Clinical relevance of circulating tumour cells in the bone marrow of patients with SCCHN

Background: Clinical outcome of patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (SCCHN) depends on several risk factors like the presence of locoregional lymph node or distant metastases, stage, localisation and histologic differentiation of the tumour. Circulating tumour cells in the bone marrow indicate a poor prognosis for patients with various kinds of malignoma. The present study examines the clinical relevance of occult tumour cells in patients suffering from SCCHN. Patients and Methods: Bone marrow aspirates of 176 patients suffering from SCCHN were obtained prior to surgery and stained for the presence of disseminated tumour cells. Antibodies for cytokeratin 19 were used for immunohistochemical detection with APAAP on cytospin slides. Within a clinical follow-up protocol over a period of 60 months, the prognostic relevance of several clinicopathological parameters and occult tumour cells was evaluated. Results: Single CK19-expressing tumour cells could be detected in the bone marrow of 30.7% of the patients. There is a significant correlation between occult tumour cells in the bone marrow and relapse. Uni- and multivariate analysis of all clinical data showed the metastases in the locoregional lymph system and detection of disseminated tumour cells in the bone marrow to be statistically highly significant for clinical prognosis. Conclusion: The detection of minimal residual disease underlines the understanding of SCCHN as a systemic disease. Further examination of such cells will lead to a better understanding of the tumour biology, as well as to improvement of diagnostic and therapeutic strategies

Finiteness Conditions for Light-Front Hamiltonians

In the context of simple models, it is shown that demanding finiteness for physical masses with respect to a longitudinal cutoff, can be used to fix the ambiguity in the renormalization of fermions masses in the Hamiltonian light-front formulation. Difficulties that arise in applications of finiteness conditions to discrete light-cone quantization are discussed.Comment: REVTEX, 9 page

Universal description of S-wave meson spectra in a renormalized light-cone QCD-inspired model

A light-cone QCD-inspired model, with the mass squared operator consisting of a harmonic oscillator potential as confinement and a Dirac-delta interaction, is used to study the S-wave meson spectra. The two parameters of the harmonic potential and quark masses are fixed by masses of rho(770), rho(1450), J/psi, psi(2S), K*(892) and B*. We apply a renormalization method to define the model, in which the pseudo-scalar ground state mass fixes the renormalized strength of the Dirac-delta interaction. The model presents an universal and satisfactory description of both singlet and triplet states of S-wave mesons and the corresponding radial excitations.Comment: RevTeX, 17 pages, 7 eps figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Masses of the physical mesons from an effective QCD--Hamiltonian

The front form Hamiltonian for quantum chromodynamics, reduced to an effective Hamiltonian acting only in the $q\bar q$ space, is solved approximately. After coordinate transformation to usual momentum space and Fourier transformation to configuration space a second order differential equation is derived. This retarded Schr\"odinger equation is solved by variational methods and semi-analytical expressions for the masses of all 30 pseudoscalar and vector mesons are derived. In view of the direct relation to quantum chromdynamics without free parameter, the agreement with experiment is remarkable, but the approximation scheme is not adequate for the mesons with one up or down quark. The crucial point is the use of a running coupling constant $\alpha_s(Q^2)$, in a manner similar but not equal to the one of Richardson in the equal usual-time quantization. Its value is fixed at the Z mass and the 5 flavor quark masses are determined by a fit to the vector meson quarkonia.Comment: 18 pages, 4 Postscript figure

Strong Orientation Effects in Ionization of H2+_2^+ by Short, Intense, High-Frequency Light Sources

We present three dimensional time-dependent calculations of ionization of arbitrarily spatially oriented H$_2^+$ by attosecond, intense, high-frequency laser fields. The ionization probability shows a strong dependence on both the internuclear distance and the relative orientation between the laser field and the internuclear axis.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Double-valuedness of the electron wave function and rotational zero-point motion of electrons in rings

I propose that the phase of an electron's wave function changes by $\pi$ when the electron goes around a loop maintaining phase coherence. Equivalently, that the minimum orbital angular momentum of an electron in a ring is $\hbar/2$ rather than zero as generally assumed, hence that the electron in a ring has azimuthal zero point motion. This proposal provides a physical explanation for the origin of electronic `quantum pressure', it implies that a spin current exists in the ground state of aromatic ring molecules, and it suggests an explanation for the ubiquitousness of persistent currents observed in mesoscopic rings

Description of nuclear octupole and quadrupole deformation close to the axial symmetry: Octupole vibrations in the X(5) nuclei 150Nd and 152Sm

The model, introduced in a previous paper, for the description of the octupole and quadrupole degrees of freedom in conditions close to the axial symmetry, is used to describe the negative-parity band based on the first octupole vibrational state in nuclei close to the critical point of the U(5) to SU(3) phase transition. The situation of 150Nd and 152Sm is discussed in detail. The positive parity levels of these nuclei, and also the in-band E2 transitions, are reasonably accounted for by the X(5) model. With simple assumptions on the nature of the octupole vibrations, it is possible to describe, with comparable accuracy, also the negative parity sector, without changing the description of the positive-parity part.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

On Zero Modes and the Vacuum Problem -- A Study of Scalar Adjoint Matter in Two-Dimensional Yang-Mills Theory via Light-Cone Quantisation

SU(2) Yang-Mills Theory coupled to massive adjoint scalar matter is studied in (1+1) dimensions using Discretised Light-Cone Quantisation. This theory can be obtained from pure Yang-Mills in 2+1 dimensions via dimensional reduction. On the light-cone, the vacuum structure of this theory is encoded in the dynamical zero mode of a gluon and a constrained mode of the scalar field. The latter satisfies a linear constraint, suggesting no nontrivial vacua in the present paradigm for symmetry breaking on the light-cone. I develop a diagrammatic method to solve the constraint equation. In the adiabatic approximation I compute the quantum mechanical potential governing the dynamical gauge mode. Due to a condensation of the lowest omentum modes of the dynamical gluons, a centrifugal barrier is generated in the adiabatic potential. In the present theory however, the barrier height appears too small to make any impact in this odel. Although the theory is superrenormalisable on naive powercounting grounds, the removal of ultraviolet divergences is nontrivial when the constrained mode is taken into account. The open aspects of this problem are discussed in detail.Comment: LaTeX file, 26 pages. 14 postscript figure

Model for SU(3) vacuum degeneracy using light-cone coordinates

Working in light-cone coordinates, we study the zero-modes and the vacuum in a 2+1 dimensional SU(3) gauge model. Considering the fields as independent of the tranverse variables, we dimensionally reduce this model to 1+1 dimensions. After introducing an appropriate su(3) basis and gauge conditions, we extract an adjoint field from the model. Quantization of this adjoint field and field equations lead to two constrained and two dynamical zero-modes. We link the dynamical zero-modes to the vacuum by writing down a Schrodinger equation and prove the non-degeneracy of the SU(3) vacuum provided that we neglect the contribution of constrained zero-modes.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure

Decoupling of Zero-Modes and Covariance in the Light-Front Formulation of Supersymmetric Theories

We show under suitable assumptions that zero-modes decouple from the dynamics of non-zero modes in the light-front formulation of some supersymmetric field theories. The implications for Lorentz invariance are discussed.Comment: 8 pages, revtex, 3 figure