Quantitative and qualitative characteristics of greenery in suburban residential districts of Metro Manila

This case study was conducted to better understand the present situation of urban greenery in Marikina City, in the suburbs of metropolitan Manila, a typical large Asian city. A vegetation survey was conducted in residential districts of Marikina City, and the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of trees were analyzed. Lot size had some influence on the quantity of greenery in residential lots. In smaller lots, however, quantity did not increase in proportion to lot size. It appears, then, that the land-use controls for individual lots did not function effectively. Quantitative differences of greenery were related to qualitative differences, depending on the year or period of development of the residential area. In the newly developed residential lots, the greenery is comprised mostly of ornamental trees. Under the present circumstances, there is no assurance of sustaining the desired quantity of greenery in smaller residential lots. From these results, we proposed that regulations on lot size/coverage and promotion of tree planting involving local residents are needed to sustain urban greenery in residential districts

Symmetryless Dark Matter

It is appealing to stabilize dark matter by the same discrete symmetry that is used to explain the structure of quark and lepton mass matrices. However, to generate the observed fermion mixing patterns, any flavor symmetry must necessarily be broken, rendering dark matter unstable. We study singlet, doublet and triplet SU(2) multiplets of both scalar and fermion dark matter candidates and enumerate the conditions under which no d < 6 dark matter decay operators are generated even in the case if the flavor symmetry is broken to nothing. We show that the VEVs of flavon scalars transforming as higher multiplets (e.g. triplets) of the flavor group must be at the electroweak scale. The most economical way for that is to use SM Higgs boson(s) as flavons. Such models can be tested by the LHC experiments. This scenario requires the existence of additional Froggatt-Nielsen scalars that generate hierarchies in Yukawa couplings. We study the conditions under which large and small flavor breaking parameters can coexist without destabilizing the dark matter.Comment: 8 pages, no figure

The golden ratio prediction for the solar neutrino mixing

We present a simple texture that predicts the cotangent of the solar neutrino mixing angle to be equal to the golden ratio. This prediction is 1.4 standard deviations below the present best-fit value and final SNO and KamLAND data could discriminate it from tri-bi-maximal mixing. The neutrino mass matrix is invariant under a Z_2 x Z'_2 symmetry: that geometrically is a reflection along the diagonal of the golden rectangle. Assuming an analogous structure in the quark sector suggests a golden prediction for the Cabibbo angle, theta_C = pi/4- theta_12 = 13.3 degree, up to uncertainties comparable to V_{ub}.Comment: 5 pages. Final version, to appear on PR

How does torsional rigidity affect the wrapping transition of a semiflexible chain around a spherical core?

We investigated the effect of torsional rigidity of a semiflexible chain on the wrapping transition around a spherical core, as a model of nucleosome, the fundamental unit of chromatin. Through molecular dynamics simulation, we show that the torsional effect has a crucial effect on the chain wrapping around the core under the topological constraints. In particular, the torsional stress (i) induces the wrapping/unwrapping transition, and (ii) leads to a unique complex structure with an antagonistic wrapping direction which never appears without the topological constraints. We further examine the effect of the stretching stress for the nucleosome model, in relation to the unique characteristic effect of the torsional stress on the manner of wrapping

Non-Abelian statistics of vortices with non-Abelian Dirac fermions

We extend our previous analysis on the exchange statistics of vortices having a single Dirac fermion trapped in each core, to the case where vortices trap two Dirac fermions with U(2) symmetry. Such a system of vortices with non-Abelian Dirac fermions appears in color superconductors at extremely high densities, and in supersymmetric QCD. We show that the exchange of two vortices having doublet Dirac fermions in each core is expressed by non-Abelian representations of a braid group, which is explicitly verified in the matrix representation of the exchange operators when the number of vortices is up to four. We find that the result contains the matrices previously obtained for the vortices with a single Dirac fermion in each core as a special case. The whole braid group does not immediately imply non-Abelian statistics of identical particles because it also contains exchanges between vortices with different numbers of Dirac fermions. However, we find that it does contain, as its subgroup, a genuine non-Abelian statistics for the exchange of the identical particles, that is, vortices with the same number of Dirac fermions. This result is surprising compared with conventional understanding because all Dirac fermions are defined locally at each vortex, unlike the case of Majorana fermions for which Dirac fermions are defined non-locally by Majorana fermions located at two spatially separated vortices.Comment: 32 pages, no figures, v3: published versio

N-soliton solutions to the DKP equation and Weyl group actions

We study soliton solutions to the DKP equation which is defined by the Hirota bilinear form, {\begin{array}{llll} (-4D_xD_t+D_x^4+3D_y^2) \tau_n\cdot\tau_n=24\tau_{n-1}\tau_{n+1}, (2D_t+D_x^3\mp 3D_xD_y) \tau_{n\pm 1}\cdot\tau_n=0 \end{array} \quad n=1,2,.... where $\tau_0=1$. The $\tau$-functions $\tau_n$ are given by the pfaffians of certain skew-symmetric matrix. We identify one-soliton solution as an element of the Weyl group of D-type, and discuss a general structure of the interaction patterns among the solitons. Soliton solutions are characterized by $4N\times 4N$ skew-symmetric constant matrix which we call the $B$-matrices. We then find that one can have $M$-soliton solutions with $M$ being any number from $N$ to $2N-1$ for some of the $4N\times 4N$ $B$-matrices having only $2N$ nonzero entries in the upper triangular part (the number of solitons obtained from those $B$-matrices was previously expected to be just $N$).Comment: 22 pages, 12 figure