A cross-cultural study of cereal foods' quality perception

Cereal foods' production and use show substantial heterogeneity across Europe. For a category central in most EU diets, cereal foods' quality perception is, nevertheless, surprisingly understudied. With this in mind, 357 Danish, Lithuanian and Portuguese citizens were inquired about the importance of several cues and dimensions in their evaluation of the perceived quality of bread, cookies, breakfast cereals, pasta and vodka. Portuguese and Lithuanians consistently gave a significantly higher average importance to all the cues and quality dimensions considered, for all products, than their Danish counterparts. Nevertheless, respondents in all three samples found expected quality dimensions to be much more important than both extrinsic and intrinsic cues across almost all product categories. Dimensions and cues like taste and country - of- origin were the most relevant to Lithuanians, while taste , label information and price were the most important for Danes. The cues and dimensions Portuguese found relevant were fairly different and more category- dependent. Cues like store type for bread, brand for breakfast cereals, pasta and vodka, country - of- origin for vodka , and price for cookies, pasta and vodka were more often assessed by the Portuguese as relevant for decision- making at the point - of- purchase. This highlights the need for further cross - cultural research on food quality perception.Cereal Foods, Consumer Quality Perception, Total Food Quality Model, Cross - cultural Study, Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Proton Stability In Supersymmetric SU(5)

Within supersymmetric SU(5) GUT we suggest mechanisms for suppression of baryon number violating dimension five and six operators. The mechanism is based on the idea of split multiplets (i.e. quarks and leptons are not coming from a single GUT state) which is realized by an extension with additional vector-like matter. The construction naturally avoids wrong asymptotic relation $\hat{M}_D=\hat{M}_E$. Thus, the long standing problems of the minimal SUSY SU(5) GUT can be resolved. In a particular example of flavor structure and with additional {\cal U}(1)\tm {\cal Z}_{3N} symmetry we demonstrate how the split multiplet mechanism works out. Namely, the considered model is compatible with successful gauge coupling unification and realistic fermion mass pattern. The nucleon decay rates are relatively suppressed and can be well compatible with current experimental bounds.Comment: Discussions and some clarifications adde

Transport properties of a two impurity system: a theoretical approach

A system of two interacting cobalt atoms, at varying distances, was studied in a recent scanning tunneling microscope experiment by Bork et. al.[Nature Phys. 7, 901 (2011)]. We propose a microscopic model that explains, for all experimentally analyzed interatomic distances, the physics observed in these experiments. Our proposal is based on the two-impurity Anderson model, with the inclusion of a two-path geometry for charge transport. This many-body system is treated in the finite-U slave boson mean-field approximation and the logarithmic-discretization embedded-cluster approximation. We physically characterize the different charge transport regimes of this system at various interatomic distances and show that, as in the experiments, the features observed in the transport properties depend on the presence of two impurities but also on the existence of two conducting channels for electron transport. We interpret the splitting observed in the conductance as the result of the hybridization of the two Kondo resonances associated with each impurity.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Does Geometric Coupling Generates Resonances?

Geometrical coupling in a co-dimensional one Randall-Sundrum scenario (RS) is used to study resonances of $p-$form fields. The resonances are calculated using the transfer matrix method. The model studied consider the standard RS with delta-like branes, and branes generated by kinks and domain-wall as well. The parameters are changed to control the thickness of the smooth brane. With this a very interesting pattern is found for the resonances. The geometrical coupling does not generate resonances for the reduced $p-$form in all cases considered.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure

Radiative decay Z_H-> \gamma A_H in the little Higgs model with T-parity

In the little Higgs model with T-parity (LHTM), the only tree-level kinematically allowed two-body decay of the Z_H boson is Z_H-> A_H H and thus one-loop induced two-body decays may have a significant rate. We study the Z_H-> \gamma A_H decay, which is induced at the one-loop level by a fermion triangle and is interesting as it depends on the mechanism of anomaly cancellation of the model. All the relevant two- and three-body decays of the Z_H gauge boson arising at the tree-level are also calculated. We consider a small region of the parameter space where the scale of the symmetry breaking f is still allowed to be as low as 500 GeV by electroweak precision data. We first analyze the scenario of a Higgs boson with a mass of 120 GeV. We found that the Z_H->\gamma A_H branching ratio can be of the order of a tree-level three-body decay and may be at the reach of detection at the LHC for f close to 500 GeV, but it may be difficult to detect for f=1 TeV. There is also an scenario where the Higgs boson has an intermediate mass such that the Z_H-> A_H H decay is closed, the Z_H-> \gamma A_H gets considerably enhanced and the chances of detection get a large boost.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, 2 table