94 research outputs found
A Pilot Study on effects of vaccination on immunity of broiler chickens
A pilot study was carried out with the aim of highlighting the effects of NDV vaccine on the immune responses of broiler chickens challenged with NDV. Twenty (20) broilers of day-old were used for the study. They were grouped into five of four per group. During the study they were fed with standard feeds and clean water ad libitum. Both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups were challenged with 0.2 saline suspension of 106 ELD50 intradermal inoculation of NDV challenged strain. The vaccinated groups showed neither clinical signs nor symptoms of NDV infections while unvaccinated group showed 100% mortality after 48hr. This result indicate that vaccines is still very important in the prevention, management and control of poultry diseases as maternal immunity passed on to the young chicks at precocial stage could not be relied on to fight against infectious disease in broiler chickens. Therefore, the use of locally produced vaccines should be encouraged among farmers for the prevention, control and management of outbreaks of viral infections in our community. Key: Challenged, Poultry birds- broilers, Newcastle disease virus, Vaccinatio
Displacement Operator Formalism for Renormalization and Gauge Dependence to All Orders
We present a new method for determining the renormalization of Green
functions to all orders in perturbation theory, which we call the displacement
operator formalism, or the D-formalism, in short. This formalism exploits the
fact that the renormalized Green functions may be calculated by displacing by
an infinite amount the renormalized fields and parameters of the theory with
respect to the unrenormalized ones. With the help of this formalism, we are
able to obtain the precise form of the deformations induced to the Nielsen
identities after renormalization, and thus derive the exact dependence of the
renormalized Green functions on the renormalized gauge-fixing parameter to all
orders. As a particular non-trivial example, we calculate the gauge-dependence
of at two loops in the framework of an Abelian Higgs model, using a
gauge-fixing scheme that preserves the Higgs-boson low-energy theorem for
off-shell Green functions. Various possible applications and future directions
are briefly discussed.Comment: 41 pages, 8 figure
Direct observation of incommensurate magnetism in Hubbard chains
The interplay between magnetism and doping is at the origin of exotic
strongly correlated electronic phases and can lead to novel forms of magnetic
ordering. One example is the emergence of incommensurate spin-density waves
with a wave vector that does not match the reciprocal lattice. In one dimension
this effect is a hallmark of Luttinger liquid theory, which also describes the
low energy physics of the Hubbard model. Here we use a quantum simulator based
on ultracold fermions in an optical lattice to directly observe such
incommensurate spin correlations in doped and spin-imbalanced Hubbard chains
using fully spin and density resolved quantum gas microscopy. Doping is found
to induce a linear change of the spin-density wave vector in excellent
agreement with Luttinger theory predictions. For non-zero polarization we
observe a decrease of the wave vector with magnetization as expected from the
Heisenberg model in a magnetic field. We trace the microscopic origin of these
incommensurate correlations to holes, doublons and excess spins which act as
delocalized domain walls for the antiferromagnetic order. Finally, when
inducing interchain coupling we observe fundamentally different spin
correlations around doublons indicating the formation of a magnetic polaron
Gauge-Independent Off-Shell Fermion Self-Energies at Two Loops: The Cases of QED and QCD
We use the pinch technique formalism to construct the gauge-independent
off-shell two-loop fermion self-energy, both for Abelian (QED) and non-Abelian
(QCD) gauge theories. The new key observation is that all contributions
originating from the longitudinal parts of gauge boson propagators, by virtue
of the elementary tree-level Ward identities they trigger, give rise to
effective vertices, which do not exist in the original Lagrangian; all such
vertices cancel diagrammatically inside physical quantities, such as current
correlation functions or S-matrix elements. We present two different, but
complementary derivations: First, we explicitly track down the aforementioned
cancellations inside two-loop diagrams, resorting to nothing more than basic
algebraic manipulations. Second, we present an absorptive derivation,
exploiting the unitarity of the S-matrix, and the Ward identities imposed on
tree-level and one-loop physical amplitudes by gauge invariance, in the case of
QED, or by the underlying Becchi-Rouet-Stora symmetry, in the case of QCD. The
propagator-like sub-amplitude defined by means of this latter construction
corresponds precisely to the imaginary parts of the effective self-energy
obtained in the former case; the real part may be obtained from a (twice
subtracted) dispersion relation. As in the one-loop case, the final two-loop
fermion self-energy constructed using either method coincides with the
conventional fermion self-energy computed in the Feynman gauge.Comment: 30 pages; uses axodraw (axodraw.sty included in the src); final
version to appear in Phys. Rev.
Asymptotic properties of Born-improved amplitudes with gauge bosons in the final state
For processes with gauge bosons in the final state we show how to
continuously connect with a single Born-improved amplitude the resonant region,
where resummation effects are important, with the asymptotic region far away
from the resonance, where the amplitude must reduce to its tree-level form.
While doing so all known field-theoretical constraints are respected, most
notably gauge-invariance, unitarity and the equivalence theorem. The
calculations presented are based on the process , mediated by a
possibly resonant Higgs boson; this process captures all the essential
features, and can serve as a prototype for a variety of similar calculations.
