1,403 research outputs found
Program and abstracts of the joint annual meeting of the American society of tropical medicine and hygiene and the American society of parasitologists : abstracts
Rapid brain discrimination of sounds of objects.
Electrical neuroimaging in humans identified the speed and spatiotemporal brain mechanism whereby sounds of living and man-made objects are discriminated. Subjects performed an "oddball" target detection task, selectively responding to sounds of either living or man-made objects on alternating blocks, which were controlled for in their spectrogram and harmonics-to-noise ratios between categories. Analyses were conducted on 64-channel auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) from nontarget trials. Comparing responses to sounds of living versus man-made objects, these analyses tested for modulations in local AEP waveforms, global response strength, and the topography of the electric field at the scalp. In addition, the local autoregressive average distributed linear inverse solution was applied to periods of observed modulations. Just 70 ms after stimulus onset, a common network of brain regions within the auditory "what" processing stream responded more strongly to sounds of man-made versus living objects, with differential activity within the right temporal and left inferior frontal cortices. Over the 155-257 ms period, the duration of activity of a brain network, including bilateral temporal and premotor cortices, differed between categories of sounds. Responses to sounds of living objects peaked approximately 12 ms later and the activity of the brain network active over this period was prolonged relative to that in response to sounds of man-made objects. The earliest task-related effects were observed at approximately 100 ms poststimulus onset, placing an upper limit on the speed of cortical auditory object discrimination. These results provide critical temporal constraints on human auditory object recognition and semantic discrimination processes
Real Options: A Tool for Managing Technical Risk in a Mine Plan
NPV is a static measure of project value which does not discriminate between levels of internal and external risk in project valuation. Due to current investment project?s characteristics, a much more complex model is needed: one that includes the value of flexibility and the different risk levels associated with variables subject to uncertainty (price, costs, exchange rates, grade and tonnage of the deposits, cut off grade, among many others). Few of these variables present any correlation or can be treated uniformly. In this context, Real Option Valuation (ROV) arose more than a decade ago, as a mainly theoretical model with the potential for simultaneous calculation of the risk associated with such variables. This paper reviews the literature regarding the application of Real Options Valuation in mining, noting the prior focus on external risks, and presents a case study where ROV is applied to quantify risk associated to mine planning
The effect of spontaneous collapses on neutrino oscillations
We compute the effect of collapse models on neutrino oscillations. The effect
of the collapse is to modify the evolution of the `spatial' part of the wave
function, which indirectly amounts to a change on the flavor components. In
many respects, this phenomenon is similar to neutrino propagation through
matter. For the analysis we use the mass proportional CSL model, and perform
the calculation to second order perturbation theory. As we will show, the CSL
prediction is very small - mainly due to the very small mass of neutrinos - and
practically undetectable.Comment: 24 pages, RevTeX. Updated versio
Limits on excited tau leptons masses from leptonic tau decays
We study the effects induced by excited leptons on the leptonic tau decay at
one loop level. Using a general effective lagrangian approach to describe the
couplings of the excited leptons, we compute their contributions to the
leptonic decays and use the current experimental values of the branching ratios
to put limits on the mass of excited states and the substructure scale.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.
TeV scale resonant leptogenesis from supersymmetry breaking
We propose a model of TeV-scale resonant leptogenesis based upon recent
models of the generation of light neutrino masses from supersymmetry-breaking
effects with TeV-scale right-handed (rhd) neutrinos, . The model leads to
naturally large cosmological lepton asymmetries via the resonant behaviour of
the one-loop self-energy contribution to decay. Our model addresses the
primary problems of previous phenomenological studies of low-energy
leptogenesis: a rational for TeV-scale rhd neutrinos with small Yukawa
couplings so that the out-of equilibrium condition for decay is
satisfied; the origin of the tiny, but non-zero mass splitting required between
at least two masses; and the necessary non-trivial breaking of flavour
symmetries in the rhd neutrino sector. The low mass-scale of the rhd neutrinos
and their superpartners, and the TeV-scale -terms automatically contained
within the model offer opportunities for partial direct experimental tests of
this leptogenesis mechanism at future colliders.Comment: 10 Pages latex, version for JHE
RVB Contribution to Superconductivity in
We view as electronically equivalent to (non-staggered) graphite
( layer) that has undergone a zero gap semiconductor to a superconductor
phase transition by a large c-axis (chemical) pressure due to layers.
Further, like the \ppi bonded planar organic molecules, graphite is an old
resonating valence bond (RVB) system. The RVB's are the `preexisting cooper
pairs' in the `parental' zero gap semiconducting (graphite) sheets that
manifests themselves as a superconducting ground state of the transformed
metal. Some consequences are pointed out.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure, RevTex. Based on a talk given at the Institute
Seminar Week, IMSc, Madras (12-16, Feb. 2001
Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations and New Physics
We study the robustness of the determination of the neutrino masses and
mixing from the analysis of atmospheric and K2K data under the presence of
different forms of phenomenologically allowed new physics in the nu_mu--nu_tau
sector. We focus on vector and tensor-like new physics interactions which allow
us to treat, in a model independent way, effects due to the violation of the
equivalence principle, violations of the Lorentz invariance both CPT conserving
and CPT violating, non-universal couplings to a torsion field and non-standard
neutrino interactions with matter. We perform a global analysis of the full
atmospheric data from SKI together with long baseline K2K data in the presence
of nu_mu -> nu_tau transitions driven by neutrino masses and mixing together
with sub-dominant effects due to these forms of new physics. We show that
within the present degree of experimental precision, the extracted values of
masses and mixing are robust under those effects and we derive the upper bounds
on the possible strength of these new interactions in the nu_mu--nu_tau sector.Comment: 22 pages, LaTeX file using RevTEX4, 5 figures and 4 tables include
Probing neutrino non-standard interactions with atmospheric neutrino data
We have reconsidered the atmospheric neutrino anomaly in light of the laetst
data from Super-Kamiokande contained events and from Super-Kamiokande and MACRO
up-going muons. We have reanalysed the proposed solution to the atmospheric
neutrino anomaly in terms of non-standard neutrino-matter interactions (NSI) as
well as the standard nu_mu -> nu_tau oscillations (OSC). Our statistical
analysis shows that a pure NSI mechanism is now ruled out at 99%, while the
standard nu_mu -> nu_tau OSC mechanism provides a quite remarkably good
description of the anomaly. We therefore study an extended mechanism of
neutrino propagation which combines both oscillation and non-standard
neutrino-matter interactions, in order to derive limits on flavour-changing
(FC) and non-universal (NU) neutrino interactions. We obtain that the
off-diagonal flavour-changing neutrino parameter epsilon and the diagonal
non-universality neutrino parameter epsilon' are confined to -0.03 < epsilon <
0.02 and |epsilon'| < 0.05 at 99.73% CL. These limits are model independent and
they are obtained from pure neutrino-physics processes. The stability of the
neutrino oscillation solution to the atmospheric neutrino anomaly against the
presence of non-standard neutrino interactions establishes the robustness of
the near-maximal atmospheric mixing and massive-neutrino hypothesis. The best
agreement with the data is obtained for Delta_m^2 = 2.3*10^{-3} eV^2,
sin^2(2*theta) = 1, epsilon = 6.7*10^{-3} and epsilon' = 1.1*10^{-3}, although
the chi^2 function is quite flat in the epsilon and epsilon' directions for
epsilon, epsilon' -> 0.Comment: 26 pages, LaTeX file using REVTeX4, 1 table and 12 figures included.
Added a revised analysis which takes into account the new 1489-day
Super-Kamiokande and final MACRO data. The bound on NSI parameters is
considerably improve
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