Relativistic Approach to Superfluidity in Nuclear Matter

Pairing correlations in symmetric nuclear matter are studied within a relativistic mean-field approximation based on a field theory of nucleons coupled to neutral ($\sigma$ and $\omega$) and to charged ($\varrho$) mesons. The Hartree-Fock and the pairing fields are calculated in a self-consistent way. The energy gap is the result of a strong cancellation between the scalar and vector components of the pairing field. We find that the pair amplitude vanishes beyond a certain value of momentum of the paired nucleons. This fact determines an effective cutoff in the gap equation. The value of this cutoff gives an energy gap in agreement with the estimates of non relativistic calculations.Comment: 21 pages, REVTEX, 8 ps-figures, to appear in Phys.Rev.C. e-mail: [email protected]

Pyhtään kunnan kuljetusten optimointi ja tarkistustyökalu

Pyhtään kunta on yli 5 000 asukkaan maalaiskunta Kymenlaaksossa Kaakkois-Suomessa. Kunnan toimeksiantona selvitettiin kuljetusten parantamismahdollisuudet. Pyhtään kunnan kuljetusselvitys koostui neljästä eri kuljetusosa-alueesta: koulukuljetuksesta, vammaispalvelusta, ruokakuljetuksesta ja Pyhtään palvelulinjasta. Selvityksen pääpaino oli koulukuljetuksissa. Tavoitteina oli löytää kuljetuksista kustannussäästöjä, selvittää vuoroliikenteen pysyvyys ja rakentaa tarkistustyökalu. Selvitystyö koostui myös Suomen lainsäädännön tarkastelusta, kuljetusten nykytilan selvittämisestä ja niiden mahdollisesta yhdistämisestä sekä koulukuljetuskustannusten laskemisesta. Työmenetelmät olivat tiedon keruu ja analysointi, yhteydenotot ja haastattelut sekä tarkistustyökalun luominen MS Excel -taulukkolaskentaohjelmalla. Työn tuloksena syntyivät koulukuljetuskartat ja ehdotus koulukuljetusportfolion laatimisesta sekä kaksi tarkistustyökalua. Lisäksi selvitystyössä päädyttiin siihen, että koulukuljetuskustannusten nousu on johtunut epäonnistuneesta kilpailutuksesta.The municipality of Pyhtää has over 5000 inhabitants and is located in Southern Finland. The aim of this thesis was to make a report to the municipality of Pyhtää, Finland. The report consisted of four different fields of transportation: school transport, services for the disabled, transport of perishable foodstuff and service line of Pyhtää. The main subject was the school transportation. The aims of the thesis were to find cost savings, clarify the permanence of bus lines and create a control tool to the municipality’s personnel. The report also consisted of Finnish legislation, monitoring the present state of transport, drawing the route maps from the school transportation and counting the transportation costs. The methods were finding and analyzing the available information, contacting and interviewing involved parties. The control tool was built with MS Office Excel –program. The results of the thesis were the school transport’s route maps, suggestion to create a portfolio from the school transportation and two different versions of the control tool. In addition the thesis concluded that the cost of the school transportation has increased from the unsuccessful tendering

Symptom-Level Description of Nursing Perceptions About Unwarranted Clinical Variation, Inequality in Access to Cancer Services, Specific-Symptom Knowledge: An Italian Web-Based Survey

Objectives: This study aimed to describe the cancer nurses’ views regarding the relevance of cancer symptom-specific knowledge, unwarranted clinical variation, and inequities in access to cancer services. Describing how nurses perceive these aspects could help identify research priorities and a practical framework to prioritize clinical practice guidelines. Data Sources: A web-based survey was performed using a convenience sample of 810 nurses employed in cancer settings and cross-sectional data collection. The survey adopted a previously validated questionnaire investigating 14 symptoms. Conclusion: This study revealed which cancer symptoms require priority attention to define evidence-grounded guidance for decreasing unwarranted clinical variation and inequities in access to cancer services. Future multiprofessional and multinational studies are recommended to provide an in-depth description of the investigated phenomena. Implications for Nursing Practice: Participants reported higher mean scores in pain-specific knowledge than other symptoms. Social functioning alterations and psychological disorders seem to be highly susceptible to unwarranted clinical variation and inequities in access to cancer services. This information could drive tailored interventions to improve nursing practice

