Prospective genetic screening decreases the incidence of Abacavir hypersensitivity reactions in the Western Australian HIV cohort study

Abacavir therapy is associated with significant drug hypersensitivity in ∼8% of recipients, with retrospective studies indicating a strong genetic association with the HLA-B*5701 allelle. In this prospective study, involving 260 abacavir-naive individuals (7.7% of whom were positive for HLA-B*5701), we confirm the usefulness of genetic risk stratification, with no cases of abacavir hypersensitivity among 148 HLA-B*5701–negative recipients

Radiative corrections in bumblebee electrodynamics

We investigate some quantum features of the bumblebee electrodynamics in flat spacetimes. The bumblebee field is a vector field that leads to a spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking. For a smooth quadratic potential, the massless excitation (Nambu-Goldstone boson) can be identified as the photon, transversal to the vacuum expectation value of the bumblebee field. Besides, there is a massive excitation associated with the longitudinal mode and whose presence leads to instability in the spectrum of the theory. By using the principal-value prescription, we show that no one-loop radiative corrections to the mass term is generated. Moreover, the bumblebee self-energy is not transverse, showing that the propagation of the longitudinal mode can not be excluded from the effective theory.Comment: Revised version: contains some more elaborated interpretation of the results. Conclusions improve

Cosmology in the Universe with distance dependent Lorentz-violating bakground

We consider a cosmological setup with the inflaton field in the presence of a redshift dependent Lorentz-violating time-like background to address the inflationary regime and other phases of the Universe. We also show that the regime of dark energy at large distances (low redshifts) is essentially dominated by the presence of the Lorentz-violating background.Comment: 8 pages, no figure, Latex, to appear in AHE

The Phoenix Deep Survey: spectroscopic catalog

The Phoenix Deep Survey is a multi-wavelength survey based on deep 1.4 GHz radio imaging, reaching well into the sub-100 microJy level. One of the aims of this survey is to characterize the sub-mJy radio population, exploring its nature and evolution. In this paper we present the catalog and results of the spectroscopic observations aimed at characterizing the optically ``bright'' (R<~ 21.5 mag) counterparts of faint radio sources. Out of 371 sources with redshift determination, 21% have absorption lines only, 11% show AGN signatures, 32% are star-forming galaxies, 34% show narrow emission lines that do not allow detailed spectral classification (due to poor signal-to-noise ratio and/or lack of diagnostic emission lines) and the remaining 2% are identified with stars. For the star-forming galaxies with a Balmer decrement measurement we find a median extinction of A(Ha)=1.9 mag, higher than that of optically selected samples. This is a result of the radio selection, which is not biased against dusty systems. Using the available spectroscopic information, we estimate the radio luminosity function of star-forming galaxies in two independent redshift bins at z~0.1 and 0.3 respectively. We find direct evidence for strong luminosity evolution of these systems consistent with L(1.4 GHz) ~ (1+z)^(2.7).Comment: 39 pages, 12 figures. References added, and minor changes to reflect published versio

Uniform approximation for the overlap caustic of a quantum state with its translations

The semiclassical Wigner function for a Bohr-quantized energy eigenstate is known to have a caustic along the corresponding classical closed phase space curve in the case of a single degree of freedom. Its Fourier transform, the semiclassical chord function, also has a caustic along the conjugate curve defined as the locus of diameters, i.e. the maximal chords of the original curve. If the latter is convex, so is its conjugate, resulting in a simple fold caustic. The uniform approximation through this caustic, that is here derived, describes the transition undergone by the overlap of the state with its translation, from an oscillatory regime for small chords, to evanescent overlaps, rising to a maximum near the caustic. The diameter-caustic for the Wigner function is also treated.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure