Irradiation of benzene molecules by ion-induced and light-induced intense fields

Benzene, with its sea of delocalized $\pi$-electrons in the valence orbitals, is identified as an example of a class of molecules that enable establishment of the correspondence between intense ion-induced and laser-light-induced fields in experiments that probe ionization dynamics in temporal regimes spanning the attosecond and picosecond ranges.Comment: 4 ps figure

The propensity of molecules to spatially align in intense light fields

The propensity of molecules to spatially align along the polarization vector of intense, pulsed light fields is related to readily-accessible parameters (molecular polarizabilities, moment of inertia, peak intensity of the light and its pulse duration). Predictions can now be made of which molecules can be spatially aligned, and under what circumstances, upon irradiation by intense light. Accounting for both enhanced ionization and hyperpolarizability, it is shown that {\it all} molecules can be aligned, even those with the smallest static polarizability, when subjected to the shortest available laser pulses (of sufficient intensity).Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, to be submitted to PR

Characterization of Schistosome Tegumental Alkaline Phosphatase (SmAP)

Schistosomes are parasitic platyhelminths that currently infect over 200 million people globally. The parasites can live for years in a putatively hostile environment - the blood of vertebrates. We have hypothesized that the unusual schistosome tegument (outer-covering) plays a role in protecting parasites in the blood; by impeding host immunological signaling pathways we suggest that tegumental molecules help create an immunologically privileged environment for schistosomes. In this work, we clone and characterize a schistosome alkaline phosphatase (SmAP), a predicted ∼60 kDa glycoprotein that has high sequence conservation with members of the alkaline phosphatase protein family. The SmAP gene is most highly expressed in intravascular parasite life stages. Using immunofluorescence and immuno-electron microscopy, we confirm that SmAP is expressed at the host/parasite interface and in internal tissues. The ability of living parasites to cleave exogenous adenosine monophosphate (AMP) and generate adenosine is very largely abolished when SmAP gene expression is suppressed following RNAi treatment targeting the gene. These results lend support to the hypothesis that schistosome surface enzymes such as SmAP could dampen host immune responses against the parasites by generating immunosuppressants such as adenosine to promote their survival. This notion does not rule out other potential functions for the adenosine generated e.g. in parasite nutrition

Study of the decays B->D_s1(2536)+ anti-D(*)

We report a study of the decays B -> D_s1(2536)+ anti-D(*), where anti-D(*) is anti-D0, D- or D*-, using a sample of 657 x 10^6 B anti-B pairs collected at the Upsilon(4S) resonance with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric-energy e+e- collider. The branching fractions of the decays B+ -> D_s1(2536)+ anti-D0, B0 -> D_s1(2536)+ D- and B0 -> D_s1(2536)+ D*- multiplied by that of D_s1(2536)+ -> (D*0K+ + D*+K0) are found to be (3.97+-0.85+-0.56) x 10^-4, (2.75+-0.62+-0.36) x 10^-4 and (5.01+-1.21+-0.70) x 10^-4, respectively.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figues, submitted to PRD (RC

Cross-talk between high light stress and plant defence to the two-spotted spider mite in Arabidopsis thaliana

Little is known about how plants deal with arthropod herbivores under the fluctuating light intensity and spectra which occur in natural environments. Moreover, the role of simultaneous stress such as excess light (EL) in the regulation of plant responses to herbivores is poorly characterized. In the current study, we focused on a mite-herbivore, specifically, the two-spotted spider mite (TSSM), which is one of the major agricultural pests worldwide. Our results showed that TSSM-induced leaf damage (visualized by trypan blue staining) and oviposition rate (measured as daily female fecundity) decreased after EL pre-treatment in wild-type Arabidopsis plants, but the observed responses were not wavelength specific. Thus, we established that EL pre-treatment reduced Arabidopsis susceptibility to TSSM infestation. Due to the fact that a portion of EL energy is dissipated by plants as heat in the mechanism known as non-photochemical quenching (NPQ) of chlorophyll fluorescence, we tested an Arabidopsis npq4-1 mutant impaired in NPQ. We showed that npq4-1 plants are significantly less susceptible to TSSM feeding activity, and this result was not dependent on light pre-treatment. Therefore, our findings strongly support the role of light in plant defence against TSSM, pointing to a key role for a photo-protective mechanism such as NPQ in this regulation. We hypothesize that plants impaired in NPQ are constantly primed to mite attack, as this seems to be a universal evolutionarily conserved mechanism for herbivores

