2,237 research outputs found
Three form potential in (special) minimal supergravity superspace and supermembrane supercurrent
This contribution begins the study of the complete superfield Lagrangian
description of the interacting system of D=4 N=1 supergravity (SUGRA) and
supermembrane. Firstly, we review a 'three form supergravity' by Ovrut and
Waldram, which we prefer to call 'special minimal supergravity'. This off-shell
formulation of simple SUGRA is appropriate for our purposes as the
supermembrane action contains the so-called Wess-Zumino term given by the
integral over a three form potential in superspace, C3. We describe this
formulation in the frame of Wess--Zumino superfield approach, showing how the
basic variations of minimal SUGRA are restricted by the conditions of the
existence of a three-form potential C3 in its superspace. In this language the
effect of dynamical generation of cosmological constant, known to be
characteristic for this formulation of SUGRA, appears in its superfield form,
first described by Ogievetsky and Sokatchev in their formulation of SUGRA as a
theory of axial vector superfield. Secondly, we vary the supermembrane action
with respect to the special minimal SUGRA superfields (basic variations) and
obtain the supercurrent superfields as well as the supergravity superfield
equations with the supermembrane contributions.Comment: 18 pages, no figures. V2: Important references added. The abstract
and presentation have been changed to reflect the overloop with that.
Submitted to the QTS7 Proceedings. J. Phys. style use
Scattering from supramacromolecular structures
We study theoretically the scattering imprint of a number of branched
supramacromolecular architectures, namely, polydisperse stars and dendrimeric,
hyperbranched structures. We show that polydispersity and nature of branching
highly influence the intermediate wavevector region of the scattering structure
factor, thus providing insight into the morphology of different aggregates
formed in polymer solutions.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures To appear in PR
Detecting new physics contributions to the D0-D0bar mixing through their effects on B decays
New physics effects may yield a detectable mass difference in the D0-D0bar
system, Delta m_D. Here we show that this has an important impact on some B -->
D decays. The effect involves a new source of CP violation, which arises from
the interference between the phases in the B --> D decays and those in the
D0-D0bar system. This interference is naturally large. New physics may well
manifest itself through Delta m_D contributions to these B decays.Comment: 10 pages, Revtex, no figures. To appear in PR
Onset of dissipation in ballistic atomic wires
Electronic transport at finite voltages in free-standing gold atomic chains
of up to 7 atoms in length is studied at low temperatures using a scanning
tunneling microscope (STM). The conductance vs voltage curves show that
transport in these single-mode ballistic atomic wires is non-dissipative up to
a finite voltage threshold of the order of several mV. The onset of dissipation
and resistance within the wire corresponds to the excitation of the atomic
vibrations by the electrons traversing the wire and is very sensitive to
strain.Comment: Revtex4, 4 pages, 3 fig
Compressible Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin-glass model
We introduce a Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin-glass model with the addition of
elastic degrees of freedom. The problem is formulated in terms of an effective
four-spin Hamiltonian in the pressure ensemble, which can be treated by the
replica method. In the replica-symmetric approximation, we analyze the
pressure-temperature phase diagram, and obtain expressions for the critical
boundaries between the disordered and the ordered (spin-glass and
ferromagnetic) phases. The second-order para-ferromagnetic border ends at a
tricritical point, beyond which the transition becomes discontinuous. We use
these results to make contact with the temperature-concentration phase diagrams
of mixtures of hydrogen-bonded crystals.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures; added references, added conten
On the Papapetrou field in vacuum
In this paper we study the electromagnetic fields generated by a Killing
vector field in vacuum space-times (Papapetrou fields). The motivation of this
work is to provide new tools for the resolution of Maxwell's equations as well
as for the search, characterization, and study of exact solutions of Einstein's
equations. The first part of this paper is devoted to an algebraic study in
which we give an explicit and covariant procedure to construct the principal
null directions of a Papapetrou field. In the second part, we focus on the main
differential properties of the principal directions, studying when they are
geodesic, and in that case we compute their associated optical scalars. With
this information we get the conditions that a principal direction of the
Papapetrou field must satisfy in order to be aligned with a multiple principal
direction of the Weyl tensor in the case of algebraically special vacuum
space-times. Finally, we illustrate this study using the Kerr, Kasner and pp
waves space-times.Comment: 24 pages, LaTeX2e, IOP style. To appear in Classical and Quantum
Gravit
Geologia e património geológico dos Parques Naturais de Montesinho e do Douro Internacional (Nordeste de Portugal) : resultados de um projecto de investigação
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)
Ulocuplumab (BMS-936564 / MDX1338): a fully human anti-CXCR4 antibody induces cell death in chronic lymphocytic leukemia mediated through a reactive oxygen species-dependent pathway.
