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Microarrays
- Using simulations techniques borrowed from
quantum and statistical physics,
masses of data from microarrays can be analyzed
to determine the most important genes in
diagnosing similar cancers. For example, less than 15 genes
can be used to perfectly predict which of four related
childhood cancers a patient has.
- By understanding the underlying physics of
these devices, their reliability can be greatly
increased.
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Polymers in a vacuum
The 2002 Nobel prize in Chemistry was awarded in large
part for the discovery of how to put single protein
molecules into a vacuum. This is then used to do mass
spectrometry on these large molecules such as proteins. Despite this
technology`s great importance, very little had
been done to understand the behavior of polymers
in this situation. Conservation of angular momentum
alters the statistical properties, and in many circumstances,
chains can show oscillatory behavior very different from
what is found in solution.
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Dynamics of magnets
Nonequilibrium dynamics of magnetic systems
have a wide variety of
applications including to hard drives.
New phenomena explored are:
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Often avalanches should be viewed
more like combustion than previously understood, where
the flipping of magnetic spins was thought to be more like the
the falling of dominoes.
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Hysteresis loop "multicycles"
-
Domain patterns seen
going from positive to negative applied
field are not simply related to what happens when
the field is inverted.
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One dimensional heat conduction
The dynamics of one dimensional system, such
as nanotubes, show anomalous dynamics because
of conservation laws. One of the most
striking consequences of this is that the
heat transfered across such a system does not
scale with the inverse of the system length, but
instead a power of it. Determining the exact
relationship is challenging and requires the
use of highly nonlinear models. By devising a new
model incorporating random collisions but still
obeying conservation of energy and momentum, a clearer
understanding emerged of the large scale dynamical
description.
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