'Breaking the glass': preserving social history in virtual environments

New media technologies play an important role in the evolution of our society. Traditional museums and heritage sites have evolved from the ‘cabinets of curiosity’ that focused mainly on the authority of the voice organising content, to the places that offer interactivity as a means to experience historical and cultural events of the past. They attempt to break down the division between visitors and historical artefacts, employing modern technologies that allow the audience to perceive a range of perspectives of the historical event. In this paper, we discuss virtual reconstruction and interactive storytelling techniques as a research methodology and educational and presentation practices for cultural heritage sites. We present the Narrating the Past project as a case study, in order to illustrate recent changes in the preservation of social history and guided tourist trails that aim to make the visitor’s experience more than just an architectural walk through

Dark Matter in the Standard Model Extension with Singlet Quark

We analyze the possibility of hadron Dark Matter carriers consisting of singlet quark and the light standard one. It is shown that stable singlet quarks generate effects of new physics which do not contradict to restrictions from precision electroweak data. The neutral and charged pseudoscalar low-lying states are interpreted as the Dark Matter particle and its mass-degenerated partner. We evaluated their masses and lifetime of the charged component, and describe asymptotics of the potential of low-energy interactions of these particles with nucleons and with each other. Some peculiarities of Sommerfeld enhancement effect in the annihilation process are also discussed.Comment: 13 pages, 2 tabl

Near-threshold Z-pair production in the semi-phenomenological model of unstable particles

Near-threshold production of neutral boson pairs is considered within the framework of the model of unstable particles with smeared mass. The results of calculations are in good agreement with LEP II data and Monte-Carlo simulations.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure