How Well Does AdS/QCD Describe QCD?

AdS/QCD is an extra-dimensional approach to modeling hadronic physics, motivated by the AdS/CFT correspondence in string theory. AdS/QCD models are often more accurate than would have been expected at energies below a few GeV. We address the question of why these models are so successful, and respond to some of the criticisms that have been waged against these models.Comment: To appear in proceedings of Crossing the Boundaries: Gauge Dynamics at Strong Coupling (Shifmania), Minnesota, May 14-17, 2009. 12 pages, 2 eps figure

Minimal Impairment in a Rat Model of Duration Discrimination Following Excitotoxic Lesions of Primary Auditory and Prefrontal Cortices

We present a behavioral paradigm for the study of duration perception in the rat, and report the result of neurotoxic lesions that have the goal of identifying sites that mediate duration perception. Using a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm, rats were either trained to discriminate durations of pure tones (range = [200,500] ms; boundary = 316 ms; Weber fraction after training = 0.24 ± 0.04), or were trained to discriminate frequencies of pure tones (range = [8,16] kHz; boundary = 11.3 kHz; Weber = 0.16 ± 0.11); the latter task is a control for non-timing-specific aspects of the former. Both groups discriminate the same class of sensory stimuli, use the same motions to indicate decisions, have identical trial structures, and are trained to psychophysical threshold; the tasks are thus matched in a number of sensorimotor and cognitive demands. We made neurotoxic lesions of candidate timing-perception areas in the cerebral cortex of both groups. Following extensive bilateral lesions of the auditory cortex, the performance of the frequency discrimination group was significantly more impaired than that of the duration discrimination group. We also found that extensive bilateral lesions of the medial prefrontal cortex resulted in little to no impairment of both groups. The behavioral framework presented here provides an audition-based approach to study the neural mechanisms of time estimation and memory for durations

Assessment of recent outbreaks of Dickeya sp (syn. Erwinia chrysanthemi) slow wilt in potato crops in Israel

Suspected Dickeya sp. strains were obtained from potato plants and tubers collected from commercial plots. The disease was observed on crops of various cultivars grown from seed tubers imported from the Netherlands during the spring seasons of 2004-2006, with disease incidence of 2-30% ( 10% in average). In addition to typical wilting symptoms on the foliage, in cases of severe infection, progeny tubers were rotten in the soil. Six strains were characterised by biochemical, serological and PCR amplification. All tests verified the strains as Dickeya sp. The repPCR and the biochemical assays showed that the strains isolated from blackleg diseased plants in Israel were very similar, if not identical to strains isolated from Dutch seed potatoes, suggesting that the infection in Israel originated from the Dutch seed. The strains were distantly related to D. dianthicola strains, typically found in potatoes in Western Europe, and were similar to biovar 3 D. dadanti or D. zeae. This is the first time that the presence of biovar 3 strains in potato in the Netherlands is described. One of the strains was used for pathogenicity assays on potato cvs Nicola and Mondial. Symptoms appeared 2 to 3 days after stem inoculation, and 7 to 10 days after soil inoculation. The control plants treated with water, or plants inoculated with Pectobacterium carotovorum, did not develop any symptoms with either method of inoculation. The identity of Dickeya sp. and P. carotovorum re- isolated from inoculated plants was confirmed by PCR and ELISA

On the Evaluation of Gluon Condensate Effects in the Holographic Approach to QCD

In holographic QCD the effects of gluonic condensate can be encoded in a suitable deformation of the 5D metric. We develop two different methods for the evaluation of first order perturbative corrections to masses and decay constants of vector resonances in 5D Hard-Wall models of QCD due to small deformations of the metric. They are extracted either from a novel compact form for the first order correction to the vector two-point function, or from perturbation theory for vector bound-state eigenfunctions: the equivalence of the two methods is shown. Our procedures are then applied to flat and to AdS 5D Hard-Wall models; we complement results of existing literature evaluating the corrections to vector decay constant and to two-pion-one-vector couplings: this is particularly relevant to satisfy the sum rules. We concentrate our attention on the effects for the Gasser-Leutwyler coefficients; we show that, as in the Chiral Quark model, the addition of the gluonic condensate improves the consistency, the understanding and the agreement with phenomenology of the holographic model.Comment: 23 pages, three figures, sign error in pion wave function fixed, numerical analysis extended, general conclusions unchange