A bottom-up approach to prioritize the scientific activities of Italian Association of Cancer Nurses (AIIAO): Questionnaire validation and pilot study

Introduction. There are no national data aimed to describe nurses' perception of variability in delivering nursing activities in relation to best practice and inequality in receiving nursing care. Moreover, there are no validated tools to be used in research. Therefore, the aims of this study are: a) to develop and validate a questionnaire to describe nurses' perceptions of variability and inequality in the oncology setting; b) to test content and face validity; c) to provide preliminary data (pilot study) to plan strategies for future national studies. Material and methods. This is a multi-phase and multi-method study. Phase 1 is focused on questionnaire's development (i.e., literature review and consensus discussion); phase 2 is aimed to determine content and face validity of the questionnaire; and phase 3 was a pilot data collection through an on-line survey. Results. The questionnaire that was developed yielded an adequate content and face validity (S-CVI=0.89 and CVR >0.60 for all items). The pilot study (75 nurses) found that nurse participants perceived as the most relevant categories pain and gastrointestinal and oral cavity dysfunctions. Fatigue, impairments of social function and psychological disorders were the areas in which greater variability and inequalities in receiving nursing care emerged. Overall, more than 50% of nurses reported variability and inequalities in oncology symptom management (in the investigated categories). Conclusions. The study results support the content validity of the questionnaire that can thereby be used for pan-national investigations

Caracterización biométrica de Bothriochloa laguroides ssp laguroides (dc.) Herter para un manejo pastoril sustentable

Grasses morphological knowledge, in space and time, is important in agronomic management actions. Bothriochloa laguroides is a key species in the grasslands of the hills region by higher prevalence of high forage value. The objective was to establish management guidelines to define more precisely the grazing intensity for that species. In a area of 95 ha, grazed breeding farm, were placed randomly distributed 4 closures. In every closing we selected 5 individuals of that species and every 7 days was measured total plant height (AT) and the height of the peduncle of the inflorescence visible (APVI) in both vegetative and reproductive stage. According to the results obtained showed that the growing period was maintained until mid-January. The start, peak and end of flowering occurred in midJanuary, late February - early March and late April respectively. On the other hand, there was a significant positive correlation (R = 0.8, α = 0.05) between AT and APVI. As a result, it could be recommend that grazing in the vegetative stage is of low intensity to favor the formation of bunches. From mid-January, when starts the reproductive stage, grazing may be of greater intensity until early March which should remove the animals. This manage ment would have a large supply of biomass to ensure the perpetuity of the species in time.El conocimiento morfológico de las gramíneas en el espacio y en el tiempo tiene importancia en las acciones de manejo agronómico. Bothriochloa laguroides es una especie clave en los pastizales de la región serrana del sur de la provincia de Córdoba por su predominio y alto valor forrajero. El objetivo del trabajo fue establecer pautas de manejo que definan con mayor precisión la intensidad de pastoreo para dicha especie. En un lote de 95 ha, pastoreado con hacienda de cría, se colocaron 4 clausuras distribuidas al azar. En cada clausura se seleccionaron 5 individuos de dicha especie y cada 7 días se tomaron diversas características morfométricas tanto en la etapa vegetativa como reproductiva. De acuerdo con los resultados obtenidos se observó que el período vegetativo se mantuvo hasta mediados de enero. El inicio, máximo y final de la floración se produjo a mediados de enero, fines de febrero - principios de marzo y fines de abril respectivamente. Por otro lado, se observó una correlación positiva significativa (R=0,8, α=0,05) entre AT y APVI. Debido a ello, podría recomendarse que el pastoreo en la etapa vegetativa sea de baja intensidad para favorecer la formación de macollos. A partir de mediados de enero, cuando da comienzo la etapa reproductiva, el pastoreo podría ser de mayor intensidad hasta principio de marzo donde se deberían retirar los animales. Este manejo permitiría tener una alta oferta de biomasa asegurando la perpetuidad de la especie en el tiempo

Health determinants in italian type 2 diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) patients : a critical gender differences analysis

