The Dark Side of the Solar Neutrino Parameter Space

Results of neutrino oscillation experiments have always been presented on the (sin^2 2theta, Delta m^2) parameter space for the case of two-flavor oscillations. We point out, however, that this parameterization misses the half of the parameter space pi/4 < theta <= pi/2 (``the dark side''), which is physically inequivalent to the region 0 <= theta <= pi/4 (``the light side'') in the presence of matter effects. The MSW solutions to the solar neutrino problem can extend to the dark side, especially if we take the conservative attitude to allow higher confidence levels, ignore some of the experimental results in the fits, or relax theoretical predictions. Furthermore even the so-called ``vacuum oscillation'' solution distinguishes the dark and the light sides. We urge experimental collaborations to present their results on the entire parameter space.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, uses psfig. Fixed typos in Eq. (3). An imprecise comment in the footnote remove

Axion strings are superconducting

We explore the cosmological consequences of the superconductivity of QCD axion strings. Axion strings can support a sizeable chiral electric current and charge, which alters their early universe dynamics. Shrinking axion string loops can become effectively stable remnants called vortons, supported by the electromagnetic force of the string current. Generically, vortons produced by axion strings overclose the universe, unless there are efficient current leakage processes. Furthermore, if a primordial magnetic field (PMF) exists in the early universe, a large current is induced on axion strings, creating a significant drag force from interactions with the surrounding plasma. As a result, the strings are slowed down, which leads to an orders of magnitude enhancement in the number of strings per Hubble volume. Finally, we study the implications for the QCD axion relic abundance. The QCD axion window is shifted by orders of magnitude in some parts of our parameter space.Comment: 39 pages, 11 figure

FACILE AND SENSITIVE HPLC-UV METHOD FOR DETERMINATION OF NINTEDANIB IN RAT PLASMA

Objective: In this study, a facile and sensitive high-performance liquid chromatographic method for determination of nintedanib in rat plasma was developed and validated.Methods: After plasma protein was precipitated by addition of acetonitrile, the supernatant underwent centrifugation. An aliquot was then injected into a high-performance liquid chromatographic system with a Mightysil RP-18 GP II ODS column (250 × 3.0 mm, length by inner diameter, 5-μm particle size) maintained at 50 °C. A mobile phase mixture of 20 mmol phosphate buffer (pH 3.0) and acetonitrile (7:3, v/v) was used at a flow rate of 0.6 mL/min, with UV detection at a wavelength of 390 nm for isocratic separation and detection of nintedanib, its main metabolite (BIBF1202), and p-nitrophenol as an internal standard.Results: The quantitative range of nintedanib concentration in this method was 12.5–400 ng/ml, and the calibration curves were linear. The intra-and inter-day accuracy values (relative errors) were in the range of −3.65%–4.00% and −3.65%–3.64%, respectively. The intra-and inter-day precision values (relative standard deviations) were&lt;5.9% and 8.36%, respectively. The method was successfully applied to a pharmacokinetic analysis of nintedanib in rats after intravenous administration.Conclusion: In this study, a rapid, sensitive, and simple HPLC-UV method for the quantitation of nintedanib in rat plasma was developed and validated. The method was shown to be accurate and precise and was successfully applied to a pharmacokinetic study

Statistical Test of Anarchy

"Anarchy" is the hypothesis that there is no fundamental distinction among the three flavors of neutrinos. It describes the mixing angles as random variables, drawn from well defined probability distributions dictated by the group Haar measure. We perform a Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) statistical test to verify whether anarchy is consistent with all neutrino data, including the new result presented by KamLAND. We find a KS probability for Nature's choice of mixing angles equal to 64%, quite consistent with the anarchical hypothesis. In turn, assuming that anarchy is indeed correct, we compute lower bounds on |U_{e3}|^2, the remaining unknown "angle" of the leptonic mixing matrix.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Improved criteria for testing the hypothesis and deriving lower limits on theta_{13

Towards Robust Plant Disease Diagnosis with Hard-sample Re-mining Strategy

With rich annotation information, object detection-based automated plant disease diagnosis systems (e.g., YOLO-based systems) often provide advantages over classification-based systems (e.g., EfficientNet-based), such as the ability to detect disease locations and superior classification performance. One drawback of these detection systems is dealing with unannotated healthy data with no real symptoms present. In practice, healthy plant data appear to be very similar to many disease data. Thus, those models often produce mis-detected boxes on healthy images. In addition, labeling new data for detection models is typically time-consuming. Hard-sample mining (HSM) is a common technique for re-training a model by using the mis-detected boxes as new training samples. However, blindly selecting an arbitrary amount of hard-sample for re-training will result in the degradation of diagnostic performance for other diseases due to the high similarity between disease and healthy data. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective training strategy called hard-sample re-mining (HSReM), which is designed to enhance the diagnostic performance of healthy data and simultaneously improve the performance of disease data by strategically selecting hard-sample training images at an appropriate level. Experiments based on two practical in-field eight-class cucumber and ten-class tomato datasets (42.7K and 35.6K images) show that our HSReM training strategy leads to a substantial improvement in the overall diagnostic performance on large-scale unseen data. Specifically, the object detection model trained using the HSReM strategy not only achieved superior results as compared to the classification-based state-of-the-art EfficientNetV2-Large model and the original object detection model, but also outperformed the model using the HSM strategy

Area of Compaction to Prevent Uplift by Liquefaction

In this study, shaking table tests, upper seepage flow tests and numerical analyses were conducted to determine the condition of improvement by the compaction method, including the extent of area and the density, to prevent uplift of underground pipes by liquefaction. Based on the results of these investigations, a procedure to determine the improvement conditions was proposed

Establishing a nu_{mu,tau} Component in the Solar Neutrino Flux

We point out that the recoil electron kinetic energy spectra in the nu-e elastic scattering are different for incident nu_{e} or nu_{mu,tau}, and hence one can in principle establish the existence of the nu_{mu,tau} component in the solar neutrino flux by fitting the shape of the spectrum. This would be a new model-independent test of the solar neutrino oscillation in a single experiment, free from astrophysical and nuclear physics uncertainties. For the ^7Be neutrinos, it is possible to determine the nu_{mu,tau} component at BOREXINO or KamLAND, if the background is sufficiently low. Note that this effect is different from the distortion in the incident neutrino energy spectrum, which has been discussed in the literature.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, uses psfig. Figures reorganized, one corrected, conclusions unchange

Sibling spore isolates of Tricholoma matsutake vary significantly in their ectomycorrhizal colonization abilities on pine hosts in vitro and form multiple intimate associations in single ectomycorrhizal roots

ArticleFungal Ecology. 43: 100874. (2020)journal articl