2,476 research outputs found
Effects of internal fluctuations on the spreading of Hantavirus
We study the spread of Hantavirus over a host population of deer mice using a
population dynamics model. We show that taking into account the internal
fluctuations in the mouse population due to its discrete character strongly
alters the behaviour of the system. In addition to the familiar transition
present in the deterministic model, the inclusion of internal fluctuations
leads to the emergence of an additional deterministically hidden transition. We
determine parameter values that lead to maximal propagation of the disease, and
discuss some implications for disease prevention policies
FCNCs in supersymmetric multi-Higgs doublet models
We conduct a general discussion of supersymmetric models with three families
in the Higgs sector. We analyse the scalar potential, and investigate the
minima conditions, deriving the mass matrices for the scalar, pseudoscalar and
charged states. Depending on the Yukawa couplings and the Higgs spectrum, the
model might allow the occurrence of potentially dangerous flavour changing
neutral currents at the tree-level. We compute model-independent contributions
for several observables, and as an example we apply this general analysis to a
specific model of quark-Higgs interactions, discussing how compatibility with
current experimental data constrains the Higgs sector.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures. Comments and references added. Final version
published in Physical Review
Field Theory of Propagating Reaction-Diffusion Fronts
The problem of velocity selection of reaction-diffusion fronts has been
widely investigated. While the mean field limit results are well known
theoretically, there is a lack of analytic progress in those cases in which
fluctuations are to be taken into account. Here, we construct an analytic
theory connecting the first principles of the reaction-diffusion process to an
effective equation of motion via field-theoretic arguments, and we arrive at
the results already confirmed by numerical simulations
Regional coherence evaluation in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease based on adaptively extracted magnetoencephalogram rhythms
This study assesses the connectivity alterations caused by Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in magnetoencephalogram (MEG) background activity. Moreover, a novel methodology to adaptively extract brain rhythms from the MEG is introduced. This methodology relies on the ability of empirical mode decomposition to isolate local signal oscillations and constrained blind source separation to extract the activity that jointly represents a subset of channels. Inter-regional MEG connectivity was analysed for 36 AD, 18 MCI and 26 control subjects in δ, θ, α and β bands over left and right central, anterior, lateral and posterior regions with magnitude squared coherence—c(f). For the sake of comparison, c(f) was calculated from the original MEG channels and from the adaptively extracted rhythms. The results indicated that AD and MCI cause slight alterations in the MEG connectivity. Computed from the extracted rhythms, c(f) distinguished AD and MCI subjects from controls with 69.4% and 77.3% accuracies, respectively, in a full leave-one-out cross-validation evaluation. These values were higher than those obtained without the proposed extraction methodology
Nonlinear field theories during homogeneous spatial dilation
The effect of a uniform dilation of space on stochastically driven nonlinear
field theories is examined. This theoretical question serves as a model problem
for examining the properties of nonlinear field theories embedded in expanding
Euclidean Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre-Robertson-Walker metrics in the context of
cosmology, as well as different systems in the disciplines of statistical
mechanics and condensed matter physics. Field theories are characterized by the
speed at which they propagate correlations within themselves. We show that for
linear field theories correlations stop propagating if and only if the speed at
which the space dilates is higher than the speed at which correlations
propagate. The situation is in general different for nonlinear field theories.
In this case correlations might stop propagating even if the velocity at which
space dilates is lower than the velocity at which correlations propagate. In
particular, these results imply that it is not possible to characterize the
dynamics of a nonlinear field theory during homogeneous spatial dilation {\it a
priori}. We illustrate our findings with the nonlinear Kardar-Parisi-Zhang
equation
Blow-up of the hyperbolic Burgers equation
The memory effects on microscopic kinetic systems have been sometimes
modelled by means of the introduction of second order time derivatives in the
macroscopic hydrodynamic equations. One prototypical example is the hyperbolic
modification of the Burgers equation, that has been introduced to clarify the
interplay of hyperbolicity and nonlinear hydrodynamic evolution. Previous
studies suggested the finite time blow-up of this equation, and here we present
a rigorous proof of this fact
Chemotactic Collapse and Mesenchymal Morphogenesis
We study the effect of chemotactic signaling among mesenchymal cells. We show
that the particular physiology of the mesenchymal cells allows one-dimensional
collapse in contrast to the case of bacteria, and that the mesenchymal
morphogenesis represents thus a more complex type of pattern formation than
those found in bacterial colonies. We finally compare our theoretical
predictions with recent in vitro experiments
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