Related papers: Unfolding Large Biomolecules
The quadrupole linear Paul trap is one of the key instruments in building highly stable atomic clocks. However, a frequency reference based on a single trapped ion is limited in stability due to the time needed for the interrogation cycle…
We consider the stability of systems subjected to periodic parametric driving such that their equations of motion are ordinary differential equations with periodic coefficients and carry out a detailed analysis of important aspects of such…
Biomolecular condensates govern essential cellular processes yet elude description by traditional equilibrium models. This roadmap, distilled from structured discussions at a workshop and reflecting the consensus of its participants,…
Trapping macromolecules is impoartant for the study of their conformations, interactions, dynamics and kinetic processes. Here, we develop a variational approach which self-consistently introduces a mean force that controls the…
The laser excitation of an ion crystal to high lying and long-lived electronic states is a genuine many-body process even if in fact only a single ion is excited. This is a direct manifestation of the strong coupling between internal and…
The study of biological cells in terms of mesoscopic, nonequilibrium, nonlinear, stochastic dynamics of open chemical systems provides a paradigm for other complex, self-organizing systems with ultra-fast stochastic fluctuations, short-time…
Engineering coherent spatial superpositions of levitated large masses is an ongoing challenge. Borrowing from recent experimental work, we consider a charged mass of hundreds of nanometers size (``nanoparticle'') co-trapped with an ion in a…
The motion of charged particles can be interfaced with electric circuitry via the current induced in nearby pick-up electrodes. Here we show how the rotational and translational dynamics of levitated objects with arbitrary charge…
To illustrate the power of the biophysical approach in solving important problems in life science, I present here one of our current research projects as an example. We have developed special biophotonic techniques to study the dynamic…
To maintain homeostasis, living cells process information with networks of interacting molecules. Traditional models for cellular information processing have focused on networks of chemical reactions between molecules. Here, we describe how…
Trapping of microparticles and aerosols is of great interest for physics and chemistry. We report microparticle trapping in multipole linear Paul trap geometries, operating under Standard Ambient Temperature and Pressure (SATP) conditions.…
Active matter systems comprise self-propelled particles that move on a substrate while leaving chemical trails that influence other particles through chemotaxis (e.g., slime-depositing bacteria). Orientational chemotaxis manifests as a…
We demonstrate that abundant quantities of short-lived beta unstable ions can be trapped in a novel transparent Paul trap and that their decay products can directly be detected in coincidence. Low energy 6He+ (807 ms half-life) ions were…
Paul traps are ion traps that are widely used in spectroscopic experiments to confine and stabilize a charged particle within a small region using oscillating electric fields. The dynamics of the particle inside a Paul trap is described by…
In the last decade, a growing interest has been devoted to models of spontaneous collapse of the wavefunction, known also as collapse models. They coherently solve the well-known quantum measurement problem by suitably modifying the…
We analyze the dynamics of a chain of singly-charged ions confined in a linear Paul trap and which couple with the mode of a high-finesse optical resonator. In these settings the ions interact via the Coulomb repulsion and are subject to…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
Ionic liquids constrained at interfaces or restricted in subnanometric pores are increasingly employed in modern technologies, including energy applications. Understanding the details of their behavior in these conditions is therefore…
Mapping conformational heterogeneity of macromolecules presents a formidable challenge to X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy, which often presume its absence. This has severely limited our knowledge of the conformations…
We design fast protocols to separate or recombine two ions in a segmented Paul trap. By inverse engineering the time evolution of the trapping potential composed of a harmonic and a quartic term, it is possible to perform these processes in…