460 research outputs found
Biochemical mechanisms of the effect of environmental factors (diet, fluorine, alcohol and tobacco) on oral health
Nowadays, oral diseases are prevalent chronic diseases present in worldwide population. Dental caries results
from a complex interaction between acid-producing bacteria, fermentable carbohydrates and host factors,
including teeth and saliva. Risk factors for caries development include physical, biological, environmental,
behavioral factors such as high numbers of cariogenic bacteria, inadequate salivary flow, poor oral hygiene and
poor eating habits. Moreover, due to its efficacy in caries prevention, fluorine has been added to toothpaste,
supplements and water. However, despite of its beneficial effect, excessive intake can lead to acute or chronic
toxic effects, that depend on ingestion period and ingested amount, age, cardiovascular or renal problems and
genetic changes. The most common adverse effects of excessive fluorine intake are dental and skeletal fluorosis.
Another oral health problem is oral cancer, one of the most common cancers in the world and a highly relevant
problem of global public health, mainly affecting lips and oral cavity. It is a preventable disease, where tobacco
and alcohol, considered major risk factors, are present with a synergic effect in 90% of cases. Alcohol can act as a
risk factor both locally and systemically, being causally associated with oropharyngeal and larynx cancer,
esophageal cancer, among others.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Dirac quasinormal modes of the Reissner-Nordstr\"om de Sitter black hole
The quasinormal modes of the Reissner-Nordstr\"om de Sitter black hole for
the massless Dirac fields are studied using the P\"oshl-Teller potential
approximation. We find that the magnitude of the imaginary part of the
quasinormal frequencies decreases as the cosmological constant or the orbital
angular momentum increases, but it increases as the charge or the overtone
number increases. An interesting feature is that the imaginary part is almost
linearly related to the real part as the cosmological constant changes for
fixed charge, and the linearity becomes better as the orbital angular momentum
increases. We also prove exactly that the Dirac quasinormal frequencies are the
same for opposite chirality.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, Phys. Rev. D in pres
Quasinormal modes for massless topological black holes
An exact expression for the quasinormal modes of scalar perturbations on a
massless topological black hole in four and higher dimensions is presented. The
massive scalar field is nonminimally coupled to the curvature, and the horizon
geometry is assumed to have a negative constant curvature.Comment: CECS style, 11 pages, no figures. References adde
Absorption and quasinormal modes of classical fields propagating on 3D and 4D de Sitter spacetime
We extensively study the exact solutions of the massless Dirac equation in 3D
de Sitter spacetime that we published recently. Using the Newman-Penrose
formalism, we find exact solutions of the equations of motion for the massless
classical fields of spin s=1/2,1,2 and to the massive Dirac equation in 4D de
Sitter metric. Employing these solutions, we analyze the absorption by the
cosmological horizon and de Sitter quasinormal modes. We also comment on the
results given by other authors.Comment: 31 page
Nariai, Bertotti-Robinson and anti-Nariai solutions in higher dimensions
We find all the higher dimensional solutions of the Einstein-Maxwell theory
that are the topological product of two manifolds of constant curvature. These
solutions include the higher dimensional Nariai, Bertotti-Robinson and
anti-Nariai solutions, and the anti-de Sitter Bertotti-Robinson solutions with
toroidal and hyperbolic topology (Plebanski-Hacyan solutions). We give explicit
results for any dimension D>3. These solutions are generated from the
appropriate extremal limits of the higher dimensional near-extreme black holes
in a de Sitter, and anti-de Sitter backgrounds. Thus, we also find the mass and
the charge parameters of the higher dimensional extreme black holes as a
function of the radius of the degenerate horizon.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, RevTeX4. References added. Published versio
Angular dependence of the bulk nucleation field Hc2 of aligned MgB2 crystallites
Studies on the new MgB2 superconductor, with a critical temperature Tc ~ 39
K, have evidenced its potential for applications although intense magnetic
relaxation effects limit the critical current density, Jc, at high magnetic
fields. This means that effective pinning centers must be added into the
material microstructure, in order to halt dissipative flux movements.
Concerning the basic microscopic mechanism to explain the superconductivity in
MgB2, several experimental and theoretical works have pointed to the relevance
of a phonon-mediated interaction, in the framework of the BCS theory. Questions
have been raised about the relevant phonon modes, and the gap and Fermi surface
anisotropies, in an effort to interpret spectroscopic and thermal data that
give values between 2.4 and 4.5 for the gap energy ratio. Preliminary results
on the anisotropy of Hc2 have shown a ratio, between the in-plane and
perpendicular directions, around 1.7 for aligned MgB2 crystallites and 1.8 for
epitaxial thin films. Here we show a study on the angular dependence of Hc2
pointing to a Fermi velocity anisotropy around 2.5. This anisotropy certainly
implies the use of texturization techniques to optimize Jc in MgB2 wires and
other polycrystalline components.Comment: 10 pages + 4 Figs.; Revised version accepted in Phys. Rev.
Brane Inflation, Solitons and Cosmological Solutions: I
In this paper we study various cosmological solutions for a D3/D7 system
directly from M-theory with fluxes and M2-branes. In M-theory, these solutions
exist only if we incorporate higher derivative corrections from the curvatures
as well as G-fluxes. We take these corrections into account and study a number
of toy cosmologies, including one with a novel background for the D3/D7 system
whose supergravity solution can be completely determined. This new background
preserves all the good properties of the original model and opens up avenues to
investigate cosmological effects from wrapped branes and brane-antibrane
annihilation, to name a few. We also discuss in some detail semilocal defects
with higher global symmetries, for example exceptional ones, that could occur
in a slightly different regime of our D3/D7 model. We show that the D3/D7
system does have the required ingredients to realise these configurations as
non-topological solitons of the theory. These constructions also allow us to
give a physical meaning to the existence of certain underlying homogeneous
quaternionic Kahler manifolds.Comment: Harvmac, 115 pages, 9 .eps figures; v2: typos corrected, references
added and the last section expanded; v3: Few minor typos corrected and
references added. Final version to appear in JHE
Thermodynamic and gravitational instability on hyperbolic spaces
We study the properties of anti--de Sitter black holes with a Gauss-Bonnet
term for various horizon topologies (k=0, \pm 1) and for various dimensions,
with emphasis on the less well understood k=-1 solution. We find that the zero
temperature (and zero energy density) extremal states are the local minima of
the energy for AdS black holes with hyperbolic event horizons. The hyperbolic
AdS black hole may be stable thermodynamically if the background is defined by
an extremal solution and the extremal entropy is non-negative. We also
investigate the gravitational stability of AdS spacetimes of dimensions D>4
against linear perturbations and find that the extremal states are still the
local minima of the energy. For a spherically symmetric AdS black hole
solution, the gravitational potential is positive and bounded, with or without
the Gauss-Bonnet type corrections, while, when k=-1, a small Gauss-Bonnet
coupling, namely, \alpha << {l}^2 (where l is the curvature radius of AdS
space), is found useful to keep the potential bounded from below, as required
for stability of the extremal background.Comment: Shortened to match published (PRD) version, 18 pages, several eps
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