We calculate the thermodynamics of the one-dimensional spin-1/2 Ising model in the presence of a constant skew magnetic field. We obtain the high-temperature expansion of its Helmholtz free energy (HFE), for the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic cases, up to order beta7. This expansion permits us to obtain the behaviour of the model for $ |J| \beta \stackrel {<}{_\sim}} 1 $, when it cannot be described by its classical version. Among the calculated thermodynamical functions of the model, we have the diagonal elements of the magnetic susceptibility tensor for the transverse and logitudinal Ising models, obtained by taking the limits h z -> 0 and h y -> 0, respectively, of the beta-expansion of the HFE. The y-component of the magnetization and the chiyy component of the magnetic susceptibility tensor are almost the same for the antiferro- and ferromagnetic models, at least for $ |J| \beta \stackrel {<}{_\sim}} 1 $; and, <FONT FACE=Symbol>c yy</FONT> is practically independent of the direction of the external magnetic. We also show that, in this region of temperature, the thermodynamics of the Ising model with skew magnetic field and that of an XXZ model with longitudinal magnetic field are not similar.

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is the most common genetic disease among Caucasians and is rare among sub-Saharan Africans. The Brazilian population is not ethnically homogeneous but it is the result of three-way ethnic admixture of Europeans, Africans and Amerindians in varying proportions, depending on the region. In the present study, we investigated 33 patients who had been diagnosed and are currently under treatment for CF at the University Hospital João de Barros Barreto, Belém, Pará State. The molecular analysis for G542X, G551D and R553X mutations was performed by PCR followed by RFLP using BstNI, HincII and MboI, respectively, in polyacrylamide gel eletrophoresis and stained with AgNO3. ThedeltaF508 mutation (a deletion of 3 bp) was only analyzed by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and stained with AgNO3. Each sample was analyzed for regions of interest in the CFTR gene using amplified by PCR and specific primers. The deltaF508 and G551D mutations presented frequencies of 22.7 and 3%, respectively. In 74.3% of the remaining patients, none of the mutations investigated was found. The present study characterized in a sample of patients with an established clinical diagnosis of CF (asthma, repeated bronchopneumonia, disorders of nutritional status, etc.) the most frequent mutation ( deltaF508) in the North region of Brazil and is also the first report of the G551D mutation. In spite of the wide spectrum of CF mutations and the heterogeneous ethnic origin of the Amazon population, the molecular diagnosis is a helpful additional tool for the diagnosis and treatment of CF patients.

The Heisenberg XXZ model is a chain model with nearest-neighbor interactions. Its thermodynamics is exactly obtained via Bethe ansatz. Recently, we developed a method to derive the high-temperature expansion of the grand potential per site of translationally invariant chain models, with periodic boundary conditions. Here we apply this approach to the XXZ model with periodic boundary conditions for the Ising limit case (t = 0) and the free fermion case (delta = 0 and h = 0), obtaining results in agreement with the literature. In this new way of obtaining the coefficients of the high-temperature expansion of the grand potential, the coefficients are derived from an auxiliary function written only in terms of open connected sub-chains.

Charret et al. applied the properties of Grassmann generators to develop a new method to calculate the coefficientes of the high temperature expansion of the grand canonical partition function of self-interacting fermionic models on d-dimensions (d > or = 1). The method explores the anti-commuting nature of fermionic fields and avoids the calculation of the fermionic path integral. We apply this new method to the relativistic free Dirac fermions and recover the known results in the literature without the beta-independent and mu-independent infinities that plague the continuum path integral formulation.