DNA waves and water

Some bacterial and viral DNA sequences have been found to induce low frequency electromagnetic waves in high aqueous dilutions. This phenomenon appears to be triggered by the ambient electromagnetic background of very low frequency. We discuss this phenomenon in the framework of quantum field theory. A scheme able to account for the observations is proposed. The reported phenomenon could allow to develop highly sensitive detection systems for chronic bacterial and viral infections.Comment: Invited talk at the DICE2010 Conference, Castiglioncello, Italy September 201

Why the Water Bridge does not collapse

In 2007 an interesting phenomenon was discovered: a thread of water, the so-called water bridge (WB), can hang between two glass beakers filled with deionized water if voltage is applied to them. We analyze the available explanations of the WB stability and propose a completely different one: the force that supports the WB is the surface tension of water and the role of electric field is not to allow the WB to reduce its surface energy by means of breaking into separate drops.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

On the one-loop Kahler potential in five-dimensional brane-world supergravity

We present an on-shell formulation of 5d gauged supergravity coupled to chiral matter multiplets localized at the orbifold fixed points. The brane action is constructed via the Noether method. In such set-up we compute one-loop corrections to the Kahler potential of the effective 4d supergravity and compare the result with previous computations based on the off-shell formalism. The results agree at lowest order in brane sources, however at higher order there are differences. We explain this discrepancy by an ambiguity in resolving singularities associated with the presence of infinitely thin branes.Comment: 20 page

Relativistic Turbulence: A Long Way from Preheating to Equilibrium

We study, both numerically and analytically, the development of equilibrium after preheating. We show that the process is characterised by the appearance of Kolmogorov spectra and the evolution towards thermal equilibrium follows self-similar dynamics. Simplified kinetic theory gives values for all characteristic exponents which are close to what is observed in lattice simulations. The resulting time for thermalization is long, and temperature at thermalization is low, $T \sim 100$ eV in the simple $\lambda \Phi^4$ inflationary model. Our results allow a straightforward generalization to realistic models.Comment: 4 pages, 3figures, LaTe

Gauge/Anomaly Syzygy and Generalized Brane World Models of Supersymmetry Breaking

In theories in which SUSY is broken on a brane separated from the MSSM matter fields, supersymmetry breaking is naturally mediated in a variety of ways. Absent other light fields in the theory, gravity will mediate supersymmetry breaking through the conformal anomaly. If gauge fields propagate in the extra dimension they, too, can mediate supersymmetry breaking effects. The presence of gauge fields in the bulk motivates us to consider the effects of new messenger fields with holomorphic and non-holomorphic couplings to the supersymmetry breaking sector. These can lead to contributions to the soft masses of MSSM fields which dramatically alter the features of brane world scenarios of supersymmetry breaking. In particular, they can solve the negative slepton mass squared problem of anomaly mediation and change the predictions of gaugino mediation.Comment: 4 pages, RevTe

Late Reheating, Hadronic Jets and Baryogenesis

If inflaton couples very weakly to ordinary matter the reheating temperature of the universe can be lower than the electroweak scale. In this letter we show that the late reheating occurs in a highly non-uniform way, within narrow areas along the jets produced by ordinary particles originated from inflaton decays. Depending on inflaton mass and decay constant, the initial temperature inside the lumps of the overheated plasma may be large enough to trigger the unsuppressed sphaleron processes with baryon number non-conservation, allowing for efficient local electroweak baryogenesis.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, revtex

Lepton Flavor Violation and Supersymmetric Dirac Leptogenesis

Dirac leptogenesis (or Dirac neutrinogenesis), in which neutrinos are purely Dirac particles, is an interesting alternative to the standard leptogenesis scenario. In its supersymmetric version, the modified form of the superpotential required for successful baryogenesis contributes new, generically non-flavor-diagonal terms to the slepton and sneutrino mass matrices. In this work, we examine how current experimental bounds on flavor-changing effects in the lepton sector (and particularly the bound on Mu -> e Gamma) constrain Dirac leptogenesis and we find that it is capable of succeeding with superpartner masses as low as 100 GeV. For such light scalars and electroweakinos, upcoming experiments such as MEG are generically expected to observe signals of lepton flavor violation.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, corrected parametric dependance on leading LFV term, figure 2 and discussion modified accordingly, conclusions unchange

Effect of metabolic and antioxidant supplementation on sperm parameters in oligo-astheno-teratozoospermia, with and without varicocele: a double-blind placebo-controlled study

Since sperm require high energy levels to perform their specialised function, it is vital that essential nutrients are available for spermatozoa when they develop, capacitate and acquire motility. However, they are vulnerable to a lack of energy and excess amounts of reactive oxygen species, which can impair sperm function, lead to immotility, acrosomal reaction impairment, DNA fragmentation and cell death. This monocentric, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial investigated the effect of 6 months of supplementation with l-carnitine, acetyl-l-carnitine and other micronutrients on sperm quality in 104 subjects with oligo- and/or astheno- and/or teratozoospermia with or without varicocele. In 94 patients who completed the study, sperm concentration was significantly increased in supplemented patients compared to the placebo (p =.0186). Total sperm count also increased significantly (p =.0117) in the supplemented group as compared to the placebo group. Both, progressive and total motility were higher in supplemented patients (p =.0088 and p =.0120, respectively). Although pregnancy rate was not an endpoint of the study, of the 12 pregnancies that occurred during the follow-up, 10 were reported in the supplementation group. In general, all these changes were more evident in varicocele patients. In conclusion, supplementation with metabolic and antioxidant compounds could be efficacious when included in strategies to improve fertility

Is Strong Gravitational Radiation predicted by TeV-Gravity?

In TeV-gravity models the gravitational coupling to particles with energies E\sim m_{Pl} \sim 10 TeV is not suppressed by powers of ultra-small ratio E/M_{Pl} with M_{Pl} \sim 10^{19} GeV. Therefore one could imagine strong synchrotron radiation of gravitons by the accelerating particles to become the most pronounced manifestation of TeV-gravity at LHC. However, this turns out to be not true: considerable damping continues to exist, only the place of E/M_{Pl} it taken by a power of a ratio \theta\omega/E, where the typical frequency \omega of emitted radiation, while increased by a number of \gamma-factors, can not reach E/\vartheta unless particles are accelerated by nearly critical fields. Moreover, for currently available magnetic fields B \sim 10 Tesla, multi-dimensionality does not enhance gravitational radiation at all even if TeV-gravity is correct.Comment: 7 pages, LaTe