High Interaction Rates Research Articles

Paediatric asylum seekers in Western Australia: Identification of adversity and complex needs through comprehensive refugee health assessment.

Asylum seekers (ASs) report high rates of trauma and difficulty accessing health and educational services. This study aims to ascertain the needs of paediatric ASs managed by the tertiary Western Australian paediatric Refugee Health Service (RHS), including demographic features, the range of health and psychosocial issues and ongoing management challenges. An audit of multidisciplinary RHS assessments, health records and hospital admissions for new AS patients (<16 years) between July 2012 and June 2016 was undertaken. Records for 110 ASs were reviewed (mean age 6 years, standard deviation 4.72 years). Multiple issues (medical, psychological, developmental, educational) were identified after the first tertiary assessment (median 4, interquartile range (IQR) 3-6) compared to referral sources (median 1, IQR 0-2, P < 0.001). The median number of issues per child at audit completion was 6 (IQR 4-7, P < 0.001). Multiple refugee adverse childhood experiences were identified, with all experiencing >3 (median 4, IQR 4-5). Most had detention experience (107/110, 97.2%), family separation (91/108, 84%) and interrupted education (41/46, 89.2%). The median duration of detention was 7 months (IQR 3-12.5 months) at time of initial review across multiple sites (median 2, IQR 1-3 locations). High rates of hospital interaction were evident, with 45.4% requiring hospital admission and 36% presenting to the emergency department. The median number of outpatient appointments attended per child was 5 (IQR 2-8). Parental and child mental health concerns were identified in 53.6 and 46.3%, respectively. Paediatric ASs have complex trauma backgrounds with exposure to multiple adverse events within disrupted family units. The majority of Western Australian ASs assessed demonstrated negative health or education sequelae compounded by detention not previously identified prior to comprehensive paediatric review. Our data support the urgent removal of ASs from held detention. Ongoing holistic assessment and management engaging multidisciplinary trauma-informed paediatric refugee services to optimise health and well-being is recommended.

Investigation of the relation between feline infectious peritonitis and retroviruses in cats

Feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) infection is a highly pathogenic and fatal systemic inflammatory disease in cats. Although FIP infection is associated with the immune system, there are several predisposing factors of the disease. FIP has a high rate of interaction with other infectious agents. The feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) and Feline Leukemia Virus (FeLV) infections play a predisposing role by reducing immunity against FIP. This study was conducted with the Turkish Van cats, which is a cat breed specific to the Lake Van region of Turkey, between 2014 and 2015. Ascites and organ damage symptoms were identified by pathological analysis in 15 Van cats that were brought to the Van Yüzüncü Yıl University. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to investigate the presence of FIV and FeLV in the homogenate of brain, lung, liver, kidney, spleen and intestines tissue samples with lesions. As a result of the analysis, FIV was identified in 1 (6.7%) out of 15 cats, and all cat samples were found to be positive in terms of FeLV (100%). In the phylogenetic analysis of positive samples, all FeLVs were observed to be in endogenous-FeLVs. In the FIV phylogenetic analysis, our study strain was found to be in the FIV sub-group B. The fact that FIP positive cats were also FeLV positive at the same time has attracted the attention to the pathogenesis of Endogenous-FeLV in malignant diseases, which has not yet been understood. Particularly, it was concluded that the prevalence of FIP infection can be reduced by paying attention to FIV and FeLV vaccination in multiple-cat sheltering environments in young cats.

Trigger and timing distributions using the TTC-PON and GBT bridge connection in ALICE for the LHC Run 3 Upgrade