The CXCR4 receptor (Chemokine C-X-C motif receptor 4) is highly expressed in different hematological malignancies including chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). The CXCR4 ligand (CXCL12) stimulates CXCR4 promoting cell survival and proliferation, and may contribute to the tropism of leukemia cells towards lymphoid tissues. Therefore, strategies targeting CXCR4 may constitute an effective therapeutic approach for CLL. To address that question, we studied the effect of Ulocuplumab (BMS-936564), a fully human IgG4 anti-CXCR4 antibody, using a stroma--CLL cells co-culture model. We found that Ulocuplumab (BMS-936564) inhibited CXCL12 mediated CXCR4 activation-migration of CLL cells at nanomolar concentrations. This effect was comparable to AMD3100 (Plerixafor--Mozobil), a small molecule CXCR4 inhibitor. However, Ulocuplumab (BMS-936564) but not AMD3100 induced apoptosis in CLL at nanomolar concentrations in the presence or absence of stromal cell support. This pro-apoptotic effect was independent of CLL high-risk prognostic markers, was associated with production of reactive oxygen species and did not require caspase activation. Overall, these findings are evidence that Ulocuplumab (BMS-936564) has biological activity in CLL, highlight the relevance of the CXCR4-CXCL12 pathway as a therapeutic target in CLL, and provide biological rationale for ongoing clinical trials in CLL and other hematological malignancies
Exotic particles below the TeV from low scale flavour theories
A flavour gauge theory is observable only if the symmetry is broken at
relatively low energies. The intrinsic parity-violation of the fermion
representations in a flavour theory describing quark, lepton and higgsino
masses and mixings generically requires anomaly cancellation by new fermions.
Benchmark supersymmetric flavour models are built and studied to argue that: i)
the flavour symmetry breaking should be about three orders of magnitude above
the higgsino mass, enough also to efficiently suppress FCNC and CP violations
coming from higher-dimensional operators; ii) new fermions with exotic decays
into lighter particles are typically required at scales of the order of the
higgsino mass.Comment: 19 pages, references added, one comment and one footnote added,
results unchange
Can codimension-two branes solve the cosmological constant problem?
It has been suggested that codimension-two braneworlds might naturally
explain the vanishing of the 4D effective cosmological constant, due to the
automatic relation between the deficit angle and the brane tension. To
investigate whether this cancellation happens dynamically, and within the
context of a realistic cosmology, we study a codimension-two braneworld with
spherical extra dimensions compactified by magnetic flux. Assuming Einstein
gravity, we show that when the brane contains matter with an arbitrary equation
of state, the 4D metric components are not regular at the brane, unless the
brane has nonzero thickness. We construct explicit 6D solutions with thick
branes, treating the brane matter as a perturbation, and find that the universe
expands consistently with standard Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) cosmology.
The relation between the brane tension and the bulk deficit angle becomes
for a general equation of state. However, this
relation does not imply a self-tuning of the effective 4D cosmological constant
to zero; perturbations of the brane tension in a static solution lead to
deSitter or anti-deSitter braneworlds. Our results thus confirm other recent
work showing that codimension-two braneworlds in nonsupersymmetric Einstein
gravity do not lead to a dynamical relaxation of the cosmological constant, but
they leave open the possibility that supersymmetric versions can be compatible
with self-tuning.Comment: Revtex4, 17 pages, references added, typos corrected, minor points
clarified. Matches published versio
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