The mechanical properties of cells influence their cellular and subcellular functions, including cell adhesion, migration, polarization, and differentiation, as well as organelle organization and trafficking inside the cytoplasm. Yet reported values of cell stiffness and viscosity vary substantially, which suggests differences in how the results of different methods are obtained or analyzed by different groups. To address this issue and illustrate the complementarity of certain approaches, here we present, analyze, and critically compare measurements obtained by means of some of the most widely used methods for cell mechanics: atomic force microscopy, magnetic twisting cytometry, particle-tracking microrheology, parallel-plate rheometry, cell monolayer rheology, and optical stretching. These measurements highlight how elastic and viscous moduli of MCF-7 breast cancer cells can vary 1,000-fold and 100-fold, respectively. We discuss the sources of these variations, including the level of applied mechanical stress, the rate of deformation, the geometry of the probe, the location probed in the cell, and the extracellular microenvironment.

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Anisotropic plasmonic particles such as gold nanotriangles have extraordinary structural, optical, and physicochemical properties. For many applications in different fields, it is essential to prepare them in a chemically and physically stable, structurally well-defined manner, e.g., as large and uniform coverage on a substrate. We present a direct method for the large scale close-packed monolayer formation of edge-to-edge ordered, ultrathin crystalline gold nanotriangles on Si wafers or quartz glass via the transfer of these asymmetric particles to the air-liquid interface after adding ethanol-toluene mixtures without any subsequent surface functionalization. X-ray diffraction monitoring of the close-packed, large area monolayer with a mosaicity of less than 0.1° allows for calibrating the temperature of the particles during continuous laser heating. This is important for characterizing the microscopic temperature of the metal particles in the plasmon-driven dimerization process of 4-nitrothiophenol (4-NTP) into 4,4'-dimercaptoazobenzene (DMAB), monitored in real time by surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). The gold nanotriangles can act as a source of hot electrons and initiate the dimerization process.

We analyse the SM97 partial wave amplitudes for nucleon-nucleon (NN) scattering to 2.5 GeV, in which resonance and meson production effects are evident for energies above pion production threshold. Our analyses are based upon boson exchange or quantum inversion potentials with which the subthreshold data are fit perfectly. Above 300 MeV they are extrapolations, to which complex short ranged Gaussian potentials are added in the spirit of the optical models of nuclear physics and of diffraction models of high energy physics. The data to 2.5 GeV are all well fit. The energy dependences of these Gaussians are very smooth save for precise effects caused by the known ∆ and N ⋆ resonances. With this approach, we confirm that the geometrical implications of the profile function found from diffraction scattering are pertinent in the regime 300 MeV to 2.5 GeV and that the overwhelming part of meson production comes from the QCD sector of the nucleons when they have a separation of their centres of 1 to 1.2 fm. This analysis shows that the elastic NN scattering data above 300 MeV can be understood with a local potential operator as well as has the data below 300 MeV.

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An integrated process to fabricate controllable arrays of semiconductor nanorings and nanodots on patterned surfaces is presented. This approach is based on pattern transfer of nanopores to a SiO2 layer, followed by selective epitaxial growth of InGaN onto an underlying GaN substrate using metalorganic chemical vapor deposition. Using this approach, crystalline InGaN nanorings and nanodots ∼80nm in diameter have been grown on GaN surfaces. The formation mechanism of the nanorings and nanodots is described based on the initial stage of selective growth and restricted atom migration in a confined hole. Strong photoluminescence obtained at room temperature from the noncapped nanorings indicates strong confinement of the excitons in the nanostructures. This approach enables fabrication of dense, uniform arrays of epitaxial nanostructures and is potentially applicable to a variety of materials systems.

Phonons are often regarded as delocalized quasiparticles with certain energy and momentum. The anharmonic interaction of phonons determines macroscopic properties of the solid, such as thermal expansion or thermal conductivity, and a detailed understanding becomes increasingly important for functional nanostructures. Although phonon-phonon scattering processes depicted in simple wave-vector diagrams are the basis of theories describing these macroscopic phenomena, experiments directly accessing these coupling channels are scarce. We synthesize monochromatic acoustic phonon wave packets with only a few cycles to introduce nonlinear phononics as the acoustic counterpart to nonlinear optics. Control of the wave vector, bandwidth, and consequently spatial extent of the phonon wave packets allows us to observe nonlinear phonon interaction, in particular, second harmonic generation, in real time by wave-vector-sensitive Brillouin scattering with x-rays and optical photons.

The sensitivity of nucleon-nucleus elastic scattering to the off-shell behavior of realistic nucleon-nucleon interactions is investigated when on-shell equivalent nucleon-nucleon potentials are used. The study is based on applications of the full-folding optical model potential for an explicit treatment of the offshell behavior of the nucleon-nucleon effective interaction. Applications were made at beam energies between 40 and 500 MeV for proton scattering from 40 Ca and 208 Pb. We use the momentum-dependent Paris potential and its local on-shell equivalent as obtained with the Gelfand-Levitan and Marchenko inversion formalism for the two nucleon Schrödinger equation. Full-folding calculations for nucleon-nucleus scattering show small fluctuations in the corresponding observables. This implies that off-shell features of the NN interaction cannot be unambiguously identified with these processes. Inversion potentials were also constructed directly from NN phase-shift data (SM94) in the 0-1.3 GeV energy range. Their use in proton-nucleus scattering above 200 MeV provide a superior description of the observables relative to those obtained from current realistic NN potentials. Limitations and scope of our findings are presented and discussed.