Observation of cone and rod photoreceptors in normal subjects and patients using a new generation adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscope.

We demonstrate the capability of a new generation adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscope (AOSLO) to resolve cones and rods in normal subjects, and confirm our findings by comparing cone and rod spacing with published histology measurements. Cone and rod spacing measurements are also performed on AOSLO images from two different diseased eyes, one affected by achromatopsia and the other by acute zonal occult outer retinopathy (AZOOR). The potential of AOSLO technology in the study of these and other retinal diseases is illustrated

Updated analysis of π\piN elastic scattering data to 2.1~GeV: The Baryon Spectrum

We present the results of energy-dependent and single-energy partial-wave analyses of $\pi$N elastic scattering data with laboratory kinetic energies below 2.1~GeV. Resonance structures have been extracted using Breit-Wigner fits, speed plots, and a complex plane mapping of the associated poles and zeroes. This is the first set of resonance parameters from a VPI analysis constrained by fixed-t dispersion relations. We have searched our solutions for structures which may have been missed in our previous analyses, finding candidates in the $S_{11}$ and $F_{15}$ partial-wave amplitudes. Our results are compared with those found by the Karlsruhe, Carnegie-Mellon$-$Berkeley, and Kent State groups.Comment: 25 pages of text plus 5 figures. Revtex file and postscript figures available via anonymous FTP at ftp://clsaid.phys.vt.edu/pub/pi

Sensitivity to the pion-nucleon coupling constant in partial-wave analyses of elastic pi-N and NN scattering and pion photoproduction

We summarize results obtained in our studies of the pion-nucleon coupling constant. Several different techniques have been applied to pi-N and NN elastic scattering data, and the existing database for single-pion photoproduction. The most reliable determination comes from pi-N elastic scattering. The sensitivity in this reaction was found to be greater, by at least a factor of 3, when compared with analyses of NN elastic scattering or single-pion photoproduction.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure. Talk given at the Uppsala workshop on the pion-nucleon coupling constan

On the determination of constitutive parametersin a hyperelastic model for a soft tissue

The aim of this paper is to study a model of hyperelastic materials and itsapplications into soft tissue mechanics. In particular, we first determine an unbounded domain of the constitutive parameters of the model making our smoothstrain energy function to be polyconvex and hence satisfying the Legendre–Hadamard condition. Thus, physically reasonable material behaviour are described by our model with these parameters and a plently of tissues can betreated. Furthermore, we localize bounded subsets of constitutive parameters in fixed physical and very general bounds and then introduce a family of descrete stress–strain curves. Whence, various classes of tissues are characterized. Ourgeneral approach is based on a detailed analytical study of the first Piola–Kirchhoff stress tensor through its dependence on the invariants and on the constitutive parameters. The uniqueness of parameters for one tissue is discussed by introducing the notion of manifold of constitutive parameters, whichis locally represented by possibly different physical quantities. The advantage of our study is that we show a possible way to improve of the usual approachesshown in the literature which are mainly based on the minimization of a costfunction as the difference between experimental and model results

Focus Point Supersymmetry Redux

Recent results from Higgs boson and supersymmetry searches at the Large Hadron Collider provide strong new motivations for supersymmetric theories with heavy superpartners. We reconsider focus point supersymmetry (FP SUSY), in which all squarks and sleptons may have multi-TeV masses without introducing fine-tuning in the weak scale with respect to variations in the fundamental SUSY-breaking parameters. We examine both FP SUSY and its familiar special case, the FP region of mSUGRA/CMSSM, and show that they are beautifully consistent with all particle, astroparticle, and cosmological data, including Higgs boson mass limits, null results from SUSY searches, electric dipole moments, b -> s gamma, B_s -> mu^+ mu^-, the thermal relic density of neutralinos, and dark matter searches. The observed deviation of the muon's anomalous magnetic moment from its standard model value may also be explained in FP SUSY, although not in the FP region of mSUGRA/CMSSM. In light of recent data, we advocate refined searches for FP SUSY and related scenarios with heavy squarks and sleptons, and we present a simplified parameter space to aid such analyses.Comment: v3: 20 pages, 20 figures, minor numerical error in relic density calculation corrected, fixed contours in figure

HESS J1632-478: an energetic relic

HESS J1632-478 is an extended and still unidentified TeV source in the galactic plane. In order to identify the source of the very high energy emission and to constrain its spectral energy distribution, we used a deep observation of the field obtained with XMM-Newton together with data from Molonglo, Spitzer and Fermi to detect counterparts at other wavelengths. The flux density emitted by HESS J1632-478 peaks at very high energies and is more than 20 times weaker at all other wavelengths probed. The source spectrum features two large prominent bumps with the synchrotron emission peaking in the ultraviolet and the external inverse Compton emission peaking in the TeV. HESS J1632-478 is an energetic pulsar wind nebula with an age of the order of 10^4 years. Its bolometric (mostly GeV-TeV) luminosity reaches 10% of the current pulsar spin down power. The synchrotron nebula has a size of 1 pc and contains an unresolved point-like X-ray source, probably the pulsar with its wind termination shock.Comment: A&A accepted, 9 pages, 5 figures, 4 table

Deformation procedure for scalar fields in cosmology

This work offers an extension of the deformation procedure introduced in field theory to the case of standard cosmology in the presence of real scalar field in flat space-time. The procedure is shown to work for many models, which give rise to several different cosmic scenarios, evolving under the presence of first-order differential equations which solve the corresponding equations of motion very appropriately