Supernovae as a probe of particle physics and cosmology

It has very recently been demonstrated by Csaki, Kaloper and Terning (CKT) that the faintness of supernovae at high redshift can be accommodated by mixing of a light axion with the photon in the presence of an intergalactic magnetic field, as opposed to the usual explanation of an accelerating universe by a dark energy component. In this paper we analyze further aspects of the CKT mechanism and its generalizations. The CKT mechanism also passes various cosmological constraints from the fluctuations of the CMB and the formation of structure at large scales, without requiring an accelerating phase in the expansion of the Universe. We investigate the statistical significance of current supernova data for pinning down the different components of the cosmological energy-momentum tensor and for probing physics beyond the standard models.Comment: 17 pages, LaTeX, 4 figures; v2: typos corrected, minor changes, references added; v3: updated figures, details regarding fits include

Deficits in Beam-Walking After Neonatal Motor Cortical Lesions are not Spared by Fetal Cortical Transplants in Rats

Adult rats that sustained unilateral motor cortical lesions at birth demonstrated deficits in traversing an elevated narrow beam. These deficits, manifested by hindlimb slips off the edge of the beam, were not spared in animals that received fetal cortical transplants into the lesion cavity immediately after lesion placement

Conformal Symmetry and the Three Point Function for the Gravitational Axial Anomaly

This work presents a first study of a radiative calculation for the gravitational axial anomaly in the massless Abelian Higgs model. The two loop contribution to the anomalous correlation function of one axial current and two energy-momentum tensors, , is computed at an order that involves only internal matter fields. Conformal properties of massless field theories are used in order to perform the Feynman diagram calculations in the coordinate space representation. The two loop contribution is found not to vanish, due to the presence of two independent tensor structures in the anomalous correlator.Comment: 34 pages, 5 figures, RevTex, Minor changes, Final version for Phys. Rev.

Clustering and Alignment of Polymorphic Sequences for HLA-DRB1 Genotyping

Located on Chromosome 6p21, classical human leukocyte antigen genes are highly polymorphic. HLA alleles associate with a variety of phenotypes, such as narcolepsy, autoimmunity, as well as immunologic response to infectious disease. Moreover, high resolution genotyping of these loci is critical to achieving long-term survival of allogeneic transplants. Development of methods to obtain high resolution analysis of HLA genotypes will lead to improved understanding of how select alleles contribute to human health and disease risk. Genomic DNAs were obtained from a cohort of n = 383 subjects recruited as part of an Ulcerative Colitis study and analyzed for HLA-DRB1. HLA genotypes were determined using sequence specific oligonucleotide probes and by next-generation sequencing using the Roche/454 GSFLX instrument. The Clustering and Alignment of Polymorphic Sequences (CAPSeq) software application was developed to analyze next-generation sequencing data. The application generates HLA sequence specific 6-digit genotype information from next-generation sequencing data using MUMmer to align sequences and the R package diffusionMap to classify sequences into their respective allelic groups. The incorporation of Bootstrap Aggregating, Bagging to aid in sorting of sequences into allele classes resulted in improved genotyping accuracy. Using Bagging iterations equal to 60, the genotyping results obtained using CAPSeq when compared with sequence specific oligonucleotide probe characterized 4-digit genotypes exhibited high rates of concordance, matching at 759 out of 766 (99.1%) alleles. © 2013 Ringquist et al

Self-bound dense objects in holographic QCD

We study a self-bound dense object in the hard wall model. We consider a spherically symmetric dense object which is characterized by its radial density distribution and non-uniform but spherically symmetric chiral condensate. For this we analytically solve the partial differential equations in the hard wall model and read off the radial coordinate dependence of the density and chiral condensate according to the AdS/CFT correspondence. We then attempt to describe nucleon density profiles of a few nuclei within our framework and observe that the confinement scale changes from a free nucleon to a nucleus. We briefly discuss how to include the effect of higher dimensional operator into our study. We finally comment on possible extensions of our work.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, figures replaced, minor revision, to appear in JHE