Preliminary Analysis of Yeast Communities Associated with the Spontaneous Fermentation of Musalais, a Traditional Alcoholic Beverage of Southern Xinjiang, China

Musalais is a traditional alcoholic beverage made by the Uighur people in southern Xinjiang, China. Theinitial fermentation juice is obtained by prolonged boiling of local grape juice and grape residues. In thecurrent study, 242 yeast isolates were obtained from 18 samples (grapes, derived starting products, andprogressive stages of fermentation), and 20 phenotypes were distinguished, based on colony characteristicson WL nutrient agar. Fifty representative isolates were selected and found to belong to eight genera (basedon rRNA gene sequence analysis). Among the non-Saccharomyces species present on the grapes and relatedderived substrates, Hanseniaspora spp. was the dominant species. However, nearly all of these specieswere absent in early fermentation. Saccharomyces cerevisiae was not found until the onset of spontaneousfermentation and quickly became the dominant species. The identified yeast community could be used tofurther develop indigenous yeast strains to serve the traditional technology of Musalais. The productionof Musalais, from a starting substrate that has been boiled for 15 hours to kill all, or nearly all, yeast cells,provides fresh insights into the production of ethanol by the fermentation of grape juice

Probing the metal-nonmetal transition in thin metal overlayers using resonant photoemission

We have studied one and two monolayers of barium on Ni(111) and of mercury on Cu(100). Using resonant photoemission, we have found core excited electrons become delocalized with increasing barium coverage. Similarly, upon formation of the mercury bilayer (as determined by low-energy electron diffraction and by atom-beam scattering), there is a substantial increase in the screening of the photohole. A transition of the electronic structure akin to a metal-nonmetal (metal-insulator) transition is apparent in these final-state effects. The band structure for Hg is similar to the band structure expected for a free-standing film with a free-electron sd band. The delocalization of the core excited electrons resembles the exciton unbinding that occurs at the metal-nonmetal Mott transition

Littlest Higgs model and associated ZH production at high energy e+e−e^{+}e^{-} collider

In the context of the littlest Higgs (LH) model, we consider the Higgs strahlung process $e^{+}e^{-}\to ZH$. We find that the correction effects on this process mainly come from the heavy photon $B'$. If we take the mixing angle parameter $c$ in the range of 0.75 - 1, the contributions of the heavy gauge boson $W_{3}'$ is larger than 6%. In most of the parameter space, the deviation of the total production cross section $\sigma^{tot}$ from its SM value is larger than 5%, which may be detected in the future high energy $e^{+}e^{-}$ collider (LC) experiments. The future LC experiments could test the LH model by measuring the cross section of the process $e^{+}e^{-}\to ZH$.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

Neutral top-pion and lepton flavor violating processes

In the context of topcolor-assisted techicolor(TC2) models, we study the contributions of the neutral top-pion $\pi^{0}_{t}$ to the lepton flavor violating(LFV) processes $l_{i}\to l_{j}\gamma$ and $l_{i}\to l_{j}l_{k}l_{l}$. We find that the present experimental bound on $\mu\to e\gamma$ gives severe constraints on the free parameters of $TC2$ models. Taking into account these constraints, we consider the processes $l_{i}\to l_{j}l_{k}l_{l}$ generated by top-pion exchange at the tree-level and the one loop level, and obtain $Br(\mu\to 3e)\simeq 2.87\times 10^{-14}$, $1.1\times 10^{-15}\leq Br(\tau\to 3e)\simeq Br(\tau\to 2e\mu)\leq 4.4 \times 10^{-15}$, $3.1\times 10^{-15} \leq Br(\tau\to 2\mu e)\simeq Br(\tau\to 3\mu)\leq 1.5 \times 10^{-14}$ in most of the parameter space.Comment: latex files,16 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev.