Spiritual friendship in the works of Alfonso X of Castile: images of interaction between the sacred and spiritual worlds of thirteenth-century Iberia

During the Middle Ages the predominant Christian mentality played a fundamental role in establishing the rules according to which both personal and emotional connections between individuals, and the links between humans and the supernatural, were forged. Considering this, the present study will focus on a topic largely unexplored, the medieval Iberian interpretation of friendship, which will be examined through the analysis of the thirteenth‐century production ascribed to Alfonso X of Castile’s scriptorium. In particular, special emphasis will be devoted to the Marian collection of the Cantigas de Santa María together with several references to the legal corpus of the Siete Partidas

Analytic formulas for the rapid evaluation of the orbit response matrix and chromatic functions from lattice parameters in circular accelerators

Measurements and analysis of orbit response matrix have been providing for decades a formidable tool in the detection of linear lattice imperfections and their correction. Basically all storage- ring-based synchrotron light sources across the world make routinely use of this technique in their daily operation, reaching in some cases a correction of linear optics down to 1% beta beating and 0.1% coupling. During the design phase of a new storage ring it is also applied in simulations for the evaluation of magnetic and mechanical tolerances. However, this technique is known for its intrinsic slowness compared to other methods based on turn-by-turn beam position data, both in the measurement and in the data analysis. In this paper analytic formulas are derived and discussed that shall greatly speed up this second part. The mathematical formalism based on the Lie algebra and the resonance driving terms is extended to the off-momentum regime and explicit analytic formulas for the evaluation of chromatic functions from lattice parameters are also derived. The robustness of these formulas, which are linear in the magnet strengths, is tested with different lattice configurations

Nearby radio loud AGN and the Unified Model

The statistical study of the parsec scale properties of radio sources is crucial to get information on the nature of the central engine and to provide the foundations of the current unified theories, suggesting that the appearance of active galactic nuclei depends strongly on orientation. We started a project to observe at sub-arcsec resolution a complete sample of 94 nearby (z<0.1) radio galaxies, the Bologna Complete Sample, which is not affected by any selection effect on the jet velocity and orientation with respect to the line of sight. Up to now, we published our parsec scale analysis of 77/94 sources. Here, we describe the last VLBA observations at 5 GHz and EVN data at 18 cm obtained for the 17 remaining faintest radio core (<5 mJy at 5 GHz in VLA images) BCS sources and we report our preliminary results on the whole complete sample.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure; accepted for publication in the proceeding of the "12th European VLBI Network Symposium and Users Meeting - EVN 2014" (7-10 October 2014, Cagliari, Italy); published online in Proceedings of Science, PoS(EVN 2014)09