A simple model is devised to show that an enzymatic Brownian particle in a static electric field can undergo directional movement when coupled with a nonequilibrium chemical reaction which the particle catalyzes, if at least one of the intermediate states of the catalytic cycle is charged. The direction of the movement depends not only on the asymmetry of the electric field, but also on the dir...

Fluorescence imaging provides a comprehensive view of the electrical behavior of excitable cells, the relative nature of the optical signals however requires additional means for calibration. The determination of the actual electrical field strength is subject to uncertainty even when using concurrent electrode measurements. A combined approach of electrical field measurement and optical mappin...

Yeast cells of Candida albicans which had been attached to polylysine-coated microscope slides were induced to form buds or germ tubes in the presence of external electrical fields. The sites of budding and germ tube formation and the growth of germ tubes and hyphal branches were polarized preferentially towards the cathode. Buds were not converted to pseudohyphae or germ tubes by the field and...

Perovskite-type ferroelectric ceramics have found many applications in actuators, sensors and memories. One critical limitation on their performance is due to electric fatigue, which refers to the deterioration of material properties associated with electric cycling. The degradation of electrical properties in ferroelectrics, which appears in the hysteresis loop in the form of a decrease of rem...

The temperature and electrical field dependent conductivity of n-type CdSe nanocrystal thin films is investigated. In the low electrical field regime, the conductivity follows sigma approximately exp([-(T(*)/T)(1/2)] in the temperature range 10<T<120 K. At high electrical field, the conductivity is strongly field dependent. At 4 K, the conductance increases by 8 orders of magnitude over one dec...

We propose a new setup to measure an electrical field in one direction. This setup is made of a piezoelectric sintered lead zinconate titanate film and an optical interferometric probe. We used this setup to investigate how the shape of the extremity of a coaxial cable influences the longitudinal electrical near-field generated by it. For this application, we designed our setup to have a spatia...

We have studied thermodynamics of vapor nucleation on a spherical wettable dielectric nanoparticle carrying a discrete electric charge located at a certain distance from the particle center. New general equations for the chemical potential of a condensate molecule in the droplet around the particle, the work of the droplet formation and the droplet shape as functions of the effective radius of ...