The Szilard engine (SZE) is the quintessence of Maxwell's demon, which can extract the work from a heat bath by utilizing information. We present the first complete quantum analysis of the SZE, and derive an analytic expression of the quantum-mechanical work performed by a quantum SZE containing an arbitrary number of molecules, where it is crucial to regard the process of insertion or removal of a wall as a legitimate thermodynamic process. We find that more (less) work can be extracted from the bosonic (fermionic) SZE due to the indistinguishability of identical particles.

A bismuth ferrite and barium titanate solid solution compound can achieve good piezoelectric properties with a high Curie temperature when fabricated with low-temperature sintering followed by a water-quenching process, with no complicated grain alignment processes performed. By adding the super-tetragonal bismuth gallium oxide to the compound, the piezoelectric properties are as good as those of lead zirconate titanate ceramics.

Background-Stent thrombosis (ST) is a serious complication of drug-eluting stent (DES) implantation regardless of the timing (acute, subacute, or late). 0001).The mean duration to ST from the stent implantation was 8.9Ϯ8.5 days in subacute and 152.7Ϯ100.4 days in late thrombosis cases. Mortality was significantly higher in patients with ST compared with those without ST at 6 months (31% versus 3%; PϽ0.001). Multivariate analysis detected cessation of clopidogrel therapy, renal failure, bifurcation lesions, and in-stent restenosis as significant correlates of ST (PϽ0.05). Conclusions-ST continues to be a serious complication of contemporary DES use. Careful management is warranted in patients with renal failure and in those undergoing treatment for in-stent restenosis and bifurcations. Special focus on clopidogrel compliance may minimize the incidence of ST after DES implantation.

Quasi-bound states in an open system do in general not form an orthogonal and complete basis. It is, however, expected that the non-orthogonality is weak in the case of well-confined states except close to a so-called exceptional point in parameter space. We present numerical evidence showing that for passive optical microspiral cavities the parameter regime where the non-orthogonality is significant is rather broad. Here we observe almost-degenerate pairs of well-confined modes which are highly non-orthogonal. Using a non-Hermitian model Hamiltonian we demonstrate that this interesting phenomenon is related to the asymmetric scattering between clockwise and counterclockwise propagating waves in the spiral geometry. Numerical simulations of ray dynamics reveal a clear ray-wave correspondence.