QCD Factorization for the Pion Diffractive Dissociation Into Two Jets

We report a detailed study of the process of pion diffraction dissociation into two jets with large transverse momenta. We find that the standard collinear factorization does not hold in this reaction. The structure of non-factorizable contributions is discussed and the results are compared with the experimental data. Our conclusion is that the existing theoretical uncertainties do not allow, for the time being, for a quantitative extraction of the pion distribution amplitude. (Talk presented at the Workshop on Exclusive Processes at High Momentum Transfer, Jefferson News, VA, May 15-18, 2002)Comment: 6 pages, latex, two figure

Influence of Cooper pairing on the inelastic processes in a gas of Fermi atoms

Correlation properties in ultracold Fermi gas with negative scattering length and its impact on the three-body recombination is analyzed. We find that Cooper pairing enhances the recombination rate in contrast to the decrease of this rate accompanying Bose-Einstein condensation in a Bose gas. This trend is characteristic for all interval of temperatures T<Tc

Strong earthquakes, novae and cosmic ray environment

Observations about the relationship between seismic activity and astronomical phenomena are discussed. First, after investigating the seismic data (magnitude 7.0 and over) with the method of superposed epochs it is found that world seismicity evidently increased after the occurring of novae with apparent magnitude brighter than 2.2. Second, a great many earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 and over occurred in the 13th month after two of the largest ground level solar cosmic ray events (GLEs). The causes of three high level phenomena of global seismic activity in 1918-1965 can be related to these, and it is suggested that according to the information of large GLE or bright nova predictions of the times of global intense seismic activity can be made

Using the information of cosmic rays to predict influence epidemic

A correlation between the incidence of influenza pandemics and increased cosmic ray activity is made. A correlation is also made between the occurrence of these pandemics and the appearance of bright novae, e.g., Nova Eta Car. Four indices based on increased cosmic ray activity and novae are proposed to predict future influenza pandemics and viral antigenic shifts