312 research outputs found
Probing the Planck Scale with Neutrino Oscillations
Quantum gravity "foam", among its various generic Lorentz non-invariant
effects, would cause neutrino mixing. It is shown here that, if the foam is
manifested as a nonrenormalizable effect at scale M, the oscillation length
generically decreases with energy as (E/M)^(-2). Neutrino observatories and
long-baseline experiments should have therefore already observed foam-induced
oscillations, even if M is as high as the Planck energy scale. The null
results, which can be further strengthened by better analysis of current data
and future experiments, can be taken as experimental evidence that Lorentz
invariance is fully preserved at the Planck scale, as is the case in critical
string theory.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures. Final version published in PRD. 1 figure,
references, clarifications and explanations added. Results unchange
Cosmological Constant, Gauge Hierarchy and Warped Geometry
It is suggested that the mechanism responsible for the resolution of the
gauge hierarchy problem within the warped geometry framework can be generalized
to provide a new explanation of the extremely tiny vacuum energy density rho_V
suggested by recent observations. We illustrate the mechanism with some 5D
examples in which the true vacuum energy is assumed to vanish, and rho_V is
associated with a false vacuum energy such that rho_V^{1/4} ~ TeV^2/M_{Pl} ~
10^{-3} eV, where M_{Pl} denotes the reduced Planck mass. We also consider a
quintessence-like solution to the dark energy problem.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX, 2 figures, section on quantum corrections added,
version to appear in Phys. Rev.
Numerical evidence for `multi-scalar stars'
We present a class of general relativistic soliton-like solutions composed of
multiple minimally coupled, massive, real scalar fields which interact only
through the gravitational field. We describe a two-parameter family of
solutions we call ``phase-shifted boson stars'' (parameterized by central
density rho_0 and phase delta), which are obtained by solving the ordinary
differential equations associated with boson stars and then altering the phase
between the real and imaginary parts of the field. These solutions are similar
to boson stars as well as the oscillating soliton stars found by Seidel and
Suen [E. Seidel and W.M. Suen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 66, 1659 (1991)]; in
particular, long-time numerical evolutions suggest that phase-shifted boson
stars are stable. Our results indicate that scalar soliton-like solutions are
perhaps more generic than has been previously thought.Comment: Revtex. 4 pages with 4 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev.
Threshold Pion Electroproduction in Chiral Perturbation Theory
Electroproduction of pions on the nucleon near the threshold is analyzed
within the framework of baryon chiral perturbation theory. We give a thorough
discussion of the low--energy theorems related to charged and neutral
electropionproduction. It is shown how the axial radius of the nucleon can be
related to the S--wave multipoles and . The chiral
perturbation theory calculations of the reaction
are found to be in good agreement with the recent near threshold data. We also
discuss the influence of some isospin--breaking effects in this channel. For
future experimental tests of the underlying chiral dynamics, extensive
predictions of differential cross sections and multipole amplitudes are
presented.Comment: 44pp, TeX, 15 figures available upon request, BUTP-93/23 and CRN
93-4
On the Initial Conditions for Brane Inflation
String theory gives rise to various mechanisms to generate primordial
inflation, of which ``brane inflation'' is one of the most widely considered.
In this scenario, inflation takes place while two branes are approaching each
other, and the modulus field representing the separation between the branes
plays the role of the inflaton field. We study the phase space of initial
conditions which can lead to a sufficiently long period of cosmological
inflation, and find that taking into account the possibility of nonvanishing
initial momentum can significantly change the degree of fine tuning of the
required initial conditions.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure
Interplay of quantum magnetic and potential scattering around Zn or Ni impurity ions in superconducting cuprates
To describe the scattering of superconducting quasiparticles from
non-magnetic (Zn) or magnetic (Ni) impurities in optimally doped high T
cuprates, we propose an effective Anderson model Hamiltonian of a localized
electron hybridizing with -wave BCS type superconducting
quasiparticles with an attractive scalar potential at the impurity site. Due to
the strong local antiferromagnetic couplings between the original Cu ions and
their nearest neighbors, the localized electron in the Ni-doped materials is
assumed to be on the impurity sites, while in the Zn-doped materials the
localized electron is distributed over the four nearest neighbor sites of the
impurities with a dominant symmetric form of the wave function.
