4,894 research outputs found
Pricing of drugs and donations: options for sustainable equity pricing.
Effective medicines exist to treat or alleviate many diseases which predominate in the developing world and cause high mortality and morbidity rates. Price should not be an obstacle preventing access to these medicines. Increasingly, drug donations have been established by drug companies, but these are often limited in time, place or use. Measures exist which are more sustainable and will have a greater positive impact on people's health. Principally, these are encouraging generic competition; adopting into national legislation and implementing TRIPS safeguards to gain access to cheaper sources of drugs; differential pricing; creating high volume or high demand through global and regional procurement; and supporting the production of quality generic drugs by developing countries through voluntary licenses if needed, and facilitating technology transfer
Instrumentation status of the low-b magnet systems at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
The low-beta magnet systems are located in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
insertion regions around the four interaction points. They are the key elements
in the beams focusing/defocusing process allowing proton collisions at
luminosity up to 10**34/cm**2s. Those systems are a contribution of the US-LHC
Accelerator project. The systems are mainly composed of the quadrupole magnets
(triplets), the separation dipoles and their respective electrical feed-boxes
(DFBX). The low-beta magnet systems operate in an environment of extreme
radiation, high gradient magnetic field and high heat load to the cryogenic
system due to the beam dynamic effect. Due to the severe environment, the
robustness of the diagnostics is primordial for the operation of the triplets.
The hardware commissioning phase of the LHC was completed in February 2010. In
the sake of a safer and more user-friendly operation, several consolidations
and instrumentation modifications were implemented during this commissioning
phase. This paper presents the instrumentation used to optimize the engineering
process and operation of the final focusing/defocusing quadrupole magnets for
the first years of operation.Comment: 6 pp. ICEC 23 - ICMC 2010 International Cryogenic Engineering
Conference 23 - International Cryogenic Materials Conference 2010. 19-23 Jul
2010. Wroclaw, Polan
QLC relation and neutrino mass hierarchy
Latest measurements have revealed that the deviation from a maximal solar
mixing angle is approximately the Cabibbo angle, i.e. QLC relation. We argue
that it is not plausible that this deviation from maximality, be it a
coincidence or not, comes from the charged lepton mixing. Consequently we have
calculated the required corrections to the exactly bimaximal neutrino mass
matrix ansatz necessary to account for the solar mass difference and the solar
mixing angle. We point out that the relative size of these two corrections
depends strongly on the hierarchy case under consideration. We find that the
inverted hierarchy case with opposite CP parities, which is known to guarantee
the RGE stability of the solar mixing angle, offers the most plausible scenario
for a high energy origin of a QLC-corrected bimaximal neutrino mass matrix.
This possibility may allow us to explain the QLC relation in connection with
the origin of the charged fermion mass matrices.Comment: 7 pages, 0 figure
Optimization Of Bio-inspired Hair Sensor Arrays
Crickets use a pair of hairy appendages on their abdomen called cerci, each of which contains numerous mechano-receptive filiform hairs. These sensitive hairs can respond even to the slightest air movements, down to 0.03 mm/s, generated by the approaching predators and initiating an escape mechanism in the crickets. Bio-mimicking the cricket cerci, arrays of artificial hair sensors have been successfully fabricated using advanced MEMS techniques. Despite its appreciable performance, the actual cricket filiform hairs outperform artificial hair sensors by several orders in sensitivity. Nevertheless, more careful look at the anatomy and physiology of the cricket cerci provides new directions to be explored with MEMS technologies to realize higher sensitivities on a par with crickets’. This paper aims to provide an overview of comparisons between the actual and artificial hair sensors in terms of sensitivity, structural functionalities and robustness and draws out constructive insights to optimize sensor performance
Stability of Neutrino Mass Degeneracy
Two neutrinos of Majorana masses with mixing angle are
unstable against radiative corrections in the limit , but are stable
for (i.e. opposite CP eigenstates) with which
corresponds to an additional symmetry.Comment: 7 pages, no figure, one reference adde
Second order analysis for bang-bang control problems of PDEs
In this paper, we derive some sufficient second order optimality conditions for control problems of partial differential equations (PDEs) when the cost functional does not involve the usual quadratic term for the control or higher nonlinearities for it. Though not always, in this situation the optimal control is typically bang-bang. Two different control problems are studied. The second differs from the first in the presence of the L1 norm of the control. This term leads to optimal controls that are sparse and usually take only three different values (we call them bang-bang-bang controls). Though the proofs are detailed in the case of a semilinear elliptic state equation, the approach can be extended to parabolic control problems. Some hints are provided in the last section to extend the results.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under project MTM2011-2271
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