The ALICE experiment at CERN is preparing for a major upgrade for the third phase of data taking run (Run 3), when the high luminosity phase of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) starts. The increase in the beam luminosity will result in high interaction rate causing the data acquisition rate to exceed 3 TB/sec. In order to acquire data for all the events and to handle the increased data rate, a transition in the readout electronics architecture from the triggered to the trigger-less acquisition mode is required. In this new architecture, a dedicated electronics block called the Common Readout Unit (CRU) is defined to act as a nodal communication point for detector data aggregation and as a distribution point for timing, trigger and control (TTC) information. The ALICE trigger protocol in the upgraded triggerless readout architecture uses two asynchronous fast serial trigger links (FTLs) connections: the TTC-PON and the GBT. We have carried out a study to evaluate the quality of the embedded timing signals forwarded to the connected electronics using the TTC-PON and GBT bridge connection. We have used four performance metrics to characterize the communication bridge: (a) the latency added by the firmware logic, (b) the jitter cleaning effect of the PLL on the timing signal, (c) BER analysis for quantitative measurement of signal quality, and (d) the effect of optical transceivers parameter settings on the signal strength. Reliability study of the bridge connection in maintaining the phase consistency of timing signals is conducted by performing multiple iterations of power on/off cycle, firmware upgrade and reset assertion/de-assertion cycle (PFR cycle). The Intel® development kit having Arria® 10 FPGA is used for developing the prototype of the firmware. The test results are presented and discussed concerning the performance of the TTC-PON and GBT bridge communication chain and its compliance with the ALICE timing requirements.

Electrothermal Explosion of a Titanium–Soot Mixture under Quasistatic Compression. II. Kinetics and Mechanism of Interaction in a Titanium–Soot Mixture

The experimental study of the high-temperature interaction kinetics of a titanium-soot mixture under quasistatic compression in an electrothermal explosion (ETE) is described. Dependences of the heating rate of a sample mixture on temperature are obtained, and the effective values of the energy of ignition activation and thermal explosion are calculated. The formation of the microstructure of intermediate and final interaction products is investigated. It is shown that the formation of a final product occurs according to a shell-core mechanism. The high rate of the solid-phase interaction of titanium and soot is explained by the formation of micropores and microcracks in the intermediate product, which ensure the high rate of surface diffusion of carbon.

What to Name the Children? Oral Histories of Ethnically Mixed Families in Soviet Kazakhstan and Tajikistan

What to Name the Children? Oral Histories of Ethnically Mixed Families in Soviet Kazakhstan and Tajikistan Adrienne L. Edgar (bio) When Rustam Iskandarov’s son was born in 1984, Rustam, a man of mixed Tajik and Russian descent living in Tajikistan, thought carefully about what to name him. It was important that the child’s first name match the other parts of his name, Rustam explained. A Russian first name would not go well with a Tajik patronynic and surname, and the “wrong” first name could cause lifelong social problems for the boy. Ultimately, Rustam and his wife (a woman of mixed Tajik-Tatar descent) chose the name Timur for their son. Rustam explained their reasoning: “My main concern was to make sure that he would have an easier life. Because, for example, his patronymic is Rustamovich, and his last name is Iskandarov. All right, let’s say I were to give him the name Vasilii, for instance: how does Vasilii Rustamovich sound?1 That’s why I picked a neutral name like Timur. Timur is a common name here and in Russia. So, Timur Rustamovich is a synthesis and a more agreeable combination.”2 Rustam’s story illustrates the challenges faced by ethnically mixed couples in Soviet Central Asia as they chose names for their children. In every society, personal names signal individual identity and reflect community values, while also serving as “powerful determinants of inclusion and exclusion.”3 In multiethnic societies, a first name can be an important signal of the future identity and community the parents envision for their child. Bestowing a name, moreover, is a low-cost yet clear way of declaring one’s desired ethnic [End Page 269] affiliation. Unlike acquiring a new language or adopting new customs, which require a certain investment of time and energy, naming is easy and free.4 For mixed families, however, this decision was far from clear-cut; should the child have a name from the mother’s culture or the father’s? From both or from neither? What if the parents themselves were ethnically mixed, as in Rustam’s case? Among mixed families in Central Asia, whether a child was given a Turkic or Persian name, a Muslim name of Arabic origin, a Russian name, or some other sort of name revealed something of the parents’ preferences and allegiances. Yet mixed families were signaling more than just ethnic and religious identity in the names they chose for their children. In this article, I draw on oral history interviews to investigate the process of choosing names for children in Soviet-era mixed families in order to gain insight into the motivations for bestowing particular names and the experiences of the people who bear these names.5 Oral history is virtually the only source available for understanding how the process of naming worked in the past, since few people document their reasons for this decision. The process of choosing a name for a child, moreover, is so fraught with significance that it is often indelibly stamped in the memory of the parents, making it a particularly fruitful area of inquiry for the oral historian.6 This article is part of a broader project using oral history to investigate mixed marriages and ethnic identity in the late Soviet period. The research is based on more than 80 in-depth interviews conducted in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan with men and women of different ages and from a variety of regional, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. All the interviewees were participants (or former participants) in ethnically mixed marriages or the offspring of such marriages. These marriages came in a variety of different mixtures: Kazakh-Russian, Kazakh-Tatar, Russian-Tajik, Uzbek-Tajik, Russian-Korean, Kazakh-Korean, Russian-Armenian, and a number of others. I chose Kazakhstan and Tajikistan as the primary venues for this research because these two former Soviet republics represent opposing poles on the [End Page 270] spectrum of ethnicity and nationality in Soviet Central Asia. Kazakhstan, with its extremely diverse population and high rates of interethnic interaction, offered fertile ground for ethnic mixing. Tajikistan, more socially and religiously conservative and ostensibly more ethnically homogenous (even though “Tajik” as a nationality formed only in...

