The Adsorption Kinetics of Cethyltrimethylammonium Bromide (CTAB) onto Powdered Active Carbon

This study investigates the adsorption kinetics of CTAB (cethyltrimethylammonium bromide), a cationic surfactant, onto PAC from aqueous solution with respect to the initial CTAB concentration at 20C. The pseudo-first-order, second-order kinetic models and intraparticle diffusion model were used to describe the kinetic data and the rate constants were calculated. The rate parameter, k_i, of intraparticle diffusion, the rate parameter, k₂, of the pseudo-second-order and k₁, the rate parameter for the pseudo-first-order mechanism were compared. It was found that the pseudo-second-order adsorption mechanism is predominant and the overall rate of the CTAB adsorption process appears to be controlled by more than one step, namely both the external mass transfer and intraparticle diffusion mechanisms.     

Metal-insulator crossover in high T c cuprates: A gauge field approach

A metal-insulator crossover appears in the experimental data for in-plane resistivity of underdoped cuprates and a range of superconducting cuprates in the presence of a strong magnetic field suppressing superconductivity. We propose an explanation for this phenomenon based on a gauge field theory approach to the t-J model. In this approach, based on a formal spin-charge separation, the low energy effective action describes gapful spinons (with a theoretically derived doping dependence of the gap m _s ² ∼ δ| ln δ|) and holons with finite Fermi surface (ɛF ∼ tδ) interacting via a gauge field whose basic effect on the spinons is to bind them into overdamped spin waves, shifting their gap by a damping term linear in T, which causes the metal-insulator crossover. The presence of a magnetic field perpendicular to the plane acts by increasing the damping, in turn producing a big positive transverse in-plane magnetoresistance at low T, as experimentally observed.     

Targeting and photodynamic killing of a microbial pathogen using protein cage architectures functionalized with a photosensitizer

The selectivity of antimicrobial photodynamic therapy (PDT) can be enhanced by coupling the photosensitizer (PS) to a targeting ligand. Nanoplatforms provide a medium for designing delivery vehicles that incorporate both functional attributes. We report here the photodynamic inactivation of a pathogenic bacterium, Staphylococcus aureus, using targeted nanoplatforms conjugated to a photosensitizer (PS). Both electrostatic and complementary biological interactions were used to mediate targeting. Genetic constructs of a protein cage architecture allowed site-specific chemical functionalization with the PS and facilitated dual functionalization with the PS and the targeting ligand. These results demonstrate that protein cage architectures can serve as versatile templates for engineering nanoplatforms for targeted antimicrobial PDT.