How does water get hot on cold comets?
Our recent laboratory study focused on at water molecules produced by splitting off a
proton from hydronium ions (H3O+) by addition of a slow electron - the
main process that forms H2O in dilute gas under space conditions at
temperatures as low as 10 to 100 K. The study showed that extremely hot
water molecules are created, corresponding to temperatures of 60 000 K or
more. This helps to understand previous observations by British
astronomers, who are speculating about the origin of spectral lines from
hot water molecules they find the gaseous cloud around comets, the coma.
For water formation from H3O+ ions, electrons also present in the cold
medium play a crucial role. In a cold collision, they first attach to
hydonium ions forming an unstable neutral intermediate, from which a
hydrogen atom splits off to leave H2O. These reactions were generated in
the laboratory study, using the institute's ion storage ring TSR to
project the breakup products from individual reactions onto a particle
counting detector. With a new technique, the water-producing reaction
channel was isolated and the pattern of breakup products revealed an
unsually high amount of energy in the generated H2O molecules.
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ES10666
Visually checking if a time series is consistent with a mathematical
definition of chaos
Deterministic chaos has been researched for more than 30 years. It
attracts a lot of attentions since a simple rule generates complex
phenomena while its deterministic rule makes possible many applications
including short-term prediction and chaos control. One of its
mathematical definitions is Devaney’s one. Although it has been
investigated well mathematically, Devaney’s chaos has not been applied
to real observations of time series so far since its definition uses
arbitrary neighborhoods. In this paper, we relax the conditions of
Devaney’s chaos by using a fixed size of neighborhoods and interpret
these conditions by using recurrence plots, which visualize time series
data. Using the proposed conditions, one can tell whether a given time
series is consistent with deterministic chaos in the Devaney’s sense or
not by visually inspecting its recurrence plot. For example, we showed
in the paper that a real dataset obtained from a squid giant axon is
consistent with Devaney’s chaos (see the attached figure). The set of
the proposed conditions provides a quick and easy way for non-experts to
analyze the chaotic nature of time series.
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BM11326
Chiral Symmetry-Breaking of a Platinum-Covered Surface
Formation of a chiral state of matter rests on twisted atoms such that left- and right-rotated variants exist, a principle which is also fundamental to many biological molecules. In finding a chiral surface that contains the catalytically active atom platinum, this may open the door to selective adsorption and processing of chiral molecules for only one of the two symmetry variants.
Recent studies of a single atomic layer of platinum on a silicon surface now unveil that the platinum atoms arrange themselves as trimers. Unexpectedly, the trimer orientation is twisted by 30° with respect to the substrate lattice. This can be seen by scanning tunneling microscopy at the atomic scale. The symmetry-breaking spreads over the entire surface, and thus forms a chiral system. It is a novel basis for studies aiming at adsorption of a mixture of molecules where only one chiral type docks onto the surface, with bearing for a wide range of chemical and pharmaceutical applications.
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EQ10643
Bose-Einstein condensation in people's daily lives
There is an interested phenomenon in quantum world that a lot of Bosons (such as photon, helium-4 atom, etc) would condense into the lowest energy level once this Boson system approaches absolute zero. This phenomenon is called the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), which was firstly predicted by Einstein in 1920s. Nevertheless, our study shows that there also exists BEC even in people's daily lives, that is, the economic crisis, which has puzzled human for near 200 years. It is well known that the economic crisis almost always starts from economy overheated extreme market, which can be described by perfect competitive market. Our study shows that the perfect competitive market not only obeys Bose-Einstein statistics but also shall lead to BEC as society reaches full employment, that is, a lot of firms condense into the zero output level. As use of this study, early warning of economic crises can be achieved.
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LP12424
Light microscopy with axial nanometer resolution
In recent years super-resolution methods based on fluorescence have broken the diffraction
barrier that limited the resolution of conventional optical microscopy. Due to the wave nature
of light the lateral image resolution was limited to about 200 nm and the axial resolution to
about 500 nm for visible wavelengths. In this letter, we introduce 3-Dimensional Supercritical
Angle Fluorescence Microscopy (3D-SAFM) − a novel optical microscopy method to achieve
nanometer resolution along the optical axis. The method utilizes the distance-dependent
influence of the microscope glass slide on the angular distribution of fluorescence emission. It
is accomplished straightforwardly by the parallel detection of fluorescence emitted into two
angular regions. The proportion of fluorescence measured below and above the critical angle
for total internal reflection of the sample/glass interface is used to determine the axial position
of emitters with an accuracy of up to one nanometer.
