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Covalently bound substrate at the regulatory site triggers allosteric enzyme activation (2008)

Steffen Kutter Manfred S. Weiss Georg Wille Ralph Golbik Michael Spinka Stephan König

The mechanism by which the enzyme pyruvate decarboxylase from yeast is activated allosterically has been elucidated. A total of seven three-dimensional structures of the enzyme, of enzyme variants or of enzyme complexes from two yeast species (three of them reported here for the first time) provide detailed atomic resolution snapshots along the activation coordinate. The prime event is the covalent binding of the substrate pyruvate to the side chain of cysteine 221, thus forming a thiohemiketal. This reaction causes the shift of a neighbouring amino acid, which eventually leads to the rigidification of two otherwise flexible loops, where one of the loops provides two histidine residues necessary to complete the enzymatically competent active site architecture. The structural data are complemented and supported by kinetic investigations and binding studies and provide a consistent picture of the structural changes, which occur upon enzyme activation.

The outer crust of non-accreting cold neutron stars (2006)

Stefan Bernhard Rüster Matthias Hempel Jürgen Schaffner-Bielich

The properties of the outer crust of non-accreting cold neutron stars are studied by using modern nuclear data and theoretical mass tables updating in particular the classic work of Baym, Pethick and Sutherland. Experimental data from the atomic mass table from Audi, Wapstra, and Thibault of 2003 is used and a thorough comparison of many modern theoretical nuclear models, relativistic and non-relativistic ones, is performed for the first time. In addition, the influences of pairing and deformation are investigated. State-of-the-art theoretical nuclear mass tables are compared in order to check their differences concerning the neutron dripline, magic neutron numbers, the equation of state, and the sequence of neutron-rich nuclei up to the dripline in the outer crust of non-accreting cold neutron stars.

The phase diagram of neutral quark matter : self-consistent treatment of quark masses (2005)

Stefan Bernhard Rüster Verena Werth Michael Buballa Igor A. Shovkovy Dirk-Hermann Rischke

We study the phase diagram of dense, locally neutral three-flavor quark matter within the framework of the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. In the analysis, dynamically generated quark masses are taken into account self-consistently. The phase diagram in the plane of temperature and quark chemical potential is presented. The results for two qualitatively different regimes, intermediate and strong diquark coupling strength, are presented. It is shown that the role of gapless phases diminishes with increasing diquark coupling strength.

The phase diagram of neutral quark matter : the effect of neutrino trapping (2006)

Stefan Bernhard Rüster Verena Werth Michael Buballa Igor A. Shovkovy Dirk-Hermann Rischke

We study the effect of neutrino trapping on the phase diagram of dense, locally neutral three-flavor quark matter within the framework of a Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. In the analysis, dynamically generated quark masses are taken into account self-consistently. The phase diagrams in the plane of temperature and quark chemical potential, as well as in the plane of temperature and lepton-number chemical potential are presented. We show that neutrino trapping favors two-flavor color superconductivity and disfavors the color-flavor-locked phase at intermediate densities of matter. At the same time, the location of the critical line separating the two-flavor color-superconducting phase and the normal phase of quark matter is little affected by the presence of neutrinos. The implications of these results for the evolution of protoneutron stars are briefly discussed. PACS numbers: 12.39.-x 12.38.Aw 26.60.+c

Phase diagram of neutral quark matter at moderate densities (2006)

Stefan Bernhard Rüster Verena Werth Michael Buballa Igor A. Shovkovy Dirk-Hermann Rischke

We discuss the phase diagram of moderately dense, locally neutral three-flavor quark matter using the framework of an effective model of quantum chromodynamics with a local interaction. The phase diagrams in the plane of temperature and quark chemical potential as well as in the plane of temperature and lepton-number chemical potential are discussed.

Phase diagram of dense neutral three-flavor quark matter (2004)

Stefan Bernhard Rüster Igor A. Shovkovy Dirk-Hermann Rischke

We study the phase diagram of dense, locally neutral three-flavor quark matter as a function of the strange quark mass, the quark chemical potential, and the temperature, employing a general nine-parameter ansatz for the gap matrix. At zero temperature and small values of the strange quark mass, the ground state of matter corresponds to the color-flavor-locked (CFL) phase. At some critical value of the strange quark mass, this is replaced by the recently proposed gapless CFL (gCFL) phase. We also find several other phases, for instance, a metallic CFL (mCFL) phase, a so-called uSC phase where all colors of up quarks are paired, as well as the standard two-flavor color-superconducting (2SC) phase and the gapless 2SC (g2SC) phase.

Gapless phases of colour-superconducting matter (2004)

Igor A. Shovkovy Stefan Bernhard Rüster Dirk-Hermann Rischke

We discuss gapless colour superconductivity for neutral quark matter in β equilibrium at zero as well as at nonzero temperature. Basic properties of gapless superconductors are reviewed. The current progress and the remaining problems in the understanding of the phase diagram of strange quark matter are discussed.

Effect of color superconductivity on the mass and radius of a quark star (2003)

Stefan Bernhard Rüster Dirk-Hermann Rischke

We compare quark stars made of color-superconducting quark matter to normal-conducting quark stars. We focus on the most simple color-superconducting system, a two-flavor color superconductor, and employ the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model to compute the gap parameter and the equation of state. By varying the strength of the four-fermion coupling of the NJL model, we study the mass and the radius of the quark star as a function of the value of the gap parameter. If the coupling constant exceeds a critical value, the gap parameter does not vanish even at zero density. For coupling constants below this critical value, mass and radius of a color-superconducting quark star change at most by ca. 20% compared to a star consisting of normal-conducting quark matter. For coupling constants above the critical value mass and radius may change by factors of two or more.

Baryon number and electric charge fluctuations in Pb+Pb collisions at SPS energies (2006)

Volodymyr P. Konchakovski Mark I. Gorenstein Elena L. Bratkovskaya Horst Stöcker

Event-by-event fluctuations of the net baryon number and electric charge in nucleus-nucleus collisions are studied in Pb+Pb at SPS energies within the HSD transport model. We reveal an important role of the fluctuations in the number of target nucleon participants. They strongly influence all measured fluctuations even in the samples of events with rather rigid centrality trigger. This fact can be used to check different scenarios of nucleus-nucleus collisions by measuring the multiplicity fluctuations as a function of collision centrality in fixed kinematical regions of the projectile and target hemispheres. The HSD results for the event-by-event fluctuations of electric charge in central Pb+Pb collisions at 20, 30, 40, 80 and 158 A GeV are in a good agreement with the NA49 experimental data and considerably larger than expected in a quark-gluon plasma. This demonstrate that the distortions of the initial fluctuations by the hadronization phase and, in particular, by the final resonance decays dominate the observable fluctuations.

Transport model analysis of the transverse momentum and rapidity dependence of pion interferometry at SPS energies (2006)

Qingfeng Li Marcus Bleicher Xianglei Zhu Horst Stöcker

Based on the UrQMD transport model, the transverse momentum and the rapidity dependence of the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss (HBT) radii R_L, R_O, R_S as well as the cross term R_OL at SPS energies are investigated and compared with the experimental NA49 and CERES data. The rapidity dependence of the R_L, R_O, R_S is weak while the R_OL is significantly increased at large rapidities and small transverse momenta. The HBT "life-time" issue (the phenomenon that the calculated sqrt R_O^2-R_S^2 value is larger than the correspondingly extracted experimental data) is also present at SPS energies.

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