistry - Silicon is considered to be a very attractive anode material for next-generation lithium-ion batteries due to its high theoretical capacity...     

Alternating subgroups of Coxeter groups

We study combinatorial properties of the alternating subgroup of a Coxeter group, using a presentation of it due to Bourbaki.     

Losslessness and stability of LDI ladders and filters

The stability of digital ladder filters close in form, via the lossless discrete integrator (LDI) transformation, to doubly terminatedLC Cauer ladder low-pass filters is studied. The LDI transformation does not necessarily map stable analogue into stable digital filters. Necessary and sufficient conditions for these digital filter to be lossless and for a corresponding doubly terminated filter to be stable are given. LDIs are often used in the design of switched capacitor (SC) filters. For this case we provide a threshold sampling rate above which the SC LDI filter retains the stability of the analogue filter. In spite of the stability problem with the LDI mapping, it has been observed that when applied to simulate analogue filters the resulting filter is stable. It can now be argued that, in these cases, other factors in the determination of the sampling rate leads typically to a choice that is also sufficiently above the threshold rate for stability. The theory described is also useful to derive more general digital filters and to perform the design of stable LDI filters exclusively in the Z-plane without reference to analogue prototypes.This work was partly supported by the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation under Grant No. 88-425.     

Random Cayley graphs and expanders

For every 1 > δ > 0 there exists a c = c(δ) > 0 such that for every group G of order n, and for a set S of c(δ) log n random elements in the group, the expected value of the second largest eigenvalue of the normalized adjacency matrix of the Cayley graph X(G, S) is at most (1 - δ). This implies that almost every such a graph is an ?(δ)-expander. For Abelian groups this is essentially tight, and explicit constructions can be given in some cases. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Crack growth resistance of shape memory alloys by means of a cohesive zone model

Crack growth resistance of shape memory alloys (SMAs) is dominated by the transformation zone in the vicinity of the crack tip. In this study, the transformation toughening behavior of a slowly propagating crack in an SMA under plane strain conditions and mode I deformation is numerically investigated. A small-scale transformation zone is assumed. A cohesive zone model is implemented to simulate crack growth within a finite element scheme. Resistance curves are obtained for a range of parameters that specify the cohesive traction-separation constitutive law. It is found that the choice of the cohesive strength t₀ has a great influence on the toughening behavior of the material. Moreover, the reversibility of the transformation can significantly reduce the toughening of the alloy. The shape of the initial transformation zone, as well as that of a growing crack is determined. The effect of the Young's moduli ratio of the martensite and austenite phases is examined.     

Schur-positive sets of permutations via products and grid classes

Characterizing sets of permutations whose associated quasisymmetric function is symmetric and Schur-positive is a long-standing problem in algebraic combinatorics. In this paper, we present a general method to construct Schur-positive sets and multisets, based on geometric grid classes and the product operation. Our approach produces many new instances of Schur-positive sets and provides a broad framework that explains the existence of known such sets that until now were sporadic cases.     

On Lipschitz extension from finite subsets

We prove that for every n ∈ ? there exists a metric space (X, d _X), an n-point subset S ? X, a Banach space (Z, \({\left\| \right\|_Z}\)) and a 1-Lipschitz function f: S → Z such that the Lipschitz constant of every function F: X → Z that extends f is at least a constant multiple of \(\sqrt {\log n} \). This improves a bound of Johnson and Lindenstrauss [JL84]. We also obtain the following quantitative counterpart to a classical extension theorem of Minty [Min70]. For every α ∈ (1/2, 1] and n ∈ ? there exists a metric space (X, d _X), an n-point subset S ? X and a function f: S → ?₂ that is α-Hölder with constant 1, yet the α-Hölder constant of any F: X → ?₂ that extends f satisfies \({\left\| F \right\|_{Lip\left( \alpha \right)}} > {\left( {\log n} \right)^{\frac{{2\alpha - 1}}{{4\alpha }}}} + {\left( {\frac{{\log n}}{{\log \log n}}} \right)^{{\alpha ^2} - \frac{1}{2}}}\). We formulate a conjecture whose positive solution would strengthen Ball’s nonlinear Maurey extension theorem [Bal92], serving as a far-reaching nonlinear version of a theorem of König, Retherford and Tomczak-Jaegermann [KRTJ80]. We explain how this conjecture would imply as special cases answers to longstanding open questions of Johnson and Lindenstrauss [JL84] and Kalton [Kal04].