Seven-branes and Supersymmetry

We re-investigate the construction of half-supersymmetric 7-brane solutions of IIB supergravity. Our method is based on the requirement of having globally well-defined Killing spinors and the inclusion of SL(2,Z)-invariant source terms. In addition to the well-known solutions going back to Greene, Shapere, Vafa and Yau we find new supersymmetric configurations, containing objects whose monodromies are not related to the monodromy of a D7-brane by an SL(2,Z) transformation.Comment: 31 pages, 3 figure

Super-Hubble de Sitter Fluctuations and the Dynamical RG

Perturbative corrections to correlation functions for interacting theories in de Sitter spacetime often grow secularly with time, due to the properties of fluctuations on super-Hubble scales. This growth can lead to a breakdown of perturbation theory at late times. We argue that Dynamical Renormalization Group (DRG) techniques provide a convenient framework for interpreting and resumming these secularly growing terms. In the case of a massless scalar field in de Sitter with quartic self-interaction, the resummed result is also less singular in the infrared, in precisely the manner expected if a dynamical mass is generated. We compare this improved infrared behavior with large-N expansions when applicable.Comment: 33 pages, 4 figure

Equilibration processes in the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium

The Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM) is thought to contribute about 40-50 % to the baryonic budget at the present evolution stage of the universe. The observed large scale structure is likely to be due to gravitational growth of density fluctuations in the post-inflation era. The evolving cosmic web is governed by non-linear gravitational growth of the initially weak density fluctuations in the dark energy dominated cosmology. Non-linear structure formation, accretion and merging processes, star forming and AGN activity produce gas shocks in the WHIM. Shock waves are converting a fraction of the gravitation power to thermal and non-thermal emission of baryonic/leptonic matter. They provide the most likely way to power the luminous matter in the WHIM. The plasma shocks in the WHIM are expected to be collisionless. Collisionless shocks produce a highly non-equilibrium state with anisotropic temperatures and a large differences in ion and electron temperatures. We discuss the ion and electron heating by the collisionless shocks and then review the plasma processes responsible for the Coulomb equilibration and collisional ionisation equilibrium of oxygen ions in the WHIM. MHD-turbulence produced by the strong collisionless shocks could provide a sizeable non-thermal contribution to the observed Doppler parameter of the UV line spectra of the WHIM.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Space Science Reviews, special issue "Clusters of galaxies: beyond the thermal view", Editor J.S. Kaastra, Chapter 8; work done by an international team at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI), Bern, organised by J.S. Kaastra, A.M. Bykov, S. Schindler & J.A.M. Bleeke

Building a Better Racetrack

We find IIb compactifications on Calabi-Yau orientifolds in which all Kahler moduli are stabilized, along lines suggested by Kachru, Kallosh, Linde and Trivedi.Comment: 47 pages, 1 figure, harvmac (v2: added references, minor comments, v3: improved discussion of metastability and explicit flux vacua

Static quantities of the W boson in the SU_L(3) X U_X(1) model with right-handed neutrinos

The static electromagnetic properties of the $W$ boson, $\Delta \kappa$ and $\Delta Q$, are calculated in the SU_L(3)} \times U_X(1) model with right-handed neutrinos. The new contributions from this model arise from the gauge and scalar sectors. In the gauge sector there is a new contribution from a complex neutral gauge boson $Y^0$ and a singly-charged gauge boson $Y^\pm$. The mass of these gauge bosons, called bileptons, is expected to be in the range of a few hundreds of GeV according to the current bounds from experimental data. If the bilepton masses are of the order of 200 GeV, the size of their contribution is similar to that obtained in other weakly coupled theories. However the contributions to both $\Delta Q$ and $\Delta \kappa$ are negligible for very heavy or degenerate bileptons. As for the scalar sector, an scenario is examined in which the contribution to the $W$ form factors is identical to that of a two-Higgs-doublet model. It is found that this sector would not give large corrections to $\Delta \kappa$ and $\Delta Q$.Comment: New material included. Final version to apppear in Physical Review

Ebola virus disease: an update on post-exposure prophylaxis

The massive outbreak of Ebola virus disease in west Africa between 2013 and 2016 resulted in intense efforts to evaluate the efficacy of several specific countermeasures developed through years of preclinical work, including the first clinical trials for therapeutics and vaccines. In this Review, we discuss how the experience and data generated from that outbreak have helped to advance the understanding of the use of these countermeasures for post-exposure prophylaxis against Ebola virus infection. In future outbreaks, post-exposure prophylaxis could play an important part in reducing community transmission of Ebola virus by providing more immediate protection than does immunisation as well as providing additional protection for health-care workers who are inadvertently exposed over the course of their work. We propose provisional guidance for use of post-exposure prophylaxis in Ebola virus disease and identify the priorities for future preparedness and further research

Brane cosmology in the Horava-Witten heterotic M-Theory on S1/Z2S^{1}/Z_{2}

We study the radion stability and radion mass in the framework of the Horava-Witten (HW) heterotic M-Theory on $S^{1}/Z_{2}$, and find that the radion is stable and its mass can be of the order of GeV. The gravity is localized on the visible brane, and the spectrum of the gravitational Kaluza-Klein (KK) modes is discrete and can have a mass gap of TeV. The corrections to the 4D Newtonian potential from the higher order gravitational KK modes are exponentially suppressed. Applying such a setup to cosmology, we find the generalized Friedmann-like equations on each of the two orbifold branes.Comment: Version published in JCAP, 06 (2009) 01

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results