The design and Performance of the Atlas Inner Detector Trigger in High Pileup Collisions at 13 Tev at the Large Hadron Collider

The design and performance of the ATLAS Inner Detector (ID) trigger algorithms running online on the High Level Trigger (HLT) processor farm for 13 TeV LHC collision data with high pileup are discussed. The HLT ID tracking is a vital component in all physics signatures in the ATLAS trigger for the precise selection of the rare or interesting events necessary for physics analysis without overwhelming the offline data storage in terms of both size and rate. To cope with the high interaction rates expected in the 13 TeV LHC collisions, the ID trigger was redesigned during the 2013-15 long shutdown. The performance of the ID trigger in Run 2 data from 13 TeV LHC collisions has been excellent and exceeded expectations, even at the very high interaction multiplicities observed at the end of data-taking in 2017. The detailed efficiencies and resolutions of the ID trigger in a wide range of physics signatures are presented for the Run 2 data. The superb performance of the ID trigger algorithms in these extreme pileup conditions demonstrates how the ID tracking continues to lie at the heart of the trigger performance to enable the ATLAS physics program, and will continue to do so in the future.

Acoustic detection of neutrinos in bedrock

We propose to utilize bedrock as a medium for acoustic detection of particle showers following interactions of ultra-high energy neutrinos. With the density of rock three-times larger and the speed of sound four-times larger compared to water, the amplitude of the generated bipolar pressure pulse in rock should be larger by an order of magnitude. Our preliminary simulations confirm that prediction. Higher density of rock also guarantees higher interaction rate for neutrinos. A noticeably longer attenuation length in rock reduces signal dissipation. The Pyhäsalmi mine has a unique infrastructure and rock conditions to test this idea and, if successful, extend it to a full-size experiment.

Coxiella burnetii in wild mammals: A systematic review.

Coxiella burnetii is a multi-host bacterium that causes Q fever in humans, a zoonosis that is emerging worldwide. The ecology of C.burnetii in wildlife is still poorly understood and the influence of host, environmental and pathogen factors is almost unknown. This study gathers current published information on different aspects of C.burnetii infection in wildlife, even in species with high reservoir potential and a high rate of interaction with livestock and humans, in order to partially fill the existing gap and highlight future needs. Exposure and/or infection by C.burnetii has, to date, been reported in 109 wild mammal species. The limited sample size of most of the existing studies could suggest an undervalued prevalence of C.burnetii infection. Knowledge on the clinical outcome of C.burnetii infection in wildlife is also very limited, but currently includes reproductive failure in waterbuck (Kobus ellipsiprymnus), roan antelope (Hippotragus niger), dama gazelle (Nanger dama) and water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) and placentitis in the Pacific harbor seal (Phoca vitulina richardsi), Steller sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus) and red deer (Cervus elaphus). The currently available serological tests need to be optimised and validated for each wildlife species. Finally, there is a huge gap in the research on C.burnetii control in wildlife, despite of the increasing evidence that wildlife is a source of C.burnetii for both livestock and humans.

