Probing the quark-gluon interaction with hadrons

We present a unified picture of mesons and baryons in the Dyson-Schwinger/Bethe-Salpeter approach, wherein the quark-gluon and quark-(anti)quark interaction follow from a systematic truncation of the QCD effective action and includes all its tensor structures. The masses of some of the ground state mesons and baryons are found to be in reasonable agreement with the expectations of a `quark-core calculation', suggesting a partial insensitivity to the details of the quark-gluon interaction. However, discrepancies remain in the meson sector, and for excited baryons, that suggest higher order corrections are relevant and should be investigated following the methods outlined herein.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables. Version to appear in PL

Shannon Entropy as Characterization Tool in Acoustics

We introduce Shannon's information entropy to characterize the avoided crossing appearing in the resonant Zener-like phenomenon in ultrasonic superlattices made of two different fluidlike meta- materials. We show that Shannon's entropy gives a correct physical insight of the localization effects taking place and manifest the informational exchange of the involved acoustic states in the narrow region of parameters where the avoided crossing occurs. Results for ultrasonic structures consisting of alternating layers of methyl-metacrylate and water cavities, in which the acoustic Zener effect were recently demonstrated, are also reported.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Hamiltonian Formulation of Palatini f(R) theories a la Brans-Dicke

We study the Hamiltonian formulation of f(R) theories of gravity both in metric and in Palatini formalism using their classical equivalence with Brans-Dicke theories with a non-trivial potential. The Palatini case, which corresponds to the w=-3/2 Brans-Dicke theory, requires special attention because of new constraints associated with the scalar field, which is non-dynamical. We derive, compare, and discuss the constraints and evolution equations for the ww=-3/2 and w\neq -3/2 cases. Based on the properties of the constraint and evolution equations, we find that, contrary to certain claims in the literature, the Cauchy problem for the w=-3/2 case is well-formulated and there is no reason to believe that it is not well-posed in general.Comment: 17 pages, no figure