Small angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) is a versatile and widely used technique for obtaining low-resolution structures of macromolecules and complexes. SAXS experiments measure molecules in solution, without the need for labeling or crystallization. However, radiation damage currently limits the application of SAXS to molecules that can be produced in microgram quantities; for typical proteins, 10-20 μL of solution at 1 mg/mL is required to accumulate adequate signal before irreversible x-ray damage is observed.

A series of studies that provide a consistent and illuminating picture of global radiation damage to protein crystals, especially at temperatures above 200 K, are described. The radiation sensitivity shows a transition near 200 K, above which it appears to be limited by solvent-coupled diffusive processes. Consistent with this interpretation, a component of global damage proceeds on timescales of several minutes at 180 K, decreasing to seconds near room temperature. As a result, data collection times of order 1 s allow up to half of global damage to be outrun at 260 K.

The asymmetry between electron and hole doping remains one of the central issues in high-temperature cuprate superconductivity, but our understanding of the electron-doped cuprates has been hampered by apparent discrepancies between the only two known families: Re2-xCexCuO4 and A1-xLaxCuO2. Here we report in situ angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements of epitaxially stabilized Sr1-xLaxCuO2 thin films synthesized by oxide molecular-beam epitaxy.

The recently discovered shear modulus anomaly in solid 4He bears a strong similarity to the phenomenon of supersolidity in solid 4He and can lead to the period shift and dissipative signals in torsional oscillator experiments that are nearly identical to the classic NCRI signals observed by Kim and Chan. In the experiments described here, we attempt to isolate the effects of these two phenomena on the resonance periods of torsion oscillators. We have constructed a triple compound oscillator with distinct normal modes.

Synchronization, the emergence of spontaneous order in coupled systems, is of fundamental importance in both physical and biological systems. We demonstrate the synchronization of two dissimilar silicon nitride micromechanical oscillators, that are spaced apart by a few hundred nanometers and are coupled through an optical cavity radiation field. The tunability of the optical coupling between the oscillators enables one to externally control the dynamics and switch between coupled and individual oscillation states.

We theoretically study trapped one-dimensional Fermi gases in the presence of spin-orbit coupling induced by Raman lasers. The gas changes from a conventional (nontopological) superfluid to a topological superfluid as one increases the intensity of the Raman lasers above a critical chemical-potential-dependent value. Solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations self-consistently, we calculate the density of states in real and momentum space at finite temperatures.

We introduce a semistochastic implementation of the power method to compute, for very large matrices, the dominant eigenvalue and expectation values involving the corresponding eigenvector. The method is semistochastic in that the matrix multiplication is partially implemented numerically exactly and partially stochastically with respect to expectation values only. Compared to a fully stochastic method, the semistochastic approach significantly reduces the computational time required to obtain the eigenvalue to a specified statistical uncertainty.

Ice formation on warming is of comparable or greater importance to ice formation on cooling in determining survival of cryopreserved samples. Critical warming rates required for ice-free warming of vitrified aqueous solutions of glycerol, dimethyl sulfoxide, ethylene glycol, polyethylene glycol 200 and sucrose have been measured for warming rates of order 10-104K/s. Critical warming rates are typically one to three orders of magnitude larger than critical cooling rates.

We present here the design of a sensitive compact Faraday-modulator (CFM) based optical magnetometer for imaging the distribution of weak local magnetic fields inside hysteretic magnetic materials. The system developed has a root-mean-square noise level of 50 mGHz-1/2 at a full frame rate of 1 fps (frame per second) with each frame being of size 512 × 512 pixels.