The management of plantar warts - a podiatric perspective

The number of treatments offered for a particular condition is often indicative of the unsatisfactory success rate in curing the problem. This can be demonstrated by the documented plethora of treatments suggested for plantar warts (or verrucae), which range from the traditional to the bizarre — including banana skins, hypnosis and nail varnish. This paper aims to review the problem of plantar warts and take an evidence-based approach, balancing research findings coupled with the authors’ combined 40 years of experience in managing this common problem

Precision Measurement of Time-Reversal Symmetry Violation with Laser-Cooled Polyatomic Molecules

Precision searches for time-reversal symmetry violating interactions in polar molecules are extremely sensitive probes of high energy physics beyond the Standard Model. To extend the reach of these probes into the PeV regime, long coherence times and large count rates are necessary. Recent advances in laser cooling of polar molecules offer one important tool -- optical trapping. However, the types of molecules that have been laser-cooled so far do not have the highly desirable combination of features for new physics searches, such as the ability to fully polarize and the existence of internal co-magnetometer states. We show that by utilizing the internal degrees of freedom present only in molecules with at least three atoms, these features can be attained simultaneously with molecules that have simple structure and are amenable to laser cooling and trapping

Finite Conductivity in Mesoscopic Hall Bars of Inverted InAs/GaSb Quantum Wells

We have studied experimentally the low temperature conductivity of mesoscopic size InAs/GaSb quantum well Hall bar devices in the inverted regime. Using a pair of electrostatic gates we were able to move the Fermi level into the electron-hole hybridization state, and observe a mini gap. Temperature dependence of the conductivity in the gap shows residual conductivity, which can be consistently explained by the contributions from the free as well as the hybridized carriers in the presence of impurity scattering, as proposed by Naveh and Laikhtman [Euro. Phys. Lett., 55, 545-551 (2001)]. Experimental implications for the stability of proposed helical edge states will be discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

An averaging principle for diffusions in foliated spaces

Consider an SDE on a foliated manifold whose trajectories lay on compact leaves. We investigate the effective behavior of a small transversal perturbation of order $\varepsilon$. An average principle is shown to hold such that the component transversal to the leaves converges to the solution of a deterministic ODE, according to the average of the perturbing vector field with respect to invariant measures on the leaves, as $\varepsilon$ goes to zero. An estimate of the rate of convergence is given. These results generalize the geometrical scope of previous approaches, including completely integrable stochastic Hamiltonian system.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOP982 in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The cos⁡2ϕ\cos2\phi azimuthal asymmetry of unpolarized dilepton production at the ZZ-pole

We calculate the Boer-Mulders effect contribution to the $\cos2\phi$ azimuthal asymmetry of unpolarized dilepton production near the $Z$-pole. Based on the tree-level expression in the transverse momentum dependent factorization framework, we show that the corresponding asymmetry near the $Z$-pole is negative, which is opposite to the asymmetry in the low $Q^2$ region, dominated by the production via a virtual photon. We calculate the asymmetry generated by the Boer-Mulders effect near the $Z$-pole at RHIC, with $\sqrt{s}=500$ GeV. We find that the magnitude of the asymmetry is several percent, and therefore it is measurable. The experimental confirmation of this sign change of the asymmetry from the low $Q^2$ region to the $Z$-pole provides direct evidence of the chiral odd structure of quarks inside an unpolarized nucleon.Comment: comments and references added, journal versio

Optical properties of metal nanoparticles with arbitrary shapes

We have studied the optical properties of metallic nanoparticles with arbitrary shape. We performed theoretical calculations of the absorption, extinction and scattering efficiencies, which can be directly compared with experiments, using the Discrete Dipole Approximation (DDA). In this work, the main features in the optical spectra have been investigated depending of the geometry and size of the nanoparticles. The origin of the optical spectra are discussed in terms of the size, shape and material properties of each nanoparticle, showing that a nanoparticle can be distinguish by its optical signature.Comment: 19 pages + 8 figure

Does Exchange Rate Risk Matter for Welfare?

Volatility in exchange rates is a prominent feature of open economies, a fact which has motivated elaborate attempts in many countries at exchange rate management. This paper analyzes quantitatively the welfare effects of exchange rate risk in a general two-country environment. It finds that the effects of uncertainty tend to be small for the types of simplified cases considered in past literature. But it identifies other cases, not considered previously, in which these effects can be significantly larger. These include habit persistence, where agents are more sensitive to risk, and also incomplete asset market structures which allow for asymmetries between countries. The latter case suggests that countries which are hosts to an international reserve currency, such as the U.S. or members of the euro zone, may accrue