@article{9663, abstract = {Molecular dynamics simulations of small Cu nanoparticles using three different interatomic potentials at rising temperature indicate that small nanoparticles can undergo solid-solid structural transitions through a direct geometrical conversion route. The direct geometrical conversion can happen for cuboctahedral nanoparticles, which turn into an icosahedra shape: one diagonal of the square faces contracts, and the faces are folded along the diagonal to give rise to two equilateral triangles. The transition is a kinetic process that cannot be fully explained through an energetic point of view. It has low activation energy and fast reaction time in the simulations. The transition mechanism is via the transmission of shear waves initiated from the particle surface and does not involve dislocation activity.}, author = {Cheng, Bingqing and Ngan, Alfonso H. W.}, issn = {1089-7690}, journal = {The Journal of Chemical Physics}, number = {16}, publisher = {AIP Publishing}, title = {{Thermally induced solid-solid structural transition of copper nanoparticles through direct geometrical conversion}}, doi = {10.1063/1.4802025}, volume = {138}, year = {2013}, } @article{9682, abstract = {In this work, we simulate the response of two Cu nanoparticles colliding at different approaching rates at room temperature by MD. For small nanospheres, the formation of single twins is favored at high approach rates, whereas larger nanospheres mainly deform by dislocation slip. For small nanocubes with large {100} flat surfaces, however, a dislocation-free direct geometrical conversion process that leads to five-fold twinning dominates except at highly retarded approaching rates. For larger nanocubes, single twin formation is the governing plasticity mechanism. The probability for plastic deformation by dislocation slip or twinning is attributed to the abundance of surface steps, which act as sites for dislocation nucleation.}, author = {Cheng, Bingqing and Ngan, Alfonso H.W.}, issn = {0921-5093}, journal = {Materials Science and Engineering: A}, pages = {326--334}, publisher = {Elsevier}, title = {{Crystal plasticity of Cu nanocrystals during collision}}, doi = {10.1016/j.msea.2013.07.065}, volume = {585}, year = {2013}, } @article{970, abstract = {Recently a new high-mobility Dirac material, trilayer graphene, was realized experimentally. The band structure of ABA-stacked trilayer graphene consists of a monolayer-like and a bilayer-like pair of bands. Here we study electronic properties of ABA-stacked trilayer graphene biased by a perpendicular electric field. We find that the combination of the bias and trigonal warping gives rise to a set of new Dirac points: In each valley, seven species of Dirac fermions with small masses of order of a few meV emerge. The positions and masses of the emergent Dirac fermions are tunable by bias, and one group of Dirac fermions becomes massless at a certain bias value. Therefore, in contrast to bilayer graphene, the conductivity at the neutrality point is expected to show nonmonotonic behavior, becoming of the order of a few e2/h when some Dirac masses vanish. Further, we analyze the evolution of the Landau level spectrum as a function of bias. The emergence of new Dirac points in the band structure translates into new threefold-degenerate groups of Landau levels. This leads to an anomalous quantum Hall effect, in which some quantum Hall steps have a height of 3e2/h. At an intermediate bias, the degeneracies of all Landau levels get lifted, and in this regime all quantum Hall plateaus are spaced by e2/h. Finally, we show that the pattern of Landau level crossings is very sensitive to certain band structure parameters, and can therefore provide a useful tool for determining their precise values.}, author = {Maksym Serbyn and Abanin, Dmitry A}, journal = {Physical Review B - Condensed Matter and Materials Physics}, number = {11}, publisher = {American Physical Society}, title = {{New Dirac points and multiple Landau level crossings in biased trilayer graphene}}, doi = {10.1103/PhysRevB.87.115422}, volume = {87}, year = {2013}, } @article{973, abstract = {We construct a complete set of local integrals of motion that characterize the many-body localized (MBL) phase. Our approach relies on the assumption that local perturbations act locally on the eigenstates in the MBL phase, which is supported by numerical simulations of the random-field XXZ spin chain. We describe the structure of the eigenstates in the MBL phase and discuss the implications of local conservation laws for its nonequilibrium quantum dynamics. We argue that the many-body localization can be used to protect coherence in the system by suppressing relaxation between eigenstates with different local integrals of motion.}, author = {Maksym Serbyn and Papić, Zlatko and Abanin, Dmitry A}, journal = {Physical Review Letters}, number = {12}, publisher = {American Physical Society}, title = {{Local conservation laws and the structure of the many body localized states}}, doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.127201}, volume = {111}, year = {2013}, } @article{974, abstract = {We propose a possible realization of the overscreened Kondo impurity problem by a magnetic s=1/2 impurity embedded in a two-dimensional S=1 U(1) spin liquid with a Fermi surface. This problem contains an interesting interplay between non-Fermi-liquid behavior induced by a U(1) gauge field coupled to fermions and a non-Fermi-liquid fixed point in the overscreened Kondo problem. Using a large-N expansion together with an expansion in the dynamical exponent of the gauge field, we find that the coupling to the gauge field leads to weak but observable changes in the physical properties of the system at the overscreened Kondo fixed point. We discuss the extrapolation of this result to a physical case and argue that the realization of overscreened Kondo physics could lead to observations of effects due to gauge fields.}, author = {Serbyn, Maksym and Senthil, Todadri and Lee, Patrick}, journal = {Physical Review B - Condensed Matter and Materials Physics}, number = {2}, publisher = {American Physical Society}, title = {{Overscreened Kondo fixed point in S=1 spin liquid}}, doi = {10.1103/PhysRevB.88.024419}, volume = {88}, year = {2013}, } @article{2284, abstract = {Background: The brood of ants and other social insects is highly susceptible to pathogens, particularly those that penetrate the soft larval and pupal cuticle. We here test whether the presence of a pupal cocoon, which occurs in some ant species but not in others, affects the sanitary brood care and fungal infection patterns after exposure to the entomopathogenic fungus Metarhizium brunneum. We use a) a comparative approach analysing four species with either naked or cocooned pupae and b) a within-species analysis of a single ant species, in which both pupal types co-exist in the same colony. Results: We found that the presence of a cocoon did not compromise fungal pathogen detection by the ants and that species with cocooned pupae increased brood grooming after pathogen exposure. All tested ant species further removed brood from their nests, which was predominantly expressed towards larvae and naked pupae treated with the live fungal pathogen. In contrast, cocooned pupae exposed to live fungus were not removed at higher rates than cocooned pupae exposed to dead fungus or a sham control. Consistent with this, exposure to the live fungus caused high numbers of infections and fungal outgrowth in larvae and naked pupae, but not in cocooned pupae. Moreover, the ants consistently removed the brood prior to fungal outgrowth, ensuring a clean brood chamber. Conclusion: Our study suggests that the pupal cocoon has a protective effect against fungal infection, causing an adaptive change in sanitary behaviours by the ants. It further demonstrates that brood removal-originally described for honeybees as "hygienic behaviour"-is a widespread sanitary behaviour in ants, which likely has important implications on disease dynamics in social insect colonies.}, author = {Tragust, Simon and Ugelvig, Line V and Chapuisat, Michel and Heinze, Jürgen and Cremer, Sylvia}, journal = {BMC Evolutionary Biology}, number = {1}, publisher = {BioMed Central}, title = {{Pupal cocoons affect sanitary brood care and limit fungal infections in ant colonies}}, doi = {10.1186/1471-2148-13-225}, volume = {13}, year = {2013}, } @article{2277, abstract = {Redundancies and correlations in the responses of sensory neurons may seem to waste neural resources, but they can also carry cues about structured stimuli and may help the brain to correct for response errors. To investigate the effect of stimulus structure on redundancy in retina, we measured simultaneous responses from populations of retinal ganglion cells presented with natural and artificial stimuli that varied greatly in correlation structure; these stimuli and recordings are publicly available online. Responding to spatio-temporally structured stimuli such as natural movies, pairs of ganglion cells were modestly more correlated than in response to white noise checkerboards, but they were much less correlated than predicted by a non-adapting functional model of retinal response. Meanwhile, responding to stimuli with purely spatial correlations, pairs of ganglion cells showed increased correlations consistent with a static, non-adapting receptive field and nonlinearity. We found that in response to spatio-temporally correlated stimuli, ganglion cells had faster temporal kernels and tended to have stronger surrounds. These properties of individual cells, along with gain changes that opposed changes in effective contrast at the ganglion cell input, largely explained the pattern of pairwise correlations across stimuli where receptive field measurements were possible.}, author = {Simmons, Kristina and Prentice, Jason and Tkacik, Gasper and Homann, Jan and Yee, Heather and Palmer, Stephanie and Nelson, Philip and Balasubramanian, Vijay}, journal = {PLoS Computational Biology}, number = {12}, publisher = {Public Library of Science}, title = {{Transformation of stimulus correlations by the retina}}, doi = {10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003344}, volume = {9}, year = {2013}, } @misc{9754, abstract = {Short-read sequencing technologies have in principle made it feasible to draw detailed inferences about the recent history of any organism. In practice, however, this remains challenging due to the difficulty of genome assembly in most organisms and the lack of statistical methods powerful enough to discriminate among recent, non-equilibrium histories. We address both the assembly and inference challenges. We develop a bioinformatic