We review recent theoretical progress in understanding physical processes of composite effects on enhanced third-order nonlinear optical responses of various kinds of the recently-proposed nonlinear optical materials, namely, colloidal nanocrystals with inhomogeneous metallodielectric particles or a graded-index host, metallic films with inhomogeneous microstructures adjusted by ion doping or temperature gradient, composites with compositional gradation or graded particles, and magneto-controlled ferrofluidbased nonlinear optical materials.
The perturbation expansion method is used to compute the effective conductivity of nonlinear composite media. We develop perturbation expansions to solve nonlinear partial differential equations pertaining to the electrostatic boundary value problems. As an example in two dimensions, we apply the method to deal with a cylindrical inclusion in a host, both of either linear or nonlinear current-voltage characteristics, and derive the zeroth-, first-, and second-order series in the nonlinear conductivity coeScient. We also consider a composite of cylindrical inclusions embedded in a host. For low concentrations of inclusions, we derive the exact formulas of the effective conductivity to first, third, and fifth order. We show that the approximate results of Zeng et al. (to third order) are indeed exact.
Background: Invasive fungal infections, such as candidemia, caused by Candida species have been increasing. Candidemia is not only associated with a high mortality (30% to 40%) but also extends the length of hospital stay and increases the costs of medical care. Sepsis caused by Candida species is clinically indistinguishable from bacterial infections. Although, the clinical presentations of the patients with candidemia caused by Candida albicans and non-albicans Candida species (NAC) are indistinguishable, the susceptibilities to antifungal agents of these species are different. In this study, we attempted to identify the risk factors for candidemia caused by C. albicans and NAC in the hope that this may guide initial empiric therapy.
Biological cells can be treated as composites of graded material inclusions. In addition to biomaterials, graded composites are important in more traditional materials science. In this article, we investigate the electrorotation (ER) spectrum of a graded colloidal suspension in an attempt to discuss its dielectric properties. For that, we use the recently obtained differential effective dipole approximation (DEDA) and generalize it for non-spherical particles. We find that variations in the conductivity profile may make the characteristic frequency red-shifted and have also an effect on the rotation peak. On the other hand, variations in the dielectric profile may enhance the rotation peak, but do not have any significant effect on the characteristic frequency. In the end, we apply our theory to fit experimental data obtained for yeast cells and find good agreement.
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