Relaxation Tribometry: A Generic Method to Identify the Nature of Contact Forces

Recent years have witnessed the development of so-called relaxation tribometers, the free oscillation of which is altered by the presence of frictional stresses within the contact. So far, analysis of such oscillations has been restricted to the shape of their decaying envelope, to identify in particular solid or viscous friction components. Here, we present a more general expression of the forces possibly acting within the contact , and retain six possible, physically relevant terms. Two of them, which had never been proposed in the context of relaxation tribometry, only affect the oscillation frequency, not the amplitude of the signal. We demonstrate that each of those six terms has a unique signature in the time-evolution of the oscillation, which allows efficient identification of their respective weights in any experimental signal. We illustrate our methodology on a PDMS sphere/glass plate torsional contact

QSO Absorption Line Constraints on Intragroup High-Velocity Clouds

We show that the number statistics of moderate redshift MgII and Lyman limit absorbers may rule out the hypothesis that high velocity clouds are infalling intragroup material.Comment: 4 pages, no figures; submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters; revised version, more general and includes more about Braun and Burton CHVC

Weaving Lighthouses and Stitching Stories: Blind and Visually Impaired People Designing E-textiles

We describe our experience of working with blind and visually impaired people to create interactive art objects that are personal to them, through a participatory making process using electronic textiles (e-textiles) and hands-on crafting techniques. The research addresses both the practical considerations about how to structure hands-on making workshops in a way which is accessible to participants of varying experience and abilities, and how effective the approach was in enabling participants to tell their own stories and feel in control of the design and making process. The results of our analysis is the offering of insights in how to run e-textile making sessions in such a way for them to be more accessible and inclusive to a wider community of participants

Yukawa Textures From Heterotic Stability Walls

A holomorphic vector bundle on a Calabi-Yau threefold, X, with h^{1,1}(X)>1 can have regions of its Kahler cone where it is slope-stable, that is, where the four-dimensional theory is N=1 supersymmetric, bounded by "walls of stability". On these walls the bundle becomes poly-stable, decomposing into a direct sum, and the low energy gauge group is enhanced by at least one anomalous U(1) gauge factor. In this paper, we show that these additional symmetries can strongly constrain the superpotential in the stable region, leading to non-trivial textures of Yukawa interactions and restrictions on allowed masses for vector-like pairs of matter multiplets. The Yukawa textures exhibit a hierarchy; large couplings arise on the stability wall and some suppressed interactions "grow back" off the wall, where the extended U(1) symmetries are spontaneously broken. A number of explicit examples are presented involving both one and two stability walls, with different decompositions of the bundle structure group. A three family standard-like model with no vector-like pairs is given as an example of a class of SU(4) bundles that has a naturally heavy third quark/lepton family. Finally, we present the complete set of Yukawa textures that can arise for any holomorphic bundle with one stability wall where the structure group breaks into two factors.Comment: 53 pages, 4 figures and 13 table

A discontinuity in the TeffT_{\rm eff}-radius relation of M-dwarfs

We report on 13 new high-precision measurements of stellar diameters for low-mass dwarfs obtained by means of near-infrared long-baseline interferometry with PIONIER at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer. Together with accurate parallaxes from Gaia DR2, these measurements provide precise estimates for their linear radii, effective temperatures, masses, and luminosities. This allows us to refine the effective temperature scale, in particular towards the coolest M-dwarfs. We measure for late-type stars with enhanced metallicity slightly inflated radii, whereas for stars with decreased metallicity we measure smaller radii. We further show that Gaia DR2 effective temperatures for M-dwarfs are underestimated by $\sim$ 8.2 % and give an empirical $M_{G}$-$T_{\rm eff}$ relation which is better suited for M-dwarfs with $T_{\rm eff}$ between 2600 and 4000 K. Most importantly, we are able to observationally identify a discontinuity in the $T_{\rm eff}$-radius plane, which is likely due to the transition from partially convective M-dwarfs to the fully convective regime. We found this transition to happen between 3200 K and 3340 K, or equivalently for stars with masses $\approx 0.23 M_{\odot}$. We find that in this transition region the stellar radii are in the range from 0.18 to 0.42$R_{\odot}$ for similar stellar effective temperatures.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, accepted in MNRA