pipeline for generating outgroup-rooted alignments of orthologous sequence blocks from de novo low-coverage short-read data for a small number of genomes, and show how such sequence blocks can be used to fit explicit models of population divergence and admixture in a likelihood framework. To illustrate our approach, we reconstruct the Pleistocene history of an oak-feeding insect (the oak gallwasp Biorhiza pallida) which, in common with many other taxa, was restricted during Pleistocene ice ages to a longitudinal series of southern refugia spanning theWestern Palaearctic. Our analysis of sequence blocks sampled from a single genome from each of three major glacial refugia reveals support for an unexpected history dominated by recent admixture. Despite the fact that 80% of the genome is affected by admixture during the last glacial cycle, we are able to infer the deeper divergence history of these populations. These inferences are robust to variation in block length, mutation model, and the sampling location of individual genomes within refugia. This combination of de novo assembly and numerical likelihood calculation provides a powerful framework for estimating recent population history that can be applied to any organism without the need for prior genetic resources.}, author = {Hearn, Jack and Stone, Graham and Barton, Nicholas H and Lohse, Konrad and Bunnefeld, Lynsey}, publisher = {Dryad}, title = {{Data from: Likelihood-based inference of population history from low coverage de novo genome assemblies}}, doi = {10.5061/dryad.r3r60}, year = {2013}, } @article{976, abstract = {Motivated by a search for experimental probes to access the physics of fractionalized excitations called spinons in spin liquids, we study the interaction of spinons with lattice vibrations. We consider the case of algebraic spin liquid, when spinons have fermionic statistics and a Dirac-like dispersion. We establish the general procedure for deriving spinon-phonon interactions, which is based on symmetry considerations. The procedure is illustrated for four different algebraic spin liquids: π-flux and staggered-flux phases on a square lattice, π-flux phase on a kagome lattice, and zero-flux phase on a honeycomb lattice. Although the low-energy description is similar for all these phases, different underlying symmetry groups lead to a distinct form of spinon-phonon interaction Hamiltonian. The explicit form of the spinon-phonon interaction is used to estimate the attenuation of ultrasound in an algebraic spin liquid. The prospects of the sound attenuation as a probe of spinons are discussed.}, author = {Maksym Serbyn and Lee, Patrick}, journal = {Physical Review B - Condensed Matter and Materials Physics}, number = {17}, publisher = {American Physical Society}, title = {{Spinon-phonon interaction in algebraic spin liquids}}, doi = {10.1103/PhysRevB.87.174424}, volume = {87}, year = {2013}, } @article{12638, abstract = {Central Asian water resources largely depend on melt water generated in the Pamir and Tien Shan mountain ranges. To estimate future water availability in this region, it is necessary to use climate projections to estimate the future glacier extent and volume. In this study, we evaluate the impact of uncertainty in climate change projections on the future glacier extent in the Amu and Syr Darya river basins. To this end we use the latest climate change projections generated for the upcoming IPCC report (CMIP5) and, for comparison, projections used in the fourth IPCC assessment (CMIP3). With these projections we force a regionalized glacier mass balance model, and estimate changes in the basins' glacier extent as a function of the glacier size distribution in the basins and projected temperature and precipitation. This glacier mass balance model is specifically developed for implementation in large scale hydrological models, where the spatial resolution does not allow for simulating individual glaciers and data scarcity is an issue. Although the CMIP5 ensemble results in greater regional warming than the CMIP3 ensemble and the range in projections for temperature as well as precipitation is wider for the CMIP5 than for the CMIP3, the spread in projections of future glacier extent in Central Asia is similar for both ensembles. This is because differences in temperature rise are small during periods of maximum melt (July–September) while differences in precipitation change are small during the period of maximum accumulation (October–February). However, the model uncertainty due to parameter uncertainty is high, and has roughly the same importance as uncertainty in the climate projections. Uncertainty about the size of the decline in glacier extent remains large, making estimates of future Central Asian glacier evolution and downstream water availability uncertain.}, author = {Lutz, A. F. and Immerzeel, W. W. and Gobiet, A. and Pellicciotti, Francesca and Bierkens, M. F. P.}, issn = {1607-7938}, journal = {Hydrology and Earth System Sciences}, keywords = {General Earth and Planetary Sciences, General Engineering, General Environmental Science}, number = {9}, pages = {3661--3677}, publisher = {Copernicus GmbH}, title = {{Comparison of climate change signals in CMIP3 and CMIP5 multi-model ensembles and implications for Central Asian glaciers}}, doi = {10.5194/hess-17-3661-2013}, volume = {17}, year = {2013}, }