Unparticle inspired corrections to the Gravitational Quantum Well

We consider unparticle inspired corrections of the type ${(\frac{R_{G}}{r})}^\beta$ to the Newtonian potential in the context of the gravitational quantum well. The new energy spectrum is computed and bounds on the parameters of these corrections are obtained from the knowledge of the energy eigenvalues of the gravitational quantum well as measured by the GRANIT experiment.Comment: Revtex4 file, 4 pages, 2 figures and 1 table. Version to match the one published at Physical Review

Orion revisited. II. The foreground population to Orion A

Following the recent discovery of a large population of young stars in front of the Orion Nebula, we carried out an observational campaign with the DECam wide-field camera covering ~10~deg^2 centered on NGC 1980 to confirm, probe the extent of, and characterize this foreground population of pre-main-sequence stars. We confirm the presence of a large foreground population towards the Orion A cloud. This population contains several distinct subgroups, including NGC1980 and NGC1981, and stretches across several degrees in front of the Orion A cloud. By comparing the location of their sequence in various color-magnitude diagrams with other clusters, we found a distance and an age of 380pc and 5~10Myr, in good agreement with previous estimates. Our final sample includes 2123 candidate members and is complete from below the hydrogen-burning limit to about 0.3Msun, where the data start to be limited by saturation. Extrapolating the mass function to the high masses, we estimate a total number of ~2600 members in the surveyed region. We confirm the presence of a rich, contiguous, and essentially coeval population of about 2600 foreground stars in front of the Orion A cloud, loosely clustered around NGC1980, NGC1981, and a new group in the foreground of the OMC-2/3. For the area of the cloud surveyed, this result implies that there are more young stars in the foreground population than young stars inside the cloud. Assuming a normal initial mass function, we estimate that between one to a few supernovae must have exploded in the foreground population in the past few million years, close to the surface of Orion A, which might be responsible, together with stellar winds, for the structure and star formation activity in these clouds. This long-overlooked foreground stellar population is of great significance, calling for a revision of the star formation history in this region of the Galaxy.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&

Signals for New Spin-1 Resonances in Electroweak Gauge Boson Pair Production at the LHC

The mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) will be directly scrutinized soon at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We analyze the LHC potential to look for new vector bosons associated with the EWSB sector. We present a possible model independent approach to search for these new spin--1 resonances. We show that the analyses of the processes pp --> l^+ l^- Emiss_T, l^\pm j j Emiss_T, l^\pm l^+ l^- Emiss_T, and l^+ l^- j j (with l=e or \mu and j=jet) have a large reach at the LHC and can lead to the discovery or exclusion of many EWSB scenarios such as Higgsless models.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figure

Amplitude analysis of four-body decays using a massively-parallel fitting framework

The GooFit Framework is designed to perform maximum-likelihood fits for arbitrary functions on various parallel back ends, for example a GPU. We present an extension to GooFit which adds the functionality to perform time-dependent amplitude analyses of pseudoscalar mesons decaying into four pseudoscalar final states. Benchmarks of this functionality show a significant performance increase when utilizing a GPU compared to a CPU. Furthermore, this extension is employed to study the sensitivity on the $D^0 - \bar{D}^0$ mixing parameters $x$ and $y$ in a time-dependent amplitude analysis of the decay $D^0 \rightarrow K^+\pi^-\pi^+\pi^-$. Studying a sample of 50 000 events and setting the central values to the world average of $x = (0.49 \pm0.15) \%$ and $y = (0.61 \pm0.08) \%$, the statistical sensitivities of $x$ and $y$ are determined to be $\sigma(x) = 0.019 \%$ and $\sigma(y) = 0.019 \%$.Comment: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics, CHEP 201

Exact solution for the energy density inside a one-dimensional non-static cavity with an arbitrary initial field state

We study the exact solution for the energy density of a real massless scalar field in a two-dimensional spacetime, inside a non-static cavity with an arbitrary initial field state, taking into account the Neumann and Dirichlet boundary conditions. This work generalizes the exact solution proposed by Cole and Schieve in the context of the Dirichlet boundary condition and vacuum as the initial state. We investigate diagonal states, examining the vacuum and thermal field as particular cases. We also study non-diagonal initial field states, taking as examples the coherent and Schrodinger cat states.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

Error threshold in finite populations

A simple analytical framework to study the molecular quasispecies evolution of finite populations is proposed, in which the population is assumed to be a random combination of the constiyuent molecules in each generation,i.e., linkage disequilibrium at the population level is neglected. In particular, for the single-sharp-peak replication landscape we investigate the dependence of the error threshold on the population size and find that the replication accuracy at threshold increases linearly with the reciprocal of the population size for sufficiently large populations. Furthermore, in the deterministic limit our formulation yields the exact steady-state of the quasispecies model, indicating then the population composition is a random combination of the molecules.Comment: 14 pages and 4 figure

Microbial syngas conversion by mesophilic and thermophilic anaerobic mixed-cultures

Synthesis gas (or syngas) can be produced from the gasification of a variety of recalcitrant or biodegradable wastes. Syngas is a mixture composed of mainly H2, CO and CO2 that can be used in a biological process for the production of fuels or usable chemicals. The main goal of this work was to study the physiology and microbial composition of anaerobic cultures able to utilize syngas. The results indicated that the thermophilic sludge inoculum presents a promising carboxydotrophic potential comparing to the mesophilic sludge inoculum. Monitoring of microbial structure of thermophilic enriched cultures by using PCR-DGGE and cloning techniques showed that bacterial community profiles clustered in three different groups

Biological fermentation of syngas

Este resumo faz parte de: Book of abstracts of the Meeting of the Institute for Biotechnology and Bioengineering, 2, Braga, Portugal, 2010. A versão completa do livro de atas está disponível em: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/1096