246 research outputs found
Another Nibble at the Core: Student Learning in a Thematically-focused Introductory Sociology Course
Identifying and assessing core knowledge has been and continues to be a challenge that vexes the discipline of sociology. With the adoption of a thematic approach to courses in the core curriculum at Butler University, faculty teaching Introductory Sociology were presented with the opportunity and challenge of defining the core knowledge and skills to be taught across course sections with a variety of themes. This study of students (N = 280) enrolled in 12 sections of a thematically-focused Introductory Sociology course presents our attempt to both define and assess a core set of concepts and skills through a pretest-posttest questionnaire to measure student learning gains relative to: (1) a sociological perspective, (2) sociological theory, (3) research methods, and (4) key concepts in sociology. Results show significant learning gains on all four dimensions, with the greatest gains coming in sociological theory. There were no significant differences in pretest scores by gender or by whether students had taken a sociology course in high school. Seniors scored significantly higher on both the pretest and the posttest, but after we controlled for pretest scores seniors did significantly better only on the subset of questions related to sociological theory. Students who took a sociology course in high school scored lower on the methods subscale of the posttest and had lower overall total posttest scores than their counterparts
Problems with Time-Varying Extra Dimensions or "Cardassian Expansion" as Alternatives to Dark Energy
It has recently been proposed that the Universe might be accelerating as a
consequence of extra dimensions with time varying size. We show that although
these scenarios can lead to acceleration, they run into serious difficulty when
taking into account limits on the time variation of the four dimensional
Newton's constant. On the other hand, models of ``Cardassian'' expansion based
on extra dimensions which have been constructed so far violate the weak energy
condition for the bulk stress energy, for parameters that give an accelerating
universe.Comment: 8 pages, minor changes. To appear in Physical Review
Modified Gravity on the Brane and Dark Energy
We analyze the dynamics of an AdS5 braneworld with matter fields when gravity
is allowed to deviate from the Einstein form on the brane. We consider exact
5-dimensional warped solutions which are associated with conformal bulk fields
of weight -4 and describe on the brane the following three dynamics: those of
inhomogeneous dust, of generalized dark radiation, and of homogeneous
polytropic dark energy. We show that, with modified gravity on the brane, the
existence of such dynamical geometries requires the presence of non-conformal
matter fields confined to the brane.Comment: Revised version published in Gen. Rel. Grav. Typos corrected, updated
reference and some remarks added for clarity. 11 pages, latex, no figure
Tests of Higgs Boson Couplings at a mu+mu- Collider
We investigate the potential of a muon collider for testing the presence of
anomalous Higgs boson couplings. We consider the case of a light (less than
) Higgs boson and study the effects on the Higgs branching ratios and
total width, which could be induced by the non standard couplings created by a
class of dim=6 gauge invariant operators
satisfying the constraints imposed by the present and future hadronic and
colliders. For each operator we give the minimal value of the
integrated luminosity needed for the muon collider () to
improve these constraints. Depending on the operator and the Higgs mass, this
minimal luminosity lies between and .Comment: 18 pages and 4 figures; version to be published in Phys. Rev.D.
e-mail: [email protected]
N=1 Supergravity Chaotic Inflation in the Braneworld Scenario
We study a N=1 Supergravity chaotic inflationary model, in the context of the
braneworld scenario. It is shown that successful inflation and reheating
consistent with phenomenological constraints can be achieved via the new terms
in the Friedmann equation arising from brane physics. Interestingly, the model
satisfies observational bounds with sub-Planckian field values, implying that
chaotic inflation on the brane is free from the well known difficulties
associated with the presence of higher order non-renormalizable terms in the
superpotential. A bound on the mass scale of the fifth dimension, M_5 \gsim
1.3 \times 10^{-6} M_P, is obtained from the requirement that the reheating
temperature be higher than the temperature of the electroweak phase transition.Comment: 5 pages, 1 Table, Revtex
A Note on Inflation with Tachyon Rolling on the Gauss-Bonnet Brane
In this paper we study the tachyonic inflation in brane world cosmology with
Gauss-Bonnet term in the bulk. We obtain the exact solution of slow roll
equations in case of exponential potential. We attempt to implement the
proposal of Lidsey and Nunes, astro-ph/0303168, for the tachyon condensate
rolling on the Gauss-Bonnet brane and discuss the difficulties associated with
the proposal.Comment: RevTex4, 5 pages, no figures, Minor clarifications added and
references updated, To appear in PR
Tachyonic Inflation in a Warped String Background
We analyze observational constraints on the parameter space of tachyonic
inflation with a Gaussian potential and discuss some predictions of this
scenario. As was shown by Kofman and Linde, it is extremely problematic to
achieve the required range of parameters in conventional string
compactifications. We investigate if the situation can be improved in more
general compactifications with a warped metric and varying dilaton. The
simplest examples are the warped throat geometries that arise in the vicinity
of of a large number of space-filling D-branes. We find that the parameter
range for inflation can be accommodated in the background of D6-branes wrapping
a three-cycle in type IIA. We comment on the requirements that have to be met
in order to realize this scenario in an explicit string compactification.Comment: Latex, JHEP class, 20 pages, 4 figures. v2: references added, small
error in section 7 corrected, published versio
Non-minimally Coupled Tachyonic Inflation in Warped String Background
We show that the non-minimal coupling of tachyon field to the scalar
curvature, as proposed by Piao et al, with the chosen coupling parameter does
not produce the effective potential where the tachyon field can roll down from
T=0 to large along the slope of the potential. We find a correct choice of
the parameters which ensures this requirement and support slow-roll inflation.
However, we find that the cosmological parameter found from the analysis of the
theory are not in the range obtained from observations. We then invoke warped
compactification and varying dilaton field over the compact manifold, as
proposed by Raeymaekers, to show that in such a setup the observed parameter
space can be ensured.Comment: minor typos corrected and references adde
Protecting the primordial baryon asymmetry in the seesaw model compatible with WMAP and KamLAND
We require that the primordial baryon asymmetry is not washed out in the
seesaw model compatible with the recent results of WMAP and the neutrino
oscillation experiments including the first results of KamLAND. We find that
only the case of the normal neutrino mass hierarchy with an approximate
-symmetry satisfies the requirement. We further derive, depending on the
signs of neutrino mass eigenvalues, three types of neutrino mass matrixes,
where the values of each element are rather precisely fixed.Comment: 21pages; added reference
Electromagnetic String Fluid in Rolling Tachyon
We study Born-Infeld type effective action for unstable D3-brane system
including a tachyon and an Abelian gauge field, and find the rolling tachyon
with constant electric and magnetic fields as the most general homogeneous
solution. Tachyonic vacua are characterized by magnitudes of the electric and
magnetic fields and the angle between them. Analysis of small fluctuations in
this background shows that the obtained configuration may be interpreted as a
fluid consisting of string-like objects carrying electric and magnetic fields.
They are stretched along one direction and the rolling tachyon move in a
perpendicular direction to the strings. Direction of the propagating waves
coincides with that of strings with velocity equal to electric field.Comment: LaTeX, 18 pages, 1 figure, minor correction
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