31 research outputs found
Rotating Black Holes which Saturate a Bogomol'nyi Bound
We construct and study the electrically charged, rotating black hole solution
in heterotic string theory compactified on a dimensional torus. This
black hole is characterized by its mass, angular momentum, and a
dimensional electric charge vector. One of the novel features of this solution
is that for , its extremal limit saturates the Bogomol'nyi bound. This is
in contrast with the case where the rotating black hole solution develops
a naked singularity before the Bogomol'nyi bound is reached. The extremal black
holes can be superposed, and by taking a periodic array in , one obtains
effectively four dimensional solutions without naked singularities.Comment: 13 pages, no figure
Topology, Entropy and Witten Index of Dilaton Black Holes
We have found that for extreme dilaton black holes an inner boundary must be
introduced in addition to the outer boundary to give an integer value to the
Euler number. The resulting manifolds have (if one identifies imaginary time)
topology and Euler number in contrast to
the non-extreme case with . The entropy of extreme dilaton black
holes is already known to be zero. We include a review of some recent ideas due
to Hawking on the Reissner-Nordstr\"om case. By regarding all extreme black
holes as having an inner boundary, we conclude that the entropy of {\sl all}
extreme black holes, including black holes, vanishes. We discuss the
relevance of this to the vanishing of quantum corrections and the idea that the
functional integral for extreme holes gives a Witten Index. We have studied
also the topology of ``moduli space'' of multi black holes. The quantum
mechanics on black hole moduli spaces is expected to be supersymmetric despite
the fact that they are not HyperK\"ahler since the corresponding geometry has
torsion unlike the BPS monopole case. Finally, we describe the possibility of
extreme black hole fission for states with an energy gap. The energy released,
as a proportion of the initial rest mass, during the decay of an
electro-magnetic black hole is 300 times greater than that released by the
fission of an nucleus.Comment: 51 pages, 4 figures, LaTeX. Considerably extended version. New
sections include discussion of the Witten index, topology of the moduli
space, black hole sigma model, and black hole fission with huge energy
releas
International nosocomial infection control consortium (INICC) report, data summary of 36 countries, for 2004-2009
The results of a surveillance study conducted by the International Nosocomial Infection Control Consortium (INICC) from January 2004 through December 2009 in 422 intensive care units (ICUs) of 36 countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe are reported. During the 6-year study period, using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN; formerly the National Nosocomial Infection Surveillance system [NNIS]) definitions for device-associated health care-associated infections, we gathered prospective data from 313,008 patients hospitalized in the consortium's ICUs for an aggregate of 2,194,897 ICU bed-days. Despite the fact that the use of devices in the developing countries' ICUs was remarkably similar to that reported in US ICUs in the CDC's NHSN, rates of device-associated nosocomial infection were significantly higher in the ICUs of the INICC hospitals; the pooled rate of central line-associated bloodstream infection in the INICC ICUs of 6.8 per 1,000 central line-days was more than 3-fold higher than the 2.0 per 1,000 central line-days reported in comparable US ICUs. The overall rate of ventilator-associated pneumonia also was far higher (15.8 vs 3.3 per 1,000 ventilator-days), as was the rate of catheter-associated urinary tract infection (6.3 vs. 3.3 per 1,000 catheter-days). Notably, the frequencies of resistance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates to imipenem (47.2% vs 23.0%), Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates to ceftazidime (76.3% vs 27.1%), Escherichia coli isolates to ceftazidime (66.7% vs 8.1%), Staphylococcus aureus isolates to methicillin (84.4% vs 56.8%), were also higher in the consortium's ICUs, and the crude unadjusted excess mortalities of device-related infections ranged from 7.3% (for catheter-associated urinary tract infection) to 15.2% (for ventilator-associated pneumonia). Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved