A novel theory of primary olfactory reception is described. It proposes that olfactory receptors respond not to the shape of the molecules but to their vibrations. It differs from previous vibrational theories (Dyson, Wright) in providing a detailed and plausible mechanism for biological transduction of molecular vibrations: inelastic electron tunnelling. Elements of the tunnelling spectroscope...

Illuminating a nano-sized metallic tip with ultrashort laser pulses leads to the emission of electrons due to multiphoton excitations. As optical fields become stronger, tunnelling emission directly from the Fermi level becomes prevalent. This can generate coherent electron waves in vacuum leading to a variety of attosecond phenomena. Working at high emission currents where multi-electron effec...

The carbon nanotube and graphene nanoribbon band structure is derived using the two-band k · p method and shown to have a similar band structure as a III-V semiconductor. Contrary to a previous claim, it is shown that the tunnelling probability is lower for a graphene based semiconductor than for a III-V semiconductor with the same bandgap. Considering the relation between the bandgap and the e...

The stability of a low temperature Bose-Einstein condensate with attractive interactions in one and three dimensional double-well potentials is discussed. In particular, the tunnelling dynamics of a condensate under the influence of a timedependent potential gradient is investigated. The condensate is shown to collapse at a critical potential gradient which corresponds to a critical number of a...

Active Network nodes are increasingly being used for nontrivial processing of data streams. These complex network applications typically benefit from protection between their components for faulttolerance or security. However, fine-grained memory protection introduces bottlenecks in communication among components. This paper describes memory protection in Expert, an OS for programmable network ...

We show that the group delay in tunnelling is not a traversal time but a lifetime of stored energy or stored probability escaping through both ends of the barrier. Because it is a lifetime associated with both forward (transmitted) and backward (reflected) fluxes, it cannot be used to define a group velocity for forward transit in cases where a wavepacket is mostly reflected. For photonic tunne...

In 1986, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) and the fact that it could achieve atomic resolution. They observed that if they held a metallic tip of 10 angstrom above a conductive surface, they could measure a tunnelling current in the order of a nanoampere. When the tip was then scanned over the conducting...

Kerner and Mann’s recent work shows that, for an uncharged and non-rotating black hole, its Hawking temperature can be correctly derived by fermions tunnelling from its horizons. In this paper, our main work is to improve the analysis to deal with charged fermion tunnelling from the general dilatonic black holes, specifically including the charged, spherically symmetric dilatonic black hole, th...

The characteristics of the reverse leakage current of GaInN/GaN multiple quantum well light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are examined with various n-type GaN doping concentrations and interpreted by using a tunnelling current model. Changing the doping concentration of the n-type GaN influences the tunnelling probability of electrons into the conduction band and thus the reverse leakage current. Redu...

The quantum tunnelling and nucleation theory of vortices in helium II is reviewed. Arguments are given that the only reliable method to calculate tunnelling probabilities in this highly correlated, strongly interacting many-body system is the semiclassical, large scale approach for evaluation of the tunnelling exponent, which does not make any assumptions about the unknown dynamical behaviour o...