Impact for Agents

Impact for agents. Most of the agent research community has been predicting greater impact for years and many of us have been working to help the process along. Yet the tremendous growth on the research front has not been met with

Abdominopelvic Splenosis—An Unusual Cause of Tenesmus

Splenosis is a rare condition defined as seeding and autotransplantation of splenic tissue, typically after blunt abdominal trauma (e.g. from road traffic collision). Sites of splenosis ranging from intrathoracic to intrapelvic have been reported, and symptoms vary greatly depending on the site and size of lesions. We present the use of Tc-99m sulphur colloid SPECT/CT in diagnosing a case of multiple abdominopelvic splenosis as the cause of new-onset tenesmus and constipation, which was initially thought to be due to colorectal malignancy, 47 years following the initial abdominal trauma

The drive system of the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescope

The MAGIC telescope is an imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope, designed to observe very high energy gamma-rays while achieving a low energy threshold. One of the key science goals is fast follow-up of the enigmatic and short lived gamma-ray bursts. The drive system for the telescope has to meet two basic demands: (1) During normal observations, the 72-ton telescope has to be positioned accurately, and has to track a given sky position with high precision at a typical rotational speed in the order of one revolution per day. (2) For successfully observing GRB prompt emission and afterglows, it has to be powerful enough to position to an arbitrary point on the sky within a few ten seconds and commence normal tracking immediately thereafter. To meet these requirements, the implementation and realization of the drive system relies strongly on standard industry components to ensure robustness and reliability. In this paper, we describe the mechanical setup, the drive control and the calibration of the pointing, as well as present measurements of the accuracy of the system. We show that the drive system is mechanically able to operate the motors with an accuracy even better than the feedback values from the axes. In the context of future projects, envisaging telescope arrays comprising about 100 individual instruments, the robustness and scalability of the concept is emphasized.Comment: 15 pages, 12 (10) figures, submitted to Astroparticle Physics, a high resolution version of the paper (particularly fig. 1) is available at http://publications.mppmu.mpg.de/2008/MPP-2008-101/FullText.pd

Minimal Flavor Violation and the Scale of Supersymmetry Breaking

In this paper we explore the constraints from B-physics observables in SUSY models of Minimal Flavor Violation, in the large tan beta regime, for both low and high scale supersymmetry breaking scenarios. We find that the rare B-decays b -> s gamma and B_s -> mu+ mu- can be quite sensitive to the scale M at which supersymmetry breaking is communicated to the visible sector. In the case of high scale supersymmetry breaking, we show that the additional gluino contribution to the b -> s gamma and B_s -> mu+ mu- rare decay rates can be significant for large tan beta, mu and M_3. The constraints on B_u -> tau nu are relatively insensitive to the precise scale of M. We also consider the additional constraints from the present direct Higgs searches at the Tevatron in the inclusive H/A -> tau tau channel, and the latest CDMS direct dark matter detection experiments. We find that altogether the constraints from B-physics, Higgs physics and direct dark matter searches can be extremely powerful in probing regions of SUSY parameter space for low M_A and large tan beta, leading to a preference for models with a lightest CP-even Higgs mass close to the current experimental limit. We find interesting regions of parameter space that satisfy all constraints and can be probed by Higgs searches at the Tevatron and the LHC and by direct dark matter searches in the near future.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures. Added citations. Published in PR

Information on the structure of the a1 from tau decay

The decay $\tau\to \pi\pi\pi\nu$ is analysed using different methods to account for the resonance structure, which is usually ascribed to the a1. One scenario is based on the recently developed techniques to generate axial-vector resonances dynamically, whereas in a second calculation the a1 is introduced as an explicit resonance. We investigate the influence of different assumptions on the result. In the molecule scenario the spectral function is described surprisingly well by adjusting only one free parameter. This result can be systematically improved by adding higher order corrections to the iterated Weinberg-Tomozawa interaction. Treating the a1 as an explicit resonance on the other hand leads to peculiar properties