Event Reconstruction and Simulation in PandaRoot for the P̄ANDA Experiment

The P̄ANDA experiment, which is currently under construction at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt, Germany, will address fundamental questions in hadron and nuclear physics via interactions of antiprotons with nuclei. It will be installed at the High Energy Storage Ring (HESR), which will provide an antiproton beam with a momentum range of 1.5 - 15 GeV/c and a high average interaction rate on the fixed target of 2 × 107 events/s. The P̄ANDA experiment will adopt a continuous data acquisition and the expected data rate transmitted to a high-bandwidth computing network will be in the order of 200 GB/s. However, in order to be able to select many different and rare physics processes, an indiscriminate hardware trigger would not suffice. Instead, an online software-based data selection system will be used to select only relevant data and thereby reduce the data rate by a factor of up to 1000. Due to the high interaction rate a highly advanced online analysis must be developed to deal also with overlapping events. Scalability and parallelization of the reconstruction algorithms are therefore a particular focus in the development process. A simulation framework called PandaRoot is used to further optimize the detector performance and develop and evaluate different reconstruction algorithms for event building, tracking and particle identification. An overview about PandaRoot and the requirements on the event reconstruction algorithms is presented and algorithms for the event time reconstruction currently under development are discussed.

Event Topology Reconstruction in the CBM Experiment

One of the main purposes of the physics program of the future heavy ion experiment CBM (FAIR, Germany) is to understand the properties of strongly interacting matter at very high baryonic densities and to study the possibility of a phase transition to a deconfined and chirally restored phase of quark matter. The experiment will operate at high interaction rates up to 10 MHz, that requires a full event reconstruction in real time.In order to make an efficient event selection online a clean sample of particles has to be provided by the reconstruction package called First Level Event Selection (FLES). The FLES package operates in two stages. First, particles registered in the CBM detector system are reconstructed. Then short-lived particles decayed before or inside the setup are searched based on their charged and neutral daughter particles. Since the FLES package is developed to run on many-core computer architectures, the reconstruction of particles is done in parallel that provides a possibility for a global competition between particle candidates. Such a global event topology reconstruction significantly improves suppression of a combinatorial background and provides for further physics analysis a very clean sample of particles produced at different stages of heavy ion collision.The global event topology reconstruction procedure and the results of its application to simulated collisions in the CBM detector setup are presented and discussed.

Development of Fluffy Screen System and Field Trial at a Shopping Mall

Digital signage has been used for services such as advertisement and guidance in public spaces. The use of interactive digital signage has been increasing in recent years. To make full use of the interactivity of digital signage, it is necessary for people to start to interact. In this study, we made a hypothesis that fluffy objects have attraction affordance, and aimed to verify this hypothesis by developing a fluffy screen system. The proposed system is inflated with air. Then, multiple touch inputs from the outside of the screen are detected by cameras inside the screen, and clustering is performed. The information is presented by LCD projectors based on the results of clustering. A field trial in a shopping mall was conducted to verify the hypothesis. A very high interaction rate was realized during the trial of four hours. The results strongly support the hypothesis.

Merger driven star-formation activity in Cl J1449+0856 at z=1.99 as seen by ALMA and JVLA

We use ALMA and JVLA observations of the galaxy cluster Cl J1449+0856 at z=1.99, in order to study how dust-obscured star-formation, ISM content and AGN activity are linked to environment and galaxy interactions during the crucial phase of high-z cluster assembly. We present detections of multiple transitions of $^{12}$CO, as well as dust continuum emission detections from 11 galaxies in the core of Cl J1449+0856. We measure the gas excitation properties, star-formation rates, gas consumption timescales and gas-to-stellar mass ratios for the galaxies. We find evidence for a large fraction of galaxies with highly-excited molecular gas, contributing $>$50% to the total SFR in the cluster core. We compare these results with expectations for field galaxies, and conclude that environmental influences have strongly enhanced the fraction of excited galaxies in this cluster. We find a dearth of molecular gas in the galaxies' gas reservoirs, implying a high star-formation efficiency (SFE) in the cluster core, and find short gas depletion timescales $\tau$<0.1-0.4 Gyrs for all galaxies. Interestingly, we do not see evidence for increased specific star-formation rates (sSFRs) in the cluster galaxies, despite their high SFEs and gas excitations. We find evidence for a large number of mergers in the cluster core, contributing a large fraction of the core's total star-formation compared with expectations in the field. We conclude that the environmental impact on the galaxy excitations is linked to the high rate of galaxy mergers, interactions and active galactic nuclei in the cluster core.

