Scholar iON
Academic Synthesis
The body of research represented by the selected papers from "cond-mat.other" explores diverse intersections of condensed matter physics, highlighting its applicability to various scientific and socio-economic domains. Micheletti et al. (2002) present a model for protein folding that identifies crucial sites for drug targeting, aligning well with clinical data on HIV-1 Protease mutations, suggesting a promising method for drug development. Bietenholz (2024) provides a statistical analysis of lattice field theory's evolution, using metrics like the Hirsch Index to correlate scientific output with national socio-economic indices, thereby offering insights into the global scientific landscape. Tu and Ou-Yang (2004) apply geometric theory to bio-membrane elasticity, proposing a novel approach using exterior differential forms to assess membrane stability and shape, which is critical for understanding cellular processes. Finally, Anteneodo et al. (2001) investigate risk aversion in economic transactions using nonextensive statistical mechanics, illustrating how varying risk sensitivities influence economic dynamics. Collectively, these studies underscore the versatility of condensed matter frameworks in addressing complex, interdisciplinary challenges.
An exactly solvable model based on the topology of a protein native state is applied to identify bottlenecks and key-sites for the folding of HIV-1 Protease. The predicted sites are found to correlate well with clinical data on resistance to FDA-approved drugs. It has been observed that the effects of drug therapy are to induce multiple mutations on the protease. The sites where such mutations occur correlate well with those involved in folding bottlenecks identified through the deterministic procedure proposed in this study. The high statistical significance of the observed correlations suggests that the approach may be promisingly used in conjunction with traditional techniques to identify candidate locations for drug attacks.
Researchers working in lattice field theory constitute an established community since the early 1990s, and around the same time the online open-access e-print repository arXiv was created. The fact that this field has a specific arXiv section, hep-lat, which is comprehensively used, provides a unique opportunity for a statistical study of its evolution over the last three decades. We present data for the number of entries, $E$, published papers, $P$, and citations, $C$, in total and separated by nations. We compare them to six other arXiv sections (hep-ph, hep-th, gr-qc, nucl-th, quant-ph, cond-mat) and to two socio-economic indices of the nations involved: the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the Education Index (EI). We present rankings, which are based either on the Hirsch Index H, or on the linear combination $Ξ£= E + P + 0.05 C$. We consider both extensive and intensive national statistics, i.e. absolute and relative to the population or to the GDP.
The purpose of this paper is to study the shapes and stabilities of bio-membranes within the framework of exterior differential forms. After a brief review of the current status in theoretical and experimental studies on the shapes of bio-membranes, a geometric scheme is proposed to discuss the shape equation of closed lipid bilayers, the shape equation and boundary conditions of open lipid bilayers and two-component membranes, the shape equation and in-plane strain equations of cell membranes with cross-linking structures, and the stabilities of closed lipid bilayers and cell membranes. The key point of this scheme is to deal with the variational problems on the surfaces embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space by using exterior differential forms.
Most people are risk-averse (risk-seeking) when they expect to gain (lose). Based on a generalization of ``expected utility theory'' which takes this into account, we introduce an automaton mimicking the dynamics of economic operations. Each operator is characterized by a parameter q which gauges people's attitude under risky choices; this index q is in fact the entropic one which plays a central role in nonextensive statistical mechanics. Different long term patterns of average asset redistribution are observed according to the distribution of parameter q (chosen once for ever for each operator) and the rules (e.g., the probabilities involved in the gamble and the indebtedness restrictions) governing the values that are exchanged in the transactions. Analytical and numerical results are discussed in terms of how the sensitivity to risk affects the dynamics of economic transactions.
In a recent Letter, Avron et. al (math-ph/0105011) introduced a notion of optimal quantum pumps. These are adiabatic quantum pumps which work without dissipation. In particular, they produce neither entropy nor noise. In the present Comment we show that in the absence of magnetic field optimal quantum pumps always have a vanishing transmission coefficient. Such `quantum pumps' do not make use of Quantum Mechanics since all tunneling or interference effects are banned by vanishing of the transmission coefficient. We leave it as an outstanding question whether genuine optimal quantum pumps with nonvanishing transmission coefficient can be constructed by making use of the magnetic field.