Search results for "Fluidity"
showing 10 items of 226 documents
Generation of proteoliposomes from subcellular fractions.
1998
Intracellular membranes are highly dynamic, yet they retain their identity and functional characteristics. Integral membrane proteins, which must confer this specific membrane identity, remain poorly characterized at the biochemical level, largely because detergent-mediated solubilization is required for purification and analysis, and several properties of integral membrane proteins can only be investigated when the molecule is properly embedded in a lipid bilayer. We present a method for the efficient reconstitution into proteoliposomes of integral membrane proteins from subcellular fractions. Integral membrane proteins were identified on high-resolution two-dimensional gels after selectiv…
Coupled normal fluid and superfluid profiles of turbulent helium II in channels
2015
We perform fully coupled two--dimensional numerical simulations of plane channel helium II counterflows with vortex--line density typical of experiments. The main features of our approach are the inclusion of the back reaction of the superfluid vortices on the normal fluid and the presence of solid boundaries. Despite the reduced dimensionality, our model is realistic enough to reproduce vortex density distributions across the channel recently calculated in three--dimensions. We focus on the coarse--grained superfluid and normal fluid velocity profiles, recovering the normal fluid profile recently observed employing a technique based on laser--induced fluorescence of metastable helium molec…
Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics of Unsteady Superfluid Turbulence in Counterflow and Rotating Situations
2005
The methods of nonequilibrium thermodynamics are used in this paper to relate an evolution equation for the vortex line density $L$, describing superfluid turbulence in the simultaneous presence of counterflow and rotation, to an evolution equation for the superfluid velocity ${\mathbf{v}}_{s}$, in order to be able to describe the full evolution of ${\mathbf{v}}_{s}$ and $L$, instead of only $L$. Two alternative possibilities are analyzed, related to two possible alternative interpretations of a term coupling the effects of the counterflow and rotation on the vortex tangle, and which imply some differences between situations where counterflow and rotation vectors are parallel or orthogonal …
Energy and temperature of superfluid turbulent vortex tangles
2007
We consider three aspects of turbulent vortex tangles in superfluids. First, we outline some contributions to the Vinen’s equation for the time evolution of the vortex line density, related to the presence of pinned vortices incorporating the effects of the walls. Afterwards, we analyze some aspects of the energy balance of the vortex tangle, related to frictional dissipation and to vortex formation and destruction. Finally, we explore the concept of an effective temperature for the vortex tangle, related to the average energy of the vortex loops and to the diffusion coefficient of vortex lines. The combination of these ideas suggests some formal similarities with other kinds of driven none…
Transition to ballistic regime for heat transport in helium II
2014
The size-dependent and flux-dependent effective thermal conductivity of narrow capillaries filled with superfluid helium is analyzed from a thermodynamic continuum perspective. The classical Landau evaluation of the effective thermal conductivity of quiescent superfluid, or the Gorter-Mellinck regime of turbulent superfluids, are extended to describe the transition to ballistic regime in narrow channels wherein the radius $R$ is comparable to (or smaller than) the phonon mean-free path $\ell$ in superfluid helium. To do so we start from an extended equation for the heat flux incorporating non-local terms, and take into consideration a heat slip flow along the walls of the tube. This leads f…
Polymorphonuclear leukocyte membrane fluidity and cytosolic Ca2+ content at baseline and after activation in essential hypertension
2004
Obiective: To examine in essential hypertension (EH) the polymorphonuclear leukocyte (PMN) membrane fluidity and cytosolic Ca2+ content at baseline and after in vitro activation. Subjects and methods: In 45 hypertensive subjects (27 men and 18 women; mean age 45.8 +/- 11.3 years) we evaluated the PMN membrane fluidity, obtained by labeling PMNs with 1-[4-(trimethyImino)phenyl]-6phenyl-1,3,5-hexatriene (TMA-DPH) and considering the TMA-DPH polarization degree, inversely related to the membrane fluidity, and the PMN cytosolic Ca2+ content, obtained by marking PMNs with Fura 2-AM. These PMN parameters were examined at baseline and after in vitro activation (prolonged for 5 min) with two agents…
Vortex length, vortex energy and fractal dimension of superfluid turbulence at very low temperature
2010
By assuming a self-similar structure for Kelvin waves along vortex loops with successive smaller scale features, we model the fractal dimension of a superfluid vortex tangle in the zero temperature limit. Our model assumes that at each step the total energy of the vortices is conserved, but the total length can change. We obtain a relation between the fractal dimension and the exponent describing how the vortex energy per unit length changes with the length scale. This relation does not depend on the specific model, and shows that if smaller length scales make a decreasing relative contribution to the energy per unit length of vortex lines, the fractal dimension will be higher than unity. F…
Thermodynamic approach to vortex production and diffusion in inhomogeneous superfluid turbulence
2014
In this paper, we use a non-equilibrium thermodynamic framework to generalize a previous nonlocal model of counterflow superfluid turbulence to incorporate some new coupled terms which may be relevant in the evolution of inhomogeneous vortex tangles. The theory chooses as fundamental fields the energy density, the heat flux, and the averaged vortex line length per unit volume. The constitutive quantities are assumed to depend on the fundamental fields and on their first spatial derivatives, allowing us to describe thermal dissipation, vortex diffusion and a new contribution to vortex formation. The restrictions on the constitutive relations are deduced from the entropy principle, using the …
Electrostatic Contribution to the Surface Pressure of Charged Monolayers Containing Polyphosphoinositides
2008
Structural and functional studies of lateral heterogeneity in biological membranes have underlined the importance of membrane organization in biological function. Most inquiries have focused on steric determinants of membrane organization, such as headgroup size and acyl-chain saturation. This manuscript reports a combination of theory and experiment that shows significant electrostatic contributions to surface pressures in monolayers of phospholipids where the charge spacing is smaller than the Bjerrum length. For molecules with steric cross sections typical of phospholipids in the cell membrane (approximately 50 A(2)), only polyphosphoinositides achieve this threshold. The most abundant s…
Josephson effect in superfluid atomic Fermi-gases
2002
We consider an analog of the internal Josephson effect in superfluid atomic Fermi-gases. Four different hyperfine states of the atoms are assumed to be trapped and to form two superfluids via the BCS-type pairing. Weshow that Josephson oscillations can be realized by coupling the superfluids with two laser fields. Choosing the laser detunings in a suitable way leads to an asymmetric below-gap tunneling effect for which there exists no analogue in the context of solid-state superconductivity.