Energy based method for numerical fatigue analysis of multidirectional carbon fibre reinforced plastics

This paper describes experiments on multiaxial fibre reinforced plastic laminates, which were performed to obtain calibration data for numerical fatigue analyses. For this purpose, fatigue tests of laminates with multidirectional layers subjected to constant amplitude and block loading (0 <= R<1 or R<1) were analysed. The presented simulation results display the fatigue behaviour of carbon fibre reinforced plastics for unidirectional loading conditions and a selected laminate

Cosmic-ray induced background intercomparison with actively shielded HPGe detectors at underground locations

The main background above 3\,MeV for in-beam nuclear astrophysics studies with $\gamma$-ray detectors is caused by cosmic-ray induced secondaries. The two commonly used suppression methods, active and passive shielding, against this kind of background were formerly considered only as alternatives in nuclear astrophysics experiments. In this work the study of the effects of active shielding against cosmic-ray induced events at a medium deep location is performed. Background spectra were recorded with two actively shielded HPGe detectors. The experiment was located at 148\,m below the surface of the Earth in the Reiche Zeche mine in Freiberg, Germany. The results are compared to data with the same detectors at the Earth's surface, and at depths of 45\,m and 1400\,m, respectively.Comment: Minor errors corrected; final versio

Higgs-Stoponium Mixing Near the Stop-Antistop Threshold

Supersymmetric extensions of the standard model contain additional heavy neutral Higgs bosons that are coupled to heavy scalar top quarks (stops). This system exhibits interesting field theoretic phenomena when the Higgs mass is close to the stop-antistop production threshold. Existing work in the literature has examined the digluon-to-diphoton cross section near threshold and has focused on enhancements in the cross section that might arise either from the perturbative contributions to the Higgs-to-digluon and Higgs-to-diphoton form factors or from mixing of the Higgs boson with stoponium states. Near threshold, enhancements in the relevant amplitudes that go as inverse powers of the stop-antistop relative velocity require resummations of perturbation theory and/or nonperturbative treatments. We present a complete formulation of threshold effects at leading order in the stop-antistop relative velocity in terms of nonrelativistic effective field theory. We give detailed numerical calculations for the case in which the stop-antistop Green's function is modeled with a Coulomb-Schr\"odinger Green's function. We find several general effects that do not appear in a purely perturbative treatment. Higgs-stop-antistop mixing effects displace physical masses from the threshold region, thereby rendering the perturbative threshold enhancements inoperative. In the case of large Higgs-stop-antistop couplings, the displacement of a physical state above threshold substantially increases its width, owing to its decay width to a stop-antistop pair, and greatly reduces its contribution to the cross section.Comment: 45 pages, 13 figures, minor corrections, references added, figures 2--5 updated, version published in Phys. Rev.

Large System Analysis of Linear Precoding in Correlated MISO Broadcast Channels under Limited Feedback

In this paper, we study the sum rate performance of zero-forcing (ZF) and regularized ZF (RZF) precoding in large MISO broadcast systems under the assumptions of imperfect channel state information at the transmitter and per-user channel transmit correlation. Our analysis assumes that the number of transmit antennas $M$ and the number of single-antenna users $K$ are large while their ratio remains bounded. We derive deterministic approximations of the empirical signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) at the receivers, which are tight as $M,K\to\infty$. In the course of this derivation, the per-user channel correlation model requires the development of a novel deterministic equivalent of the empirical Stieltjes transform of large dimensional random matrices with generalized variance profile. The deterministic SINR approximations enable us to solve various practical optimization problems. Under sum rate maximization, we derive (i) for RZF the optimal regularization parameter, (ii) for ZF the optimal number of users, (iii) for ZF and RZF the optimal power allocation scheme and (iv) the optimal amount of feedback in large FDD/TDD multi-user systems. Numerical simulations suggest that the deterministic approximations are accurate even for small $M,K$.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor