895 research outputs found
Editorial: COVID-19 pandemic:A curve ball for athletes
More than 30 months since the discovery of the novel respiratory coronavirus in
2019, COVID-19 related public health orders and restrictions remain active in many
countries on the globe in late 2022. These measures, such as city lockdown, border
closure, travel restrictions, social distancing practice, and mandatory use of facemasks,
affect all segments of the population. During the pandemic, we have witnessed the
most significant disruption to the worldwide sports calendar since the World War
II. From a global perspective, many international sports events, such as The Olympic
Games Tokyo 2020, SummerWorld University Games, and theWorld Games have been
postponed; and more than 150 international sports events involving both professional
and recreational sportsmen have been canceled. In this series, we cover original articles
examining the effect of COVID-19 on the training routine and performance in five types
of athletes, including distance runners (Chan et al.), soccer/football players (Wagemans
et al.; Keemss et al.), bodybuilders (Imboden et al.; Iff et al.), volleyball players (Morath
et al.), and paralympic athletes (Busch et al.). We are aware that this field of research is
highly dynamic with new data available almost on a daily base. Hence, we aim to bemore
inclusive in this Research Topic and involve a wider scope of research questions and
different methodological approaches, which allow us a better coverage of this emerging
and evolving Research Topic.
These findings provide important information for athletes, coaches, physical trainers,
and healthcare team members to identify potential health issues that may be related to
the pandemic, plan specifically how we can minimize the negative influence, as well as
design contingency training plan for postponed tournaments.
Although COVID-19 attacks our respiratory system and potentially causes a decline
in physical condition, we observed adverse findings from the studies in this Research
Topic in terms of physical training. Iff et al. and Keemss et al. reported a pandemic
related negative impact on the physical performance in body builders and youth soccer players, respectively. In contrast, Chan et al. and Wagemans
et al. did not find any substantial differences in terms of physical
function or training intensity in professional soccer players
and recreational distance runners. Interestingly, it seems that
COVID-19 and its related public health restrictions result in a
greater influence on peopleâs mental than physical health. For
example, Imboden et al., Busch et al., and Iff et al. reported
that athletes exhibited poorer mood during the pandemic and
this psychological impact may indeed lead to a change in
living habits, such as increase alcoholic and cannabis intake.
From a global perspective, this Research Topic also includes an
investigation of COVID transmission within volleyball games.
Morath et al. conducted contact tracing in a professional
volleyball teamin Germany. They found that players who strictly
adhere to the recommended hygiene guidelines and regulations
during both training and matches are of lower risk contracting
the virus, but coaches and players are advised to avoid nonessential
interpersonal contacts outside the training hours to
prevent the spread of infection.
Although the guest editors would love to see more
views, downloads, and citations of papers included in
this series, we sincerely hope that athletes, coaches, and
concerning healthcare professionals do not require the
information presented in this Research Topic due to another
wave of pandemic and disruption. May COVID-19 will be soon behind us and becomes a historical terminology in
near future
Amplitudes and Spinor-Helicity in Six Dimensions
The spinor-helicity formalism has become an invaluable tool for understanding
the S-matrix of massless particles in four dimensions. In this paper we
construct a spinor-helicity formalism in six dimensions, and apply it to derive
compact expressions for the three, four and five point tree amplitudes of
Yang-Mills theory. Using the KLT relations, it is a straightforward process to
obtain amplitudes in linearized gravity from these Yang-Mills amplitudes; we
demonstrate this by writing down the gravitational three and four point
amplitudes. Because there is no conserved helicity in six dimensions, these
amplitudes describe the scattering of all possible polarization states (as well
as Kaluza-Klein excitations) in four dimensions upon dimensional reduction. We
also briefly discuss a convenient formulation of the BCFW recursion relations
in higher dimensions.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figures. Minor improvements of the discussio
Bronchiolitis Obliterans Organising Pneumonia (BOOP) in a lung cancer patient after lobectomy
A 79 year-old patient with lung cancer underwent a standard thoracotomy and lobectomy. Postoperatively, he developed low-grade fever and dyspnoea. Chest X-rays showed progressive lung infiltrates, which was subsequently diagnosed to be Bronchiolitis Obliterans Organizing Pneumonia (BOOP) by transbronchial lung biopsy. He responded well to corticosteroid therapy. The case report is followed by a brief discussion on BOOP in association with lung cancer and thoracotomy
Coupled Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov kinetic equations for a trapped Bose gas
Using the Kadanoff-Baym non-equilibrium Green's function formalism, we derive
the self-consistent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) collisionless kinetic
equations and the associated equation of motion for the condensate wavefunction
for a trapped Bose-condensed gas. Our work generalizes earlier work by Kane and
Kadanoff (KK) for a uniform Bose gas. We include the off-diagonal (anomalous)
pair correlations, and thus we have to introduce an off-diagonal distribution
function in addition to the normal (diagonal) distribution function. This
results in two coupled kinetic equations. If the off-diagonal distribution
function can be neglected as a higher-order contribution, we obtain the
semi-classical kinetic equation recently used by Zaremba, Griffin and Nikuni
(based on the simpler Popov approximation). We discuss the static local
equilibrium solution of our coupled HFB kinetic equations within the
semi-classical approximation. We also verify that a solution is the rigid
in-phase oscillation of the equilibrium condensate and non-condensate density
profiles, oscillating with the trap frequency.Comment: 25 page
Conserving and Gapless Approximations for an Inhomogeneous Bose Gas at Finite Temperatures
We derive and discuss the equations of motion for the condensate and its
fluctuations for a dilute, weakly interacting Bose gas in an external potential
within the self--consistent Hartree--Fock--Bogoliubov (HFB) approximation.
