Department of Physics

Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

When transporting cellular cargoes along the cytoskeletal filament track, motor proteins produce additional frictional drag. This "protein friction"determines the mean speed of a cargo for a given force and the energy dissipated per chemical cycle. Motor protein friction has been measured directly in an optical tweezer experiment, and can also be estimated from the force-velocity curve, close to stall. We present a mathematical and computational study of this phenomenon. In our model, a motor protein is elastically linked to a μm-sized cargo particle, and undergoes tightly coupled, biased random walk-like motion on the microtubule filament, the bias being contributed by nucleotide hydrolysis as well as stretching of the linker "spring", with spring constant κ. The cytoplasm is assumed to be a Newtonian fluid, which exerts a damping force γ V on the cargo moving with velocity V. The effective drag coefficient γeff = F/V is measured in our numerical simulations, where F is the net external force on the cargo, including motor-induced force, near F = 0. The motor friction γm = γeff- γ is predicted theoretically and compared with simulation data for a range of values of κ and γ. The predicted values for small γ are found to be similar to experimental results, though smaller in magnitude. Numerical simulations also show that γm is a weakly increasing function of γ, and is additive when multiple motors are involved in transportation. © 2021 EPLA.

World University root node

Frictional drag produced by motor proteins during cargo transport

We develop a method to compute thermally mediated transition rates between the ground state and long-lived isomers in nuclei. We also establish criteria delimiting a thermalization temperature above which a nucleus may be considered a single species and below which it must be treated as two separate species: a ground-state species and an astrophysical isomer ("astromer") species. Below the thermalization temperature, the destruction rates dominate the internal transition rates between the ground state and the isomer. If the destruction rates also differ greatly from one another, the nuclear levels fall out of or fail to reach thermal equilibrium. Without thermal equilibrium, there may not be a safe assumption about the distribution of occupation probability among the nuclear levels when computing nuclear reaction rates. In these conditions, the isomer has astrophysical consequences and should be treated as a separate astromer species which evolves separately from the ground state in a nucleosynthesis network. We apply our transition-rate methods and perform sensitivity studies on a few well-known astromers. We also study transitions in several other isomers of likely astrophysical interest. © 2020. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series

Astromers: Nuclear Isomers in Astrophysics

VizieR Online Data Catalog, J/ApJ/891/

VizieR Online Data Catalog: LAMOST DR3 very metal-poor stars of the Galactic halo (Yuan+, 2020)

During the blood stage of malaria pathogenesis, parasites invade healthy red blood cells (RBC) to multiply inside the host and evade the immune response. When attached to RBC, the parasite first has to align its apex with the membrane for a successful invasion. Since the parasite’s apex sits at the pointed end of an oval (egg-like) shape with a large local curvature, apical alignment is in general an energetically un-favorable process. Previously, using coarse-grained mesoscopic simulations, we have shown that optimal alignment time is achieved due to RBC membrane deformation and the stochastic nature of bond-based interactions between the parasite and RBC membrane (Hillringhaus et al., 2020). Here, we demonstrate that the parasite’s shape has a prominent effect on the alignment process. The alignment times of spherical parasites for intermediate and large bond off-rates (or weak membrane-parasite interactions) are found to be close to those of an egg-like shape. However, for small bond off-rates (or strong adhesion and large membrane deformations), the alignment time for a spherical shape increases drastically. Parasite shapes with large aspect ratios such as oblate and long prolate ellipsoids are found to exhibit very long alignment times in comparison to the egg-like shape. At a stiffened RBC, spherical parasite aligns faster than any other investigated shapes. This study shows that the original egg-like shape performs not worse for parasite alignment than other considered shapes, but is more robust with respect to different adhesion interactions and RBC membrane rigidities. © 2021, eLife Sciences Publications Ltd. All rights reserved.

eLife

Effect of Malaria parasite shape on its alignment at erythrocyte membrane

Prestress in amorphous solids bears the memory of their formation and plays a profound role in their mechanical properties, from stiffening or softening elastic moduli to shifting frequencies of vibrational modes, as well as directing yielding and solidification in the nonlinear regime. Here we develop a set of mathematical tools to investigate elasticity of prestressed discrete networks, which disentangles the effects from disorder in configuration and disorder in prestress. Applying these methods to prestressed triangular lattices and a computational model of amorphous solids, we demonstrate the importance of prestress on elasticity and reveal a number of intriguing effects caused by prestress, including strong spatial heterogeneity in stress-response unique to prestressed solids, power-law distribution of minimal dipole stiffness and a new criterion to classify floppy modes.

arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.

Prestressed elasticity of amorphous solids

Spin waves are studied for data storage, communication, and logic circuits in the field of spintronics based on their potential to substitute electrons. The recent discovery of magnetism in 2D systems such as monolayer CrI3 and Cr2Ge2Te6 has led to a renewed interest in such applications of magnetism in the 2D limit. Here, direct evidence of standing spin waves is presented along with the uniform precessional resonance modes in the van der Waals magnetic material, CrCl3. This is the first direct observation of standing spin-wave modes, set up along a thickness of 20 mm, in a van der Waals material. Standing spin waves are detected in the vicinity of both branches, optical and acoustic, of the antiferromagnetic resonance. Magnon–magnon coupling and softening of resonance modes with temperature enable extraction of interlayer exchange field as a function of temperature. © 2020 Wiley-VCH GmbH

Advanced Materials

Observation of Standing Spin Waves in a van der Waals Magnetic Material

We show that quantum absorption refrigerators, which have traditionally been studied as of three qubits, each of which is connected to a thermal reservoir, can also be constructed by using three qubits and two thermal baths, where two of the qubits, including the qubit to be locally cooled, are connected to a common bath. With a careful choice of the system, bath, and qubit-bath interaction parameters within the Born-Markov and rotating-wave approximations, one of the qubits attached to the common bath achieves a cooling in the steady state. We observe that the proposed refrigerator may also operate in a parameter regime where no or negligible steady-state cooling is achieved, but there is considerable transient cooling. The steady-state temperature can be lowered significantly by an increase in the strength of the few-body interaction terms existing due to the use of the common bath in the refrigerator setup. The proposed refrigerator built with three qubits and two baths is shown to provide steady-state cooling for both Markovian qubit-bath interactions between the qubits and canonical bosonic thermal reservoirs, and a simpler reset model for the qubit-bath interactions. © 2021 American Physical Society.

Fulltext

Physical Review A

Three qubits in less than three baths: Beyond two-body system-bath interactions in quantum refrigerators

Hypothesis: Evaporating sessile drops containing surface active colloids is a promising route to self-assemble two-dimensional nanostructures. The standard protocol is to first self-assemble surface active nanoscale particles at the water-vapour interface and subsequently transfer it on to a solid surface. Colloidal monolayers with very few morphologies have been fabricated, exploiting this bottom-up self-assembly technique. However, the evaporation kinetics under controlled humidity conditions may dramatically alter the microstructure of self-assembled colloidal monolayers at the liquid–vapor interface and that on the solid surfaces, an aspect that has not been fully addressed in the prior studies. Experiments: To this end, we present an experimental study of evaporation driven self-assembly of soft poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (pNIPAM) microgel particles loaded in a sessile drop. The surface-active microgel particles spontaneously populate the water-vapour interface facilitating the suppression of the coffee-ring effect and the formation of monolayer stains. The role of evaporation kinetics under controlled humidity conditions on the colloid's microstructure adsorbed to the solvent-air interface and on the morphology of the colloidal monolayer transferred onto the solid surface are studied in detail. Findings: The formation of particle-free and particle-rich regions at the water–vapor interface is observed for sessile drops evaporated under saturated humidity conditions. We show that the evaporation induced shrinkage of the interface area and the enhancement of the areal density of microgel particles adsorbed onto the interface leads to a restructuring of the particle-laden interface. The rearrangement of microgel particles along the water–vapor interface resembling the de-wetting assisted patterns is transferred to the solid substrate upon complete evaporation of the solvent. The microgel particles in the deposit assemble into domains with enhanced crystalline order. The evolution of Voronoi entropy across the monolayer deposit patterns obtained by the standard and slow evaporation routes are presented. © 2020 Elsevier Inc.

Journal of Colloid and Interface Science

Colloidal monolayers with cell-like tessellations via interface assisted evaporative assembly

Thermodynamics of quantum systems and quantum thermal machines are rapidly developing fields, which have already delivered several promising results, as well as raised many intriguing questions. Many-body quantum machines present new opportunities stemming from many-body effects. At the same time, they pose new challenges related to many-body physics. In this short review we discuss some of the recent developments on technologies based on many-body quantum systems. We mainly focus on many-body effects in quantum thermal machines. We also briefly address the role played by many-body systems in the development of quantum batteries and quantum probes. © 2021 IOP Publishing Ltd.

Journal of Physics Condensed Matter

Many-body quantum thermal machines

We propose a deterministic scheme of generating genuine multiparty entangled states in quantum networks of arbitrary size having various geometric structures - we refer to it as entanglement circulation. The procedure involves optimization over a set of two-qubit arbitrary unitary operators and the entanglement of the initial resource state. We report that the set of unitary operators that maximize the genuine multipartite entanglement quantified via generalized geometric measure (GGM) is not unique. We prove that the GGM of the resulting state of arbitrary qubits coincides with the minimum GGM of the initial resource states. By fixing the output state as the six-qubit one, we find the optimal way to create such states according to the available resource. Moreover, we show that the method proposed here can be implemented by using logic gates, or by using the time dynamics of realizable spin Hamiltonians. In case of an ordered system, GGM varies periodically with time while the evolution via disordered models lead to a low but constant multipartite entanglement in outputs at a critical time, which decreases exponentially with the increase of the strength of the disorder. © 2022 American Physical Society.