Holographic Walking Technicolor and Stability of Techni-Branes

Techni-fermions are added as stacks of D7-anti-D7 techni-branes within the framework of a holographic technicolor model that has been proposed as a realization of walking technicolor. The stability of the embedding of these branes is determined. When a sufficiently low bulk cut-off is provided the fluctuations remain small. For a longer walking region, as would be required in any realistic model of electroweak symmetry breaking, a larger bulk cut-off is needed and in this case the oscillations destabilize.Comment: Latex, 25 pages, 10 figure

Screened alpha decay in dense astrophysical plasmas and magnetars

This paper shows that ultrastrong magnetic fields (such as those of magnetars) and dense astrophysical plasmas can reduce the half life of alpha decaying nuclei by many orders of magnitude. In such environments the conventional Geiger-Nuttall law is modifed so that all half lives are shifted to dramatically lower values. Those effects, which have never been investigated before, may have significant implications on the universal abundances of heavy radioactive elements and the cosmochronological methods that rely on them.Comment: 15 RevTex pages, 3 ps figures (minor revision). This work was presented during the conference ''Supernova, 10 years of SN1993J'', April 2003, Valencia, Spain. Accepted for publication in Phys.Rev.

Stability of Fine Tuned Hierarchies in Strongly Coupled Chiral Models

A fine tuned hierarchy between a strongly coupled high energy compositeness scale and a much lower chiral symmetry breaking scale is a requisite ingredient in many models of dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking. Using a nonperturbative continuous Wilson renormalization group equation approach, we explore the stability of such a hierarchy against quantum fluctuations.Comment: 14,PURD-TH-94-1

Wilson Renormalization Group Analysis of Theories with Scalars and Fermions

The continuous block spin (Wilson) renormalization group equation governing the scale dependence of the action is constructed for theories containing scalars and fermions. A locally approximated form of this equation detailing the structure of a generalized effective potential is numerically analyzed. The role of the irrelevant operators in the nonperturbative renormalization group running is elucidated and a comparison with the 1-loop perturbative results is drawn. Focusing on the spontaneously broken phase of a model possessing a discrete symmetry forbidding an explicit fermion mass term, mass bounds on both the scalar and fermion degrees of freedom are established. The effect of the generalized Yukawa coupling on the scalar mass upper bound is emphasized.Comment: 40, PURD-TH-92-

History of clinical transplantation

How transplantation came to be a clinical discipline can be pieced together by perusing two volumes of reminiscences collected by Paul I. Terasaki in 1991-1992 from many of the persons who were directly involved. One volume was devoted to the discovery of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), with particular reference to the human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) that are widely used today for tissue matching.1 The other focused on milestones in the development of clinical transplantation.2 All the contributions described in both volumes can be traced back in one way or other to the demonstration in the mid-1940s by Peter Brian Medawar that the rejection of allografts is an immunological phenomenon.3,4 © 2008 Springer New York

Probing Heavy Higgs Boson Models with a TeV Linear Collider

The last years have seen a great development in our understanding of particle physics at the weak scale. Precision electroweak observables have played a key role in this process and their values are consistent, within the Standard Model interpretation, with a light Higgs boson with mass lower than about 200 GeV. If new physics were responsible for the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking, there would, quite generally, be modifications to this prediction induced by the non-standard contributions to the precision electroweak observables. In this article, we analyze the experimental signatures of a heavy Higgs boson at linear colliders. We show that a linear collider, with center of mass energy \sqrt{s} <= 1 TeV, would be very useful to probe the basic ingredients of well motivated heavy Higgs boson models: a relatively heavy SM-like Higgs, together with either extra scalar or fermionic degrees of freedom, or with the mixing of the third generation quarks with non-standard heavy quark modes.Comment: 21 page

Blue laser cooling transitions in Tm I

We have studied possible candidates for laser cooling transitions in $^{169}$Tm in the spectral region 410 -- 420 nm. By means of saturation absorption spectroscopy we have measured the hyperfine structure and rates of two nearly closed cycling transitions from the ground state $4\textrm{f}^{13}6\textrm{s}^2(^2\textrm{F}_0)(J_g=7/2)$ to upper states $4\textrm{f}^{12}(^3\textrm{H}_5)5\textrm{d}_{3/2}6\textrm{s}^2(J_e=9/2)$ at 410.6 nm and $4\textrm{f}^{12}(^3\textrm{F}_4)5\textrm{d}_{5/2}6\textrm{s}^2(J_e=9/2)$ at 420.4 nm and evaluated the life times of the excited levels as 15.9(8) ns and 48(6) ns respectively. Decay rates from these levels to neighboring opposite-parity levels are evaluated by means of Hartree-Fock calculations. We conclude, that the strong transition at 410.6 nm has an optical leak rate of less then $2\cdot10^{-5}$ and can be used for efficient laser cooling of $^{169}$Tm from a thermal atomic beam. The hyperfine structure of two other even-parity levels which can be excited from the ground state at 409.5 nm and 418.9 nm is also measured by the same technique. In addition we give a calculated value of $7(2)$ s$^{-1}$ for the rate of magnetic-dipole transition at 1.14 $\mu$m between the fine structure levels $(J_g=7/2)\leftrightarrow(J'_g=5/2)$ of the ground state which can be considered as a candidate for applications in atomic clocks.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Magnetism and electron spin resonance in single crystalline beta-AgNpO2(SeO3)

We report magnetization, susceptibility, electrical transport, and electron spin resonance (ESR) studies of single crystals of beta-AgNpO2(SeO3). Here the valence of the Np sites is expected to be Np(V). We observe a magnetic transition below 8 K, where the transition temperature is dependent on the effective magnetic moment. Although the transition appears to be ferromagnetic, no hysteresis is seen in the magnetization, and the saturation moment above 0.1 T is found to be about 60% of the free NpO2 ion moment. The decrease in the Np moments determined experimentally is thought to arise from crystal field and spin-orbit effects. Although Np(V) is expected to be ESR silent, we observe temperature dependent ESR spectra at ~44 GHz (for fields above the saturation field) that show slight shifts in the g-factor and line width at low temperatures. Our results provide evidence that both Np(V) and Np(IV) valences are present, where the latter may be a minority population. The crystals, although dark in appearance, are electrically insulating (rho > 10^10 Ohm-cm) at room temperature.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figure