With Ni impurities, two resonant states are formed above the Fermi level in the
local density of states at the impurity site, while for Zn impurities a sharp
resonant peak below the Fermi level dominates in the local density of states at
the Zn site, accompanied by a small and broad resonant state above the Fermi
level mainly induced by the potential scattering. In both cases, there are no
Kondo screening effects. The local density of states and their spatial
distribution at the dominant resonant energy around the substituted impurities
are calculated for both cases, and they are in good agreement with the
experimental results of scanning tunneling microscopy in
BiSrCaCuO with Zn or Ni impurities, respectively.Comment: 24 pages, Revtex, 8 figures, submitted to Physical Review B for
publication. Sub-ject Class: Superconductivity; Strongly Correlated Electron
Impurity state in the vortex core of d-wave superconductors: Anderson impurity model versus unitary impurity model
Using an extended Anderson/Kondo impurity model to describe the magnetic
moments around an impurity doped in high- d-wave cuprates and in
the framework of the slave-boson meanfield approach, we study numerically the
impurity state in the vortex core by exact diagonalization of the
well-established Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations. The low-energy impurity state
is found to be good agreement with scanning tunnelingmicroscopy observation.
After pinning a vortex on the impurity site, we compare the unitary impurity
model with the extended Anderson impurity model by examining the effect of the
magnetic field on the impurity state. We find that the impurity resonance in
the unitary impurity model is strongly suppressed by the vortex; while it is
insensitive to the field in the extended Anderson impurity model.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure
Harmonisation of short-term in vitro culture for the expansion of antigen-specific CD8(+) T cells with detection by ELISPOT and HLA-multimer staining.
Ex vivo ELISPOT and multimer staining are well-established tests for the assessment of antigen-specific T cells. Many laboratories are now using a period of in vitro stimulation (IVS) to enhance detection. Here, we report the findings of a multi-centre panel organised by the Association for Cancer Immunotherapy Immunoguiding Program to investigate the impact of IVS protocols on the detection of antigen-specific T cells of varying ex vivo frequency. Five centres performed ELISPOT and multimer staining on centrally prepared PBMCs from 3 donors, both ex vivo and following IVS. A harmonised IVS protocol was designed based on the best-performing protocol(s), which was then evaluated in a second phase on 2 donors by 6 centres. All centres were able to reliably detect antigen-specific T cells of high/intermediate frequency both ex vivo (Phase I) and post-IVS (Phase I and II). The highest frequencies of antigen-specific T cells ex vivo were mirrored in the frequencies following IVS and in the detection rates. However, antigen-specific T cells of a low/undetectable frequency ex vivo were not reproducibly detected post-IVS. Harmonisation of the IVS protocol reduced the inter-laboratory variation observed for ELISPOT and multimer analyses by approximately 20 %. We further demonstrate that results from ELISPOT and multimer staining correlated after (P < 0.0001 and R (2) = 0.5113), but not before IVS. In summary, IVS was shown to be a reproducible method that benefitted from method harmonisation
Expansion for Excited Baryons
We derive consistency conditions which constrain the possible form of the
strong couplings of the excited baryons to the pions. The consistency
conditions follow from requiring the pion-excited baryon scattering amplitudes
to satisfy the large-N_c Witten counting rules and are analogous to consistency
conditions used by Dashen, Jenkins and Manohar and others for s-wave baryons.
The consistency conditions are explicitly solved, giving the most general
allowed form of the strong vertices for excited baryons in the large-N_c limit.
We show that the solutions to the large-N_c consistency conditions coincide
with the predictions of the nonrelativistic quark model for these states,
extending the results previously obtained for the s-wave baryons. The 1/N_c
corrections to these predictions are studied in the quark model with arbitrary
number of colors N_c.Comment: 56 pages, REVTeX; one new Appendix added containing a discussion of
the results in the language of quark operator
Critical properties of the Fermi-Bose Kondo and pseudogap Kondo models: Renormalized perturbation theory
Magnetic impurities coupled to both fermionic and bosonic baths or to a
fermionic bath with pseudogap density of states, described by the Fermi-Bose
Kondo and pseudogap Kondo models, display non-trivial intermediate coupling
fixed points associated with critical local-moment fluctuations and local
non-Fermi liquid behavior. Based on renormalization group together with a
renormalized perturbation expansion around the free-impurity limit, we
calculate various impurity properties in the vicinity of those
intermediate-coupling fixed points. In particular, we compute the conduction
electron T matrix, the impurity susceptibility, and the residual impurity
entropy, and relate our findings to certain scenarios of local quantum
criticality in strongly correlated lattice models.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figs; (v2) large-N results for entropy of Bose-Kondo
model added; (v3) final version as publishe
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