Effect of panel type and ethnicity on apples in Singapore using temporal dominance method : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Food Technology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

Recently, there has been an increased in oral processing studies focusing on the detection of changes in sensational attributes of food product in real time. However, the integration of sensational and emotional attributes with liking is a relatively new line of enquiry, yet if pursued may enable a deeper understanding of the sensory and emotional experience of consumers. This study successfully trials a new system combining temporal dominance of sensation (TDS), emotion (TDE) and liking (TDL) to examine the impact of training and ethnicity on the real time sensory evaluation of popular apple varieties currently being sold in Singapore. A short training (60 minutes) with food references was proven to be highly beneficial and had generated a higher dominance rate, faster first dominant attribute detected, lower variation in the dominant attribute selected and frequent complex textural attributes chosen, showing a better understanding of the terms used. The number of attributes used and dominant end time were however not affected by training. Contrary to TDE, a positive emotional or sensational attribute dominant did not relate to a direct relationship with liking. Non-dominant sensational or emotional attributes might have interfered in the liking observed. Training aside from improving the understanding of attributes used was also found to close the gap between hedonic scores and frequency liking counts. Ethnicity effects were subsequently examined using a Semi Trained Panel consisting of 8 Chinese, 7 Indian and 6 Malay with differing results observed. Chinese were more expressive and positive in the attributes chosen in TDS and TDE while Malay was the opposite. Fibrous (Chinese and Indian) and floral (Chinese) were picked up more readily by different ethnicities. Differences in product where Granny Smith evoked disliking in Malay and Indian, was positively rated by Chinese. These variations could mainly be due to differences in cultural practises and diet. The incorporation of TDS and TDL provided better product understanding than the narrow hedonic range obtained. Furthermore, the mapping of TDS, TDE and TDL curves suggested the ability to condense information allowing dynamic relation to be drawn in a single graph. However, due to the qualitative nature of the graphs, the interpretation of result might be subjective

Inclusive hch_c production at BB factories

Within the nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization framework, we investigate the inclusive production of the $h_c$ meson associated with either light hadrons or charmed hadrons at $B$ factory energy $\sqrt{s}=10.58$ GeV. Both the leading color-singlet and color-octet channels are included. For the $h_c$ production associated with light hadrons, the total production rate is dominated by the color-octet channel, thus the future measurement of this process may impose useful constraint on the value of the color-octet matrix element $$; for the $h_c$ production associated with charmed hadrons, the total production rate is about one order of magnitude smaller, and dominated by the color-singlet channel.Comment: v2, 23 pages, 1 table, 6 figures. Minor corrections, and a note added, accepted for publication in PR

Giant Magnons and Spiky Strings on S^3 with B-field

We study solutions for a rotating string on S^3 with a background NS-NS B-field and show the existence of spiky string and giant magnon as two limiting solutions. We make a connection to the sine-Gordon model via the Polyakov worldsheet action and study the effect of B-field. In particular, we find the magnon solution can be mapped to the excitation of a fractional spin chain. We conjecture a B-deformed SYM to be the gauge theory dual to this background.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, more references adde

Modular matrices from universal wave function overlaps in Gutzwiller-projected parton wave functions

We implement the universal wave function overlap (UWFO) method to extract modular $S$ and $T$ matrices for topological orders in Gutzwiller-projected parton wave functions (GPWFs). The modular $S$ and $T$ matrices generate a projective representation of $SL(2,\mathbb{Z})$ on the degenerate-ground-state Hilbert space on a torus and may fully characterize the 2+1D topological orders, i.e. the quasi-particle statistics and chiral central charge (up to $E_8$ bosonic quantum Hall states). We used the variational Monte Carlo method to computed the $S$ and $T$ matrices of the chiral spin liquid (CSL) constructed by the GPWF on the square lattice, and confirm that the CSL carries the same topological order as the $\nu=\frac{1}{2}$ bosonic Laughlin state. We find that the non-universal exponents in UWFO can be small and direct numerical computation is able to be applied on relatively large systems. We also discuss the UWFO method for GPWFs on other Bravais lattices in two and three dimensions by using the Monte Carlo method. UWFO may be a powerful method to calculate the topological order in GPWFs.Comment: 5 pages with 3 figure