Account is taken of the depletion of the condensate and the anomalous Bose
correlations, which are important at finite temperatures. We give a critical
analysis of the self-consistent HFB approximation in terms of the
Hohenberg--Martin classification of approximations (conserving vs gapless) and
point out that the Popov approximation to the full HFB gives a gapless
single-particle spectrum at all temperatures. The Beliaev second-order
approximation is discussed as the spectrum generated by functional
differentiation of the HFB single--particle Green's function. We emphasize that
the problem of determining the excitation spectrum of a Bose-condensed gas
(homogeneous or inhomogeneous) is difficult because of the need to satisfy
several different constraints.Comment: plain tex, 19 page
Black Hole Chromosphere at the LHC
If the scale of quantum gravity is near a TeV, black holes will be copiously
produced at the LHC. In this work we study the main properties of the light
descendants of these black holes. We show that the emitted partons are closely
spaced outside the horizon, and hence they do not fragment into hadrons in
vacuum but more likely into a kind of quark-gluon plasma. Consequently, the
thermal emission occurs far from the horizon, at a temperature characteristic
of the QCD scale. We analyze the energy spectrum of the particles emerging from
the "chromosphere", and find that the hard hadronic jets are almost entirely
suppressed. They are replaced by an isotropic distribution of soft photons and
hadrons, with hundreds of particles in the GeV range. This provides a new
distinctive signature for black hole events at LHC.Comment: Incorporates changes made for the version to be published in Phys.
Rev. D. Additional details provided on the effect of the chromosphere in
cosmic ray shower
Impact of CP phases on neutrinoless double beta decay
We highlight in a model independent way the dependence of the effective
Majorana mass parameter, relevant for neutrinoless double beta decay, on the CP
phases of the PMNS matrix, using the most recent neutrino data including the
cosmological WMAP measurement. We perform our analysis with three active
neutrino flavours in the context of three kinds of mass spectra:
quasi-degenerate, normal hierarchical and inverted hierarchical. If a
neutrinoless double beta decay experiment records a positive signal, then
assuming that Majorana masses of light neutrinos are responsible for it, we
show how it might be possible to discriminate between the three kinds of
spectra.Comment: 10 pages, latex, 9 eps figs, version to appear in Phys Rev
Weak Field Black Hole Formation in Asymptotically AdS Spacetimes
We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to study the thermalization of a strongly
coupled conformal field theory that is forced out of its vacuum by a source
that couples to a marginal operator. The source is taken to be of small
amplitude and finite duration, but is otherwise an arbitrary function of time.
When the field theory lives on , the source sets up a
translationally invariant wave in the dual gravitational description. This wave
propagates radially inwards in space and collapses to form a black
brane. Outside its horizon the bulk spacetime for this collapse process may
systematically be constructed in an expansion in the amplitude of the source
function, and takes the Vaidya form at leading order in the source amplitude.
This solution is dual to a remarkably rapid and intriguingly scale dependent
thermalization process in the field theory. When the field theory lives on a
sphere the resultant wave either slowly scatters into a thermal gas (dual to a
glueball type phase in the boundary theory) or rapidly collapses into a black
hole (dual to a plasma type phase in the field theory) depending on the time
scale and amplitude of the source function. The transition between these two
behaviors is sharp and can be tuned to the Choptuik scaling solution in
.Comment: 50 pages + appendices, 6 figures, v2: Minor revisions, references
adde
Testing the Nature of Kaluza-Klein Excitations at Future Lepton Colliders
With one extra dimension, current high precision electroweak data constrain
the masses of the first Kaluza-Klein excitations of the Standard Model gauge
fields to lie above TeV. States with masses not much larger than
this should be observable at the LHC. However, even for first excitation masses
close to this lower bound, the second set of excitations will be too heavy to
be produced thus eliminating the possibility of realizing the cleanest
signature for KK scenarios. Previous studies of heavy and production
in this mass range at the LHC have demonstrated that very little information
can be obtained about their couplings to the conventional fermions given the
limited available statistics and imply that the LHC cannot distinguish an
ordinary from the degenerate pair of the first KK excitations of the
and . In this paper we discuss the capability of lepton colliders
with center of mass energies significantly below the excitation mass to resolve
this ambiguity. In addition, we examine how direct measurements obtained on and
near the top of the first excitation peak at lepton colliders can confirm these
results. For more than one extra dimension we demonstrate that it is likely
that the first KK excitation is too massive to be produced at the LHC.Comment: 38 pages, 10 Figs, LaTex, comments adde
Neutrino masses from beta decays after KamLAND and WMAP (Updated including the NC enhanced SNO data)
The first data released by the KamLAND collaboration have confirmed the
strong evidence in favour of the LMA solution of the solar neutrino problem.
Taking into account the ranges for the oscillation parameters allowed by the
global analysis of the solar, CHOOZ and KamLAND data, we update the limits on
the neutrinoless double beta decay effective neutrino mass parameter and
analyze the impact of all the available data from neutrinoless double beta
decay experiments on the neutrino mass bounds, in view of the latest WMAP
results. For the normal neutrino mass spectrum the range (0.05-0.23) eV is
obtained for the lightest neutrino mass if one takes into account the
Heidelberg-Moscow evidence for neutrinoless double beta decay and the
cosmological bound. It is also shown that under the same conditions the mass of
the lightest neutrino may not be bounded from below if the spectrum is of the
inverted type. Finnaly, we discuss how future experiments can improve the
present bounds on the lightest neutrino mass set by the Troitsk, Mainz and WMAP
results. In the addendum we update the allowed ranges for the effective
Majorana neutrino mass parameter in view of the latest NC enhanced SNO data.Comment: Updated including the recent NC enhanced SNO data. Refferences added
and typos correcte
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