Making Weak Antigens Strong: Coupling Antigens to Red Blood Cells

Coupling antigens to red blood cells (RBCs) can increase the immunogenicity of weak antigens. Their size slows dispersal; that, and their particulate nature, also make them good targets for phagocytosis. If the source of the cells is different from the animal to be injected, they can also provide good targets for MHC class II–T-cell receptor binding. The choice of coupling method will depend on the antigen, but because of the complexity of proteins found on the surface of the RBCs, almost all chemical groups are available for coupling. Commonly used coupling methods include tannic acid, chromic chloride, and glutaraldehyde.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Coupling Methods of Plasma Antennas

One of the important challenges in plasma antennas, is the coupling of RF signal to the plasma column. RF signal coupling has a significant effect on antenna efficiency, antenna implementation cost, structure implementation complexity, antenna pattern shape, and final structure weight and volume. In this article, firstly the various methods of coupling were introduced. Then capacitive coupling, direct coupling and sleeve coupling were presented and their advantages and disadvantages were mentioned. As a sample, a plasma folded monopole antenna with sleeve coupling was fabricated and measured. By comparison of the different coupling methods and as a result, one can conclude that the sleeve coupling method is the most suitable method. This method has the least sensitivity to change the dimensions. It is also easy and cheap to implement. In this type of coupling, the efficiency of the Nesta antenna is suitable and the coupling structure adds small weight and volume to the antenna structure.

Strong coupling methods in QCD thermodynamics

For a long time, strong coupling expansions have not been applied systematically in lattice QCD thermodynamics, in view of the success of numerical Monte Carlo studies. The persistent sign problem at finite baryo-chemical potential, however, has motivated investigations using these methods, either by themselves or combined with numerical evaluations, as a route to finite density physics. This article reviews the strategies, by which a number of qualitative insights have been attained, notably the emergence of the hadron resonance gas or the identification of the onset transition to baryon matter in specific regions of the QCD parameter space. For the simpler case of Yang–Mills theory, the deconfinement transition can be determined quantitatively even in the scaling region, showing possible prospects for continuum physics.

A Schwarz iterative method to evaluate ocean–atmosphere coupling schemes: implementation and diagnostics in IPSL-CM6-SW-VLR

State-of-the-art Earth system models, like the ones used in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6), suffer from temporal inconsistencies at the ocean–atmosphere interface. Indeed, the coupling algorithms generally implemented in those models do not allow for a correct phasing between the ocean and the atmosphere and hence between their diurnal cycles. A possibility to remove these temporal inconsistencies is to use an iterative coupling algorithm based on the Schwarz iterative method. Despite its large computational cost compared to standard coupling methods, which makes the algorithm implementation impractical for production runs, the Schwarz method is useful to evaluate some of the errors made in state-of-the-art ocean–atmosphere coupled models (e.g., in the representation of the processes related to diurnal cycle), as illustrated by the present study. IPSL-CM6-SW-VLR is a low-resolution version of the IPSL-CM6 coupled model with a simplified land surface model, implementing a Schwarz iterative coupling scheme. Comparisons between coupled solutions obtained with this new scheme and the standard IPSL coupling scheme (referred to as the parallel algorithm) show large differences after sunrise and before sunset, when the external forcing (insolation at the top of the atmosphere) has the fastest pace of change. At these times of the day, the difference between the two numerical solutions is often larger than 100 % of the solution, even with a small coupling period, thus suggesting that significant errors are potentially made with current coupling methods. Most of those differences can be strongly reduced by making only two iterations of the Schwarz method, which leads to a doubling of the computing cost. Besides the parallel algorithm used in IPSL-CM6, we also test a so-called sequential atmosphere-first algorithm, which is used in some coupled ocean–atmosphere models. We show that the sequential algorithm improves the numerical results compared to the parallel one at the expanse of a loss of parallelism. The present study focuses on the ocean–atmosphere interface with no sea ice. The problem with three components (ocean–sea ice–atmosphere) remains to be investigated.