Search for new physics with same-sign isolated dilepton events with jets and missing transverse energy

A search for new physics is performed in events with two same-sign isolated leptons, hadronic jets, and missing transverse energy in the final state. The analysis is based on a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.98 inverse femtobarns produced in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. This constitutes a factor of 140 increase in integrated luminosity over previously published results. The observed yields agree with the standard model predictions and thus no evidence for new physics is found. The observations are used to set upper limits on possible new physics contributions and to constrain supersymmetric models. To facilitate the interpretation of the data in a broader range of new physics scenarios, information on the event selection, detector response, and efficiencies is provided.Comment: Published in Physical Review Letter

Compressed representation of a partially defined integer function over multiple arguments

In OLAP (OnLine Analitical Processing) data are analysed in an n-dimensional cube. The cube may be represented as a partially defined function over n arguments. Considering that often the function is not defined everywhere, we ask: is there a known way of representing the function or the points in which it is defined, in a more compact manner than the trivial one

Belle II Technical Design Report

The Belle detector at the KEKB electron-positron collider has collected almost 1 billion Y(4S) events in its decade of operation. Super-KEKB, an upgrade of KEKB is under construction, to increase the luminosity by two orders of magnitude during a three-year shutdown, with an ultimate goal of 8E35 /cm^2 /s luminosity. To exploit the increased luminosity, an upgrade of the Belle detector has been proposed. A new international collaboration Belle-II, is being formed. The Technical Design Report presents physics motivation, basic methods of the accelerator upgrade, as well as key improvements of the detector.Comment: Edited by: Z. Dole\v{z}al and S. Un

Measurement of χ c1 and χ c2 production with s√ = 7 TeV pp collisions at ATLAS

The prompt and non-prompt production cross-sections for the χ c1 and χ c2 charmonium states are measured in pp collisions at s√ = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC using 4.5 fb−1 of integrated luminosity. The χ c states are reconstructed through the radiative decay χ c → J/ψγ (with J/ψ → μ + μ −) where photons are reconstructed from γ → e + e − conversions. The production rate of the χ c2 state relative to the χ c1 state is measured for prompt and non-prompt χ c as a function of J/ψ transverse momentum. The prompt χ c cross-sections are combined with existing measurements of prompt J/ψ production to derive the fraction of prompt J/ψ produced in feed-down from χ c decays. The fractions of χ c1 and χ c2 produced in b-hadron decays are also measured

Measurement of jet fragmentation into charged particles in pp and PbPb collisions at sqrt(s[NN]) = 2.76 TeV

Jet fragmentation in pp and PbPb collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon pair was studied using data collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. Fragmentation functions are constructed using charged-particle tracks with transverse momenta pt > 4 GeV for dijet events with a leading jet of pt > 100 GeV. The fragmentation functions in PbPb events are compared to those in pp data as a function of collision centrality, as well as dijet-pt imbalance. Special emphasis is placed on the most central PbPb events including dijets with unbalanced momentum, indicative of energy loss of the hard scattered parent partons. The fragmentation patterns for both the leading and subleading jets in PbPb collisions agree with those seen in pp data at 2.76 TeV. The results provide evidence that, despite the large parton energy loss observed in PbPb collisions, the partition of the remaining momentum within the jet cone into high-pt particles is not strongly modified in comparison to that observed for jets in vacuum.Comment: Submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physic