Different studies described the important role of wellbeing, self-care and self-efficacy (i.e. health determinants) to achieve best health outcomes in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) patients. However, literature has paid little attention to highlight the possible gender differences related to the T2DM perception of those health determinants. For these reason, the aim of this study was to describe T2DM patients' gender differences related to their wellbeing, self-care and self-efficacy. This study was performed by a secondary analysis of data from a cross-sectional research, conducted in an outpatient setting in Northern Italy. Data was collected from March 2014 and July 2016 in a cohort of 115 T2DM outpatients, aged from 60 to 91 years (mean = 69.78 \ub1 7.11). Our results showed that men perceived more general wellbeing than women, and more diabetes specific self-efficacy. No differences seemed to be related to self-care. Indeed, the stratification by gender of the bivariate analysis allowed to identify many peculiarities related to wellbeing domains and self-efficacy. This study had a pioneering nuance in Italian assessment of T2DM health determinants, and it could have a number of future implications. Further empirical researches should provide more information to deeply understand the T2DM patients' peculiarities, which could help nurses to improve a personalized care delivery

Semiclassical theory for many-body Fermionic systems

We present a treatment of many-body Fermionic systems that facilitates an expression of the well-known quantities in a series expansion of the Planck's constant. The ensuing semiclassical result contains to a leading order of the response function the classical time correlation function of the observable followed by the Weyl-Wigner series, on top of these terms are the periodic-orbit correction terms. The treatment given here starts from linear response assumption of the many-body theory and in its connection with semiclassical theory, it makes no assumption of the integrability of classical dynamics underlying the one-body quantal system. Applications of the framework are also discussed.Comment: 18 pages, Te

Asymmetric nuclear matter in a Hartree-Fock approach to non-linear QHD

The Equation of State (EOS) for asymmetric nuclear matter is discussed starting from a phenomenological hadronic field theory of Serot-Walecka type including exchange terms. In a model with self interactions of the scalar sigma-meson we show that the Fock terms naturally lead to isospin effects in the nuclear EOS. These effects are quite large and dominate over the contribution due to isovector mesons. We obtain a potential symmetry term of "stiff" type, i.e. increasing with baryon density and an interesting behaviour of neutron/proton effective masses of relevance for transport properties of asymmetric dense matter.Comment: 12 pages (LATEX), 3 Postscript figures, revised versio

Functional approach to the electromagnetic response function: the Longitudinal Channel

In this paper we address the (charge) longitudinal electromagnetic response for a homogeneous system of nucleons interacting via meson exchanges in the functional framework. This approach warrants consistency if the calculation is carried on order-by-order in the mesonic loop expansion with RPA-dressed mesonic propagators. At the 1-loop order and considering pion, rho and omega exchanges we obtain a quenching of the response, in line with the experimental results.Comment: RevTeX, 18 figures available upon request - to be published in Physical Review

Collective modes of asymmetric nuclear matter in Quantum HadroDynamics

We discuss a fully relativistic Landau Fermi liquid theory based on the Quantum Hadro-Dynamics ($QHD$) effective field picture of Nuclear Matter ({\it NM}). From the linearized kinetic equations we get the dispersion relations of the propagating collective modes. We focus our attention on the dynamical effects of the interplay between scalar and vector channel contributions. A beautiful ``mirror'' structure in the form of the dynamical response in the isoscalar/isovector degree of freedom is revealed, with a complete parallelism in the role respectively played by the compressibility and the symmetry energy. All that strongly supports the introduction of an explicit coupling to the scalar-isovector channel of the nucleon-nucleon interaction. In particular we study the influence of this coupling (to a $\delta$-meson-like effective field) on the collective response of asymmetric nuclear matter ($ANM$). Interesting contributions are found on the propagation of isovector-like modes at normal density and on an expected smooth transition to isoscalar-like oscillations at high baryon density. Important ``chemical'' effects on the neutron-proton structure of the mode are shown. For dilute $ANM$ we have the isospin distillation mechanism of the unstable isoscalar-like oscillations, while at high baryon density we predict an almost pure neutron wave structure of the propagating sounds.Comment: 18 pages (LATEX), 8 Postscript figures, uses "epsfig