Pile-up correction algorithm based on successive integration for high count rate medical imaging and radiation spectroscopy

In high count rate radiation spectroscopy and imaging, detector output pulses tend to pile up due to high interaction rate of the particles with the detector. Pile-up effects can lead to a severe distortion of the energy and timing information. Pile-up events are conventionally prevented or rejected by both analog and digital electronics. However, for decreasing the exposure times in medical imaging applications, it is important to maintain the pulses and extract their true information by pile-up correction methods. The single-event reconstruction method is a relatively new model-based approach for recovering the pulses one-by-one using a fitting procedure, for which a fast fitting algorithm is a prerequisite. This article proposes a fast non-iterative algorithm based on successive integration which fits the bi-exponential model to experimental data. After optimizing the method, the energy spectra, energy resolution and peak-to-peak count ratios are calculated for different counting rates using the proposed algorithm as well as the rejection method for comparison. The obtained results prove the effectiveness of the proposed method as a pile-up processing scheme designed for spectroscopic and medical radiation detection applications.

In the vanguard of openness: which dynamic capabilities are essential for innovative KIBS firms to develop?

In this paper, we examine whether the innovativeness of knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) firms is affected by their inherently high rate of interactions with clients and partners. Even if such firms do not deliberately follow an open innovation strategy, they are exposed to knowledge flows from other organisations. A particularly interesting issue is the connection between openness and the need to develop dynamic capabilities for distinct phases of knowledge processing. Building on resource-based views, we have developed hypotheses on the respective importance of KIBS firms’ dynamic capabilities and their inclination to engage in open innovation. Since clients and partners can contribute to activities especially at the beginning and end of the innovation value chain, KIBS should consider focusing on developing a ‘conceptualizing’ capability for translating raw ideas into marketable service propositions. The importance of this capability is confirmed by our regression analyses on survey data from 125 KIBS in the Netherlands. By contributing to the literature on KIBS and open innovation, we shed light on strategically balancing capability development and external capability sourcing.

Interaction Dynamics in a Social Network Using Hidden Markov Model

Agents interactions in a social network are dynamic and stochastic. We model the dynamic interactions using the hidden Markov model, a probability model which has a wide array of applications. The transition matrix with three states, forgetting, reinforcement and exploration is estimated using simulation. Singular value decomposition estimates the observation matrix for emission of low, medium and high interaction rates. This is achieved when the rank approximation is applied to the transition matrix. The initial state probabilities are then estimated with rank approximation of the observation matrix. The transition and the observation matrices estimate the state and observed symbols in the model. Agents interactions in a social network account for between 20% and 50% of all the activities in the network. Noise contributes to the other portion due to interaction dynamics and rapid changes observable from the agents transitions in the network. In the model, the interaction proportions are low with 11%, medium with 56% and high with 33%. Hidden Markov model has a strong statistical and mathematical structure to model interactions in a social network.

Online Event Reconstruction in the CBM Experiment at FAIR

Targeting for rare observables, the CBM experiment will operate at high interaction rates of up to 10 MHz, which is unprecedented in heavy-ion experiments so far. It requires a novel free-streaming readout system and a new concept of data processing. The huge data rates of the CBM experiment will be reduced online to the recordable rate before saving the data to the mass storage. Full collision reconstruction and selection will be performed online in a dedicated processor farm. In order to make an efficient event selection online a clean sample of particles has to be provided by the reconstruction package called First Level Event Selection (FLES). The FLES reconstruction and selection package consists of several modules: track finding, track fitting, event building, short-lived particles finding, and event selection. Since detector measurements contain also time information, the event building is done at all stages of the reconstruction process. The input data are distributed within the FLES farm in a form of time-slices. A time-slice is reconstructed in parallel between processor cores. After all tracks of the whole time-slice are found and fitted, they are collected into clusters of tracks originated from common primary vertices, which then are fitted, thus identifying the interaction points. Secondary tracks are associated with primary vertices according to their estimated production time. After that short-lived particles are found and the full event building process is finished. The last stage of the FLES package is a selection of events according to the requested trigger signatures. The event reconstruction procedure and the results of its application to simulated collisions in the CBM detector setup are presented and discussed in detail.

Code of practice for reducing accidental mortality of dolphins in purse-seine fisheries

Purse-seine vessels commonly interact with dolphins. The total number of dolphins accidentally killed in the world's purse-seine fisheries may be substantial, even if interaction rates are generally low. This paper describes an industry Code of Practice (CoP) that was established in Australian purse-seine fishery after an observer program detected high dolphin interaction rates that had not been reported in fishery logbooks. Key features of the CoP are search and delay procedures designed to prevent encirclements and release procedures that minimise mortalities. Extrapolation from observer data (3.9% of net sets observed), suggested that 449 dolphin encirclements and 423 mortalities occurred in 2004-05, the year before the CoP was established. A decade later, observer data suggest that annual encirclements and mortalities had been reduced by 87% and 97%, respectively. Searches were highly effective in detecting the presence of dolphins. Dolphins were not encircled in > 85% of net-sets made after searches determined that dolphins were absent from the fishing area. Opening the front of the net resulted in the successful release of all dolphins in > 86% of encirclement events. Discrepancies between interaction rates estimated from observer data and those recorded in logbooks have decreased over time. This study demonstrated that codes of practice that specify changes in fisher behaviour can be effective in mitigating the interactions of purse-seine fisheries with dolphins. The avoidance and release procedures documented in the CoP for the South Australian sardine fishery are simple and, if adopted in other purse-seine fisheries, could substantially reduce global mortality of dolphins.

The high-rate data challenge: computing for the CBM experiment

The Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment (CBM) is a next-generation heavy-ion experiment to be operated at the FAIR facility, currently under construction in Darmstadt, Germany. A key feature of CBM is very high interaction rate, exceeding those of contemporary nuclear collision experiments by several orders of magnitude. Such interaction rates forbid a conventional, hardware-triggered readout; instead, experiment data will be freely streaming from self-triggered front-end electronics. In order to reduce the huge raw data volume to a recordable rate, data will be selected exclusively on CPU, which necessitates partial event reconstruction in real-time. Consequently, the traditional segregation of online and offline software vanishes; an integrated on- and offline data processing concept is called for. In this paper, we will report on concepts and developments for computing for CBM as well as on the status of preparations for its first physics run.

Surface rotation of Kepler red giant stars

Kepler allows the measurement of starspot variability in a large sample of field red giants for the first time. With a new method that combines autocorrelation and wavelet decomposition, we measure 361 rotation periods from the full set of 17 377 oscillating red giants in our sample. This represents 2.08% of the stars, consistent with the fraction of spectroscopically detected rapidly rotating giants in the field. The remaining stars do not show enough variability to allow us to measure a reliable surface rotation period. Because the stars with detected rotation periods have measured oscillations, we can infer their global properties, e.g. mass and radius, and quantitatively evaluate the predictions of standard stellar evolution models as a function of mass. Consistent with results for cluster giants when we consider only the 4881 intermediate-mass stars, M &gt; 2.0 M⊙ from our full red giant sample, we do not find the enhanced rates of rapid rotation expected from angular momentum conservation. We therefore suggest that either enhanced angular momentum loss or radial differential rotation must be occurring in these stars. Finally, when we examine the 575 low-mass (M&lt; 1.1 M⊙) red clump stars in our sample, which were expected to exhibit slow (non-detectable) rotation, 15% of them actually have detectable rotation. This suggests a high rate of interactions and stellar mergers on the red giant branch.

Cooperative RecA clustering: the key to efficient homology searching

The mechanism by which pre-synaptic RecA nucleoprotein filaments efficiently locate sequence homology across genomic DNA remains unclear. Here, using atomic force microscopy, we directly investigate the intermediates of the RecA-mediated homologous recombination process and find it to be highly cooperative, involving multiple phases. Initially, the process is dominated by a rapid ‘association’ phase, where multiple filaments interact on the same dsDNA simultaneously. This cooperative nature is reconciled by the observation of localized dense clusters of pre-synaptic filaments interacting with the observed dsDNA molecules. This confinement of reactive species within the vicinity of the dsDNA, is likely to play an important role in ensuring that a high interaction rate between the nucleoprotein filaments and the dsDNA can be achieved. This is followed by a slower ‘resolution’ phase, where the synaptic joints either locate sequence homology and progress to a post-synaptic joint, or dissociate from the dsDNA. Surprisingly, the number of simultaneous synaptic joints decreases rapidly after saturation of the dsDNA population, suggesting a reduction in interaction activity of the RecA filaments. We find that the time-scale of this decay is in line with the time-scale of the dispersion of the RecA filament clusters, further emphasising the important role this cooperative phenomena may play in the RecA-facilitated homology search.