Hadron production in electron-positron annihilation computed from the gauge gravity correspondence

We provide a non-perturbative expression for the hadron production in electron-positron annihilation at zero temperature in a strongly coupled, large-Nc SU(Nc) field theory with Nf << Nc quark flavors. The resulting expressions are valid to leading order in the electromagnetic coupling constant but non-perturbatively in the SU(Nc) interactions and the mass of the quark. We obtain this quantity by computing the imaginary part of the hadronic vacuum polarization function Pi_q using holographic techniques, providing an alternative to the known method that uses the spectrum of infinitely stable mesons determined by the normalizable modes of the appropriated fields in the bulk. Our result exhibits a structure of poles localized at specific real values of q^2, which coincide with the ones found using the normalizable modes, and extends it offering the unique analytic continuation of this distribution to a function defined for values of q^2 over the complex plane. This analytic continuation permits to include a finite decay width for the mesons. By comparison with experimental data we find qualitatively good agreement on the shape of the first pole, when using the rho meson parameters and choosing a proper normalization factor. We then estimate the contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon finding an agreement within 25%, for this choice of parameters.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure. Extended version with minor changes in emphasis and references adde

Aging under Shear: Structural Relaxation of a Non-Newtonian Fluid

The influence of an applied shear field on the dynamics of an aging colloidal suspension has been investigated by the dynamic light scattering determination of the density autocorrelation function. Though a stationary state is never observed, the slow dynamics crosses between two different non-equilibrium regimes as soon as the structural relaxation time approaches the inverse shear rate. In the shear dominated regime (at high shear rate values) the structural relaxation time is found to be strongly sensitive to shear rate while aging proceeds at a very slow rate. The effect of shear on the detailed shape of the density autocorrelation function is quantitatively described assuming that the structural relaxation process arises from the heterogeneous superposition of many relaxing units each one independently coupled to shear with a parallel composition rule for timescales.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Colloidal attraction induced by a temperature gradient

Colloidal crystals are of extreme importance for applied research, such as photonic crystals technology, and for fundamental studies in statistical mechanics. Long range attractive interactions, such as capillary forces, can drive the spontaneous assembly of such mesoscopic ordered structures. However long range attractive forces are very rare in the colloidal realm. Here we report a novel strong and long ranged attraction induced by a thermal gradient in the presence of a wall. Switching on and off the thermal gradient we can rapidly and reversibly form stable hexagonal 2D crystals. We show that the observed attraction is hydrodynamic in nature and arises from thermal induced slip flow on particle surfaces. We used optical tweezers to directly measure the force law and compare it to an analytic prediction based on Stokes flow driven by Marangoni forces.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Robust approach to f(R) gravity

We consider metric f(R) theories of gravity without mapping them to their scalar-tensor counterpart, but using the Ricci scalar itself as an "extra" degree of freedom. This approach avoids then the introduction of a scalar-field potential that might be ill defined (not single valued). In order to explicitly show the usefulness of this method, we focus on static and spherically symmetric spacetimes and deal with the recent controversy about the existence of extended relativistic objects in certain class of f(R) models.Comment: 5 pages; 2 figures (4 panels); minor corrections to match the published version; panel adde