Charmonium Suppression and Regeneration from SPS to RHIC

The production of charmonia is investigated for heavy-ion collisions from SPS to RHIC energies. Our approach incorporates two sources of $J/\Psi$ yield: (i) a direct contribution arising from early (hard) parton-parton collisions, subject to subsequent nuclear absorption, quark-gluon plasma and hadronic dissociation, and (ii) statistical production at the hadronization transition by coalescence of $c$ and $\bar{c}$ quarks. Within an expanding thermal fireball framework, the model reproduces $J/\Psi$ centrality dependencies observed at the SPS in Pb-Pb and S-U collisions reasonably well. The study of the $\Psi'/\Psi$ ratio at SPS points at the importance of the hadronic phase for $\Psi'$ interactions, possibly related to effects of chiral symmetry restoration. Predictions are given for the centrality dependence of the $N_{J/\Psi}/N_{c\bar{c}}$ ratio at full RHIC energy. We also calculate the excitation function of this ratio. The latter exhibits a characteristic minimum structure signalling the transition from the standard $J/\Psi$ suppression scenario prevailing at SPS to dominantly thermal regeneration at collider energies.Comment: 17 pages, 15 figure

Hadron form factors from sum rules for vacuum-to-hadron correlators

We analyse the extraction of the bound-state form factor from vacuum-to-hadron correlator, which is the basic object for the calculation of hadron form factors in the method of light-cone sum rules in QCD. We study this correlator in quantum mechanics, calculate it exactly, and derive the corresponding OPE. We then apply the standard procedures of QCD sum rules to isolate the ground-state form factor from this correlator. We demonstrate that fixing the effective continuum threshold, one of the key ingredients of the sum-rule calculation of bound-state parameters, poses a serious problem for sum rules based on vacuum-to-hadron correlators.Comment: 8 page

Combining Lattice QCD Results with Regge Phenomenology in a Description of Quark Distribution Functions

The most striking feature of quark distribution functions transformed to the longitudinal distance representation is the recognizable separation of small and large longitudinal distances. While the former are responsible for the average properties of parton distributions, the latter can be shown to determine specifically their small-$x$ behavior. In this paper we demonstrate how the distribution at intermediate longitudinal distances can be approximated by taking into account constraints which follow from the general properties of parton densities, such as their support and behavior at $x \to 1$. We show that the combined description of small, intermediate, and large longitudinal distances allows a good approximation of both shape and magnitude of parton distribution functions. As an application we have calculated low-virtuality C even and odd (valence) u and d quark parton densities of the nucleon and the C-even transversity distribution $h_1(x)$, combining recent QCD sum rules and lattice QCD results with phenomenological information about their small-$x$ behavior.Comment: LaTeX, 17 pages including 7 figures, shorter version will appear in Phys. Lett.

RS-invariant all-orders renormalon resummations for some QCD observables

We propose a renormalon-inspired resummation of QCD perturbation theory based on approximating the renormalization scheme (RS) invariant effective charge beta-function coefficients by the portion containing the highest power of $b$=$\frac{1}{6}(11N$--$2N_{f})$, for SU($N$) QCD with $N_{f}$ quark flavours. This can be accomplished using exact large-$N_{f}$ all-orders results. The resulting resummation is RS-invariant and the exact next-to-leading order (NLO) and next-to-NLO (NNLO) coefficients in any RS are included. This improves on a previously employed naive resummation of the leading-$b$ piece of the perturbative coefficients which is RS-dependent, making its comparison with fixed-order perturbative results ambiguous. The RS-invariant resummation is used to assess the reliability of fixed-order perturbation theory for the $e^{+}e^{-}$ $R$-ratio, the analogous $\tau$-lepton decay ratio $R_{\tau}$, and Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS) sum rules, by comparing it with the exact NNLO results in the effective charge RS. For the $R$-ratio and $R_{\tau}$, where large-order perturbative behaviour is dominated by a leading ultra-violet renormalon singularity, the comparison indicates fixed-order perturbation theory to be very reliable. For DIS sum rules, which have a leading infra-red renormalon singularity, the performance is rather poor. In this way we estimate that at LEP/SLD energies ideal data on the $R$-ratio could determine $\alpha_{s}(M_{Z})$ to three-significant figures, and for the $R_{\tau}$ we estimate a theoretical uncertainty $\delta\alpha_{s}(m_{\tau})\simeq0.008$ corresponding to $\delta\alpha_{s}(M_{Z})\simeq0.001$. This encouragingly small uncertainty is much less than has recently been deduced from comparison with the ambiguous naive resummation.Comment: 25 pages, uses LaTeX, 12 Postscript figures, epsfig.sty 'elsart.sty' and 'elsart12.sty' are available via anonymous-ftp at ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/elsevie