Instituto Superior Técnico

About: Instituto Superior Técnico is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Catalysis & Finite element method. The organization has 10085 authors who have published 30226 publications receiving 667524 citations. The organization is also known as: IST & Instituto Superior Tecnico.

Gravitational signature of Schwarzschild black holes in dynamical Chern-Simons gravity

Abstract: Dynamical Chern-Simons gravity is an extension of general relativity in which the gravitational field is coupled to a scalar field through a parity-violating Chern-Simons term. In this framework, we study perturbations of spherically symmetric black hole spacetimes, assuming that the background scalar field vanishes. Our results suggest that these spacetimes are stable, and small perturbations die away as a ringdown. However, in contrast to standard general relativity, the gravitational waveforms are also driven by the scalar field. Thus, the gravitational oscillation modes of black holes carry imprints of the coupling to the scalar field. This is a smoking gun for Chern-Simons theory and could be tested with gravitational-wave detectors, such as LIGO or LISA. For negative values of the coupling constant, ghosts are known to arise, and we explicitly verify their appearance numerically. Our results are validated using both time evolution and frequency domain methods.

Adaptation and tolerance of bacteria against acetic acid.

Abstract: Acetic acid is a weak organic acid exerting a toxic effect to most microorganisms at concentrations as low as 0.5 wt%. This toxic effect results mostly from acetic acid dissociation inside microbial cells, causing a decrease of intracellular pH and metabolic disturbance by the anion, among other deleterious effects. These microbial inhibition mechanisms enable acetic acid to be used as a preservative, although its usefulness is limited by the emergence of highly tolerant spoilage strains. Several biotechnological processes are also inhibited by the accumulation of acetic acid in the growth medium including production of bioethanol from lignocellulosics, wine making, and microbe-based production of acetic acid itself. To design better preservation strategies based on acetic acid and to improve the robustness of industrial biotechnological processes limited by this acid’s toxicity, it is essential to deepen the understanding of the underlying toxicity mechanisms. In this sense, adaptive responses that improve tolerance to acetic acid have been well studied in Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Strains highly tolerant to acetic acid, either isolated from natural environments or specifically engineered for this effect, represent a unique reservoir of information that could increase our understanding of acetic acid tolerance and contribute to the design of additional tolerance mechanisms. In this article, the mechanisms underlying the acetic acid tolerance exhibited by several bacterial strains are reviewed, with emphasis on the knowledge gathered in acetic acid bacteria and E. coli. A comparison of how these bacterial adaptive responses to acetic acid stress fit to those described in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is also performed. A systematic comparison of the similarities and dissimilarities of the ways by which different microbial systems surpass the deleterious effects of acetic acid toxicity has not been performed so far, although such exchange of knowledge can open the door to the design of novel approaches aiming the development of acetic acid-tolerant strains with increased industrial robustness in a synthetic biology perspective.

A New Pansharpening Method Based on Spatial and Spectral Sparsity Priors

Abstract: The development of multisensor systems in recent years has led to great increase in the amount of available remote sensing data. Image fusion techniques aim at inferring high quality images of a given area from degraded versions of the same area obtained by multiple sensors. This paper focuses on pansharpening, which is the inference of a high spatial resolution multispectral image from two degraded versions with complementary spectral and spatial resolution characteristics: a) a low spatial resolution multispectral image; and b) a high spatial resolution panchromatic image. We introduce a new variational model based on spatial and spectral sparsity priors for the fusion. In the spectral domain we encourage low-rank structure, whereas in the spatial domain we promote sparsity on the local differences. Given the fact that both panchromatic and multispectral images are integrations of the underlying continuous spectra using different channel responses, we propose to exploit appropriate regularizations based on both spatial and spectral links between panchromatic and the fused multispectral images. A weighted version of the vector Total Variation (TV) norm of the data matrix is employed to align the spatial information of the fused image with that of the panchromatic image. With regard to spectral information, two different types of regularization are proposed to promote a soft constraint on the linear dependence between the panchromatic and the fused multispectral images. The first one estimates directly the linear coefficients from the observed panchromatic and low resolution multispectral images by Linear Regression (LR) while the second one employs the Principal Component Pursuit (PCP) to obtain a robust recovery of the underlying low-rank structure. We also show that the two regularizers are strongly related. The basic idea of both regularizers is that the fused image should have low-rank and preserve edge locations. We use a variation of the recently proposed Split Augmented Lagrangian Shrinkage (SALSA) algorithm to effectively solve the proposed variational formulations. Experimental results on simulated and real remote sensing images show the effectiveness of the proposed pansharpening method compared to the state-of-the-art.

Role played by the N2(A3Σu+) metastable in stationary N2 and N2-O2 discharges

Abstract: The role played by the N2(A3Σu+) metastable on the overall kinetics of N2 and N2-O2 stationary discharges is illustrated by using a kinetic model based on the self-consistent solutions to the Boltzmann equation coupled to the rate balance equations for the vibrationally and electronically excited molecules, atoms and charged particles, in which the sustaining electric field is self-consistently determined It is shown that together with the vibrational distribution of N2(X1Σg+,v) molecules, the metastable state N2(A3Σu+) plays a central role in the whole problem, since some important aspects of these discharges, such as ionization, gas phase chemistry and gas heating are associated with different processes involving the N2(A3Σu+) state

Undecabenzo[7]superhelicene: A Helical Nanographene Ribbon as a Circularly Polarized Luminescence Emitter

Abstract: -European Research Council (ERC-2015-STG-677023) -Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (MINECO, Spain): CTQ2015-70283-P -Fundacao para a Ciencia e a tecnologia, Portugal: UID/NAN/50024/2013, IF/00759/2013 -Universidad de Granada