[Review of] Mariama Ba. So Long A Letter

So Long A Letter is the story of Ramatoulaye, a recently-widowed Sengalese [Senegalese] woman, as she writes to her long-time friend Aissatou. It is the articulate, often anguished narrative of a Muslim woman faced with the sudden second marriage of her husband of twenty-five years. Although polygamy is accepted by her religion and her society, Ramatoulaye feels rejected and betrayed. Yet she chooses to remain in her marriage and prepares to share equally her husband with her new co-wife, as dictated by Muslim law. Her husband, however, abandons her completely, to manage their twelve children alone. Upon his death five years later, she is faced not only with grief and confused emotion but also with enormous debts he compiled in wooing his new young wife and her greedy mother. Ramatoulaye\u27s dignity and quiet strength overcome her bitterness and pain, and she is able to begin forging her own happiness again while responding to her family\u27s changing needs

Light Stop Searches at the LHC in Events with One Hard Photon or Jet and Missing Energy

Low energy supersymmetric models provide a solution to the hierarchy problem and also have the necessary ingredients to solve two of the most outstanding issues in cosmology: the origin of the baryon asymmetry and the source of dark matter. In the MSSM, weak scale generation of the baryon asymmetry may be achieved in the presence of light stops, with masses lower than about 130 GeV. Moreover, the proper dark matter density may be obtained in the stop-neutralino co-annihilation region, where the stop-neutralino mass difference is smaller than a few tens of GeV. Searches for scalar top quarks (stops) in pair production processes at the Tevatron and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) become very challenging in this region of parameters. At the LHC, however, light stops proceeding from the decay of gluino pairs may be identified, provided the gluino mass is smaller than about 900 GeV. In this article we propose an alternative method for stop searches in the co-annihilation region, based on the search for these particles in events with missing energy plus one hard photon or jet. We show that this method is quite efficient and, when complemented with ongoing Tevatron searches, allows to probe stop masses up to about 160 GeV, fully probing the region of parameters consistent with electroweak baryogenesis in the MSSM.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure

Comment on "Effective of the q-deformed pseudoscalar magnetic field on the charge carriers in graphene"

We point out a misleading treatment in a recent paper published in this Journal [J. Math. Phys. (2016) 57, 082105] concerning solutions for the two-dimensional Dirac-Weyl equation with a q-deformed pseudoscalar magnetic barrier. The authors misunderstood the full meaning of the potential and made erroneous calculations, this fact jeopardizes the main results in this system.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

A Random Multifractal Tilling

We develop a multifractal random tilling that fills the square. The multifractal is formed by an arrangement of rectangular blocks of different sizes, areas and number of neighbors. The overall feature of the tilling is an heterogeneous and anisotropic random self-affine object. The multifractal is constructed by an algorithm that makes successive sections of the square. At each $n$-step there is a random choice of a parameter $\rho_i$ related to the section ratio. For the case of random choice between $\rho_1$ and $\rho_2$ we find analytically the full spectrum of fractal dimensions

Anisotropy and percolation threshold in a multifractal support

Recently a multifractal object, $Q_{mf}$, was proposed to study percolation properties in a multifractal support. The area and the number of neighbors of the blocks of $Q_{mf}$ show a non-trivial behavior. The value of the probability of occupation at the percolation threshold, $p_{c}$, is a function of $\rho$, a parameter of $Q_{mf}$ which is related to its anisotropy. We investigate the relation between $p_{c}$ and the average number of neighbors of the blocks as well as the anisotropy of $Q_{mf}$

A lower bound to the spectral threshold in curved tubes

We consider the Laplacian in curved tubes of arbitrary cross-section rotating together with the Frenet frame along curves in Euclidean spaces of arbitrary dimension, subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions on the cylindrical surface and Neumann conditions at the ends of the tube. We prove that the spectral threshold of the Laplacian is estimated from below by the lowest eigenvalue of the Dirichlet Laplacian in a torus determined by the geometry of the tube.Comment: LaTeX, 13 pages; to appear in R. Soc. Lond. Proc. Ser. A Math. Phys. Eng. Sc