By virtue of massive cancellations the resulting closed expressions for the
differential and total cross-sections are particularly compact.Comment: 23 pages, Latex, 4 Figures, uses axodra
The pinch technique at two-loops: The case of mass-less Yang-Mills theories
The generalization of the pinch technique beyond one loop is presented. It is
shown that the crucial physical principles of gauge-invariance, unitarity, and
gauge-fixing-parameter independence single out at two loops exactly the same
algorithm which has been used to define the pinch technique at one loop,
without any additional assumptions. The two-loop construction of the pinch
technique gluon self-energy, and quark-gluon vertex are carried out in detail
for the case of mass-less Yang-Mills theories, such as perturbative QCD. We
present two different but complementary derivations. First we carry out the
construction by directly rearranging two-loop diagrams. The analysis reveals
that, quite interestingly, the well-known one-loop correspondence between the
pinch technique and the background field method in the Feynman gauge persists
also at two-loops. The renormalization is discussed in detail, and is shown to
respect the aforementioned correspondence. Second, we present an absorptive
derivation, exploiting the unitarity of the -matrix and the underlying BRS
symmetry; at this stage we deal only with tree-level and one-loop physical
amplitudes. The gauge-invariant sub-amplitudes defined by means of this
absorptive construction correspond precisely to the imaginary parts of the
-point functions defined in the full two-loop derivation, thus furnishing a
highly non-trivial self-consistency check for the entire method. Various future
applications are briefly discussed.Comment: 29 pages, uses Revtex, 22 Figures in a separate ps fil
Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Virus Subtype H5N1 in Africa: A Comprehensive Phylogenetic Analysis and Molecular Characterization of Isolates
Highly pathogenic avian influenza virus A/H5N1 was first officially reported in Africa in early 2006. Since the first outbreak in Nigeria, this virus spread rapidly to other African countries. From its emergence to early 2008, 11 African countries experienced A/H5N1 outbreaks in poultry and human cases were also reported in three of these countries. At present, little is known of the epidemiology and molecular evolution of A/H5N1 viruses in Africa. We have generated 494 full gene sequences from 67 African isolates and applied molecular analysis tools to a total of 1,152 A/H5N1 sequences obtained from viruses isolated in Africa, Europe and the Middle East between 2006 and early 2008. Detailed phylogenetic analyses of the 8 gene viral segments confirmed that 3 distinct sublineages were introduced, which have persisted and spread across the continent over this 2-year period. Additionally, our molecular epidemiological studies highlighted the association between genetic clustering and area of origin in a majority of cases. Molecular signatures unique to strains isolated in selected areas also gave us a clearer picture of the spread of A/H5N1 viruses across the continent. Mutations described as typical of human influenza viruses in the genes coding for internal proteins or associated with host adaptation and increased resistance to antiviral drugs have also been detected in the genes coding for transmembrane proteins. These findings raise concern for the possible human health risk presented by viruses with these genetic properties and highlight the need for increased efforts to monitor the evolution of A/H5N1 viruses across the African continent. They further stress how imperative it is to implement sustainable control strategies to improve animal and public health at a global level
The Two-Loop Pinch Technique in the Electroweak Sector
The generalization of the two-loop Pinch Technique to the Electroweak Sector
of the Standard Model is presented. We restrict ourselves to the case of
conserved external currents, and provide a detailed analysis of both the
charged and neutral sectors. The crucial ingredient for this construction is
the identification of the parts discarded during the pinching procedure with
well-defined contributions to the Slavnov-Taylor identity satisfied by the
off-shell one-loop gauge-boson vertices; the latter are nested inside the
conventional two-loop self-energies. It is shown by resorting to a set of
powerful identities that the two-loop effective Pinch Technique self-energies
coincide with the corresponding ones computed in the Background Feynman gauge.
The aforementioned identities are derived in the context of the
Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism, a fact which enables the individual treatment of
the self-energies of the photon and the -boson. Some possible
phenomenological applications are briefly discussed.Comment: 50 pages, uses axodra
Updated unified phylogenetic classification system and revised nomenclature for Newcastle disease virus
Several Avian paramyxoviruses 1 (synonymous with Newcastle disease virus or NDV, used hereafter) classification systems have been proposed for strain identification and differentiation. These systems pioneered classification efforts; however, they were based on different approaches and lacked objective criteria for the differentiation of isolates. These differences have created discrepancies among systems, rendering discussions and comparisons across studies difficult. Although a system that used objective classification criteria was proposed by Diel and co-workers in 2012, the ample worldwide circulation and constant evolution of NDV, and utilization of only some of the criteria, led to identical naming and/or incorrect assigning of new sub/genotypes. To address these issues, an international consortium of experts was convened to undertake in-depth analyses of NDV genetic diversity. This consortium generated curated, up-to-date, complete fusion gene class I and class II datasets of all known NDV for public use, performed comprehensive phylogenetic neighbor-Joining, maximum-likelihood, Bayesian and nucleotide distance analyses, and compared these inference methods. An updated NDV classification and nomenclature system that incorporates phylogenetic topology, genetic distances, branch support, and epidemiological independence was developed. This new consensus system maintains two NDV classes and existing genotypes, identifies three new class II genotypes, and reduces the number of sub-genotypes. In order to track the ancestry of viruses, a dichotomous naming system for designating sub-genotypes was introduced. In addition, a pilot dataset and sub-trees rooting guidelines for rapid preliminary genotype identification of new isolates are provided. Guidelines for sequence dataset curation and phylogenetic inference, and a detailed comparison between the updated and previous systems are included. To increase the speed of phylogenetic inference and ensure consistency between laboratories, detailed guidelines for the use of a supercomputer are also provided. The proposed unified classification system will facilitate future studies of NDV evolution and epidemiology, and comparison of results obtained across the world
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