Soil, wheat, cabbage and drinking water iodine in relation to human iodine status and iodine deficiency disorders in Xinjiang Province, China

Iodine is an essential trace element for humans and animals. A lack in the diet can lead to iodine deficiency disorders (IDD) the most common manifestation being goitre, an enlargement of the thyroid gland in the neck. Infants born to severely Ideficient mothers may suffer cretinism and I-deficiency is the world's most common cause of preventable mental retardation. In many countries this problem has been tackled successfully using medical interventions such as the iodination of table salt. Xinjiang Province in northwest China is a remote desert region where goitre and cretinism have been reported for many years. People in this region do not like the taste of iodised salt and prefer to use local rock-salt with very low concentrations of iodine. As an alternative treatment, previous investigators added potassium-iodate to irrigation waters in an attempt to increase the I-concentrations of crops and animals in the food supply and the I-status of the population. Initial successes were reported but the long-term effectiveness of the method had not been tested. The present study aims to assess environmental controls on iodine uptake into the food chain and in Xinjiang had the opportunity to study three contrasting area

Relativistic Ring-Diagram Nuclear Matter Calculations

A relativistic extension of the particle-particle hole-hole ring-diagram many-body formalism is developed by using the Dirac equation for single-particle motion in the medium. Applying this new formalism, calculations are performed for nuclear matter. The results show that the saturation density is improved and the equation of state becomes softer as compared to corresponding Dirac-Brueckner-Hartree-Fock calculations. Using the Bonn A potential, nuclear matter is predicted to saturate at an energy per nucleon of --15.30 MeV and a density equivalent to a Fermi momentum of 1.38 fm$^{-1}$, in excellent agreement with empirical information. The compression modulus is 152 MeV at the saturation point.Comment: 23 pages text (LaTex) and 2 figures (paper, will be faxed upon request), UI-NTH-92-0

Ballistic transport properties across nonuniform strain barriers in graphene

We study the effect of uniaxial strain on the transmission and the conductivity across a strain-induced barrier in graphene. At variance with conventional studies, which consider sharp barriers, we consider a more realistic, smooth barrier, characterized by a nonuniform, continuous strain profile. Our results are instrumental towards a better understanding of the transport properties in corrugated graphene.Comment: High Press. Res., to appea

On Black Holes and Cosmological Constant in Noncommutative Gauge Theory of Gravity

Deformed Reissner-Nordstr\"om, as well as Reissner-Nordstr\"om de Sitter, solutions are obtained in a noncommutative gauge theory of gravitation. The gauge potentials (tetrad fields) and the components of deformed metric are calculated to second order in the noncommutativity parameter. The solutions reduce to the deformed Schwarzschild ones when the electric charge of the gravitational source and the cosmological constant vanish. Corrections to the thermodynamical quantities of the corresponding black holes and to the radii of different horizons have been determined. All the independent invariants, such as the Ricci scalar and the so-called Kretschmann scalar, have the same singularity structure as the ones of the usual undeformed case and no smearing of singularities occurs. The possibility of such a smearing is discussed. In the noncommutative case we have a local disturbance of the geometry around the source, although asymptotically at large distances it becomes flat.Comment: Based on a talk given at the International Conference on Fundamental and Applied Research in Physics "Farphys 2007", 25-28 October 2007, Iasi, Romani

Covariant anomaly and Hawking radiation from the modified black hole in the rainbow gravity theory

Recently, Banerjee and Kulkarni (R. Banerjee, S. Kulkarni, arXiv:0707.2449 [hep-th]) suggested that it is conceptually clean and economical to use only the covariant anomaly to derive Hawking radiation from a black hole. Based upon this simplified formalism, we apply the covariant anomaly cancellation method to investigate Hawking radiation from a modified Schwarzschild black hole in the theory of rainbow gravity. Hawking temperature of the gravity's rainbow black hole is derived from the energy-momentum flux by requiring it to cancel the covariant gravitational anomaly at the horizon. We stress that this temperature is exactly the same as that calculated by the method of cancelling the consistent anomaly.Comment: 5 page

Tunnelling through black rings

Hawking radiation of black ring solutions to 5-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton gravity theory is analyzed by use of the Parikh-Wilczek tunnelling method. To get the correct tunnelling amplitude and emission rate, we adopted and developed the Angheben-Nadalini-Vanzo-Zerbini covariant approach to cover the effects of rotation and electronic discharge all at once, and the effect of back reaction is also taken into account. This constitute a unified approach to the tunnelling problem. Provided the first law of thermodynamics for black rings holds, the emission rate is proportional to the exponential of the change of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. Explicit calculation for black ring temperatures agree exactly with the results obtained via the classical surface gravity method and the quasilocal formalism.Comment: 10 pages, V2: various modifications throughout the text, plus a lot of newly added reference

Improved performance robustness of DSP-enabled flexible ROADMs free from optical filters and O-E-O conversions

Utilizing Hilbert-pair-based digital filtering, intensity modulation, and passive optical coupling, digital signal processing (DSP) enabled flexible reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) are reported, which are free from optical filters and optical-electrical-optical (O-E-O) conversions and offer excellent flexibility, color-lessness, gridlessness, contentionlessness, adaptability, and transparency to physical-layer network characteristics. In this paper, the ROADM performance robustness against variations in numerous network design aspects is, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, extensively explored in intensity-modulation- and direct-detection-based optical network nodes. Numerical results show that DSPs not only enable the ROADMs to dynamically and flexibly perform add/drop operations at wavelength, subwavelength, and spectrally overlapped orthogonal subband levels but also considerably improve the ROADM performance robustness against variations in modulation formats, transmission system characteristics/impairments, and terminal equipment configurations

Black Hole Entropy: From Shannon to Bekenstein

In this note we have applied directly the Shannon formula for information theory entropy to derive the Black Hole (Bekenstein-Hawking) entropy. Our analysis is semi-classical in nature since we use the (recently proposed [8]) quantum mechanical near horizon mode functions to compute the tunneling probability that goes in to the Shannon formula, following the general idea of [5]. Our framework conforms to the information theoretic origin of Black Hole entropy, as originally proposed by Bekenstein.Comment: 9 pages Latex, Comments are welcome; Thoroughly revised version, reference and acknowledgements sections enlarged, numerical error in final result corrected, no major changes, to appear in IJT

Anomaly analysis of Hawking radiation from Kaluza-Klein black hole with squashed horizon

Considering gravitational and gauge anomalies at the horizon, a new method that to derive Hawking radiations from black holes has been developed by Wilczek et al. In this paper, we apply this method to non-rotating and rotating Kaluza-Klein black holes with squashed horizon, respectively. For the rotating case, we found that, after the dimensional reduction, an effective U(1) gauge field is generated by an angular isometry. The results show that the gauge current and energy-momentum tensor fluxes are exactly equivalent to Hawking radiation from the event horizon.Comment: 15 pages, no figures, the improved version, accepted by Eur. Phys. J.

Dirac Hartree-Fock for Finite Nuclei Employing realistic Forces

We discuss two different approximation schemes for the self-consistent solution of the {\it relativistic} Brueckner-Hartree-Fock equation for finite nuclei. In the first scheme, the Dirac effects are deduced from corresponding nuclear matter calculations, whereas in the second approach the local-density approximation is used to account for the effects of correlations. The results obtained by the two methods are very similar. Employing a realistic one-boson-exchange potential (Bonn~A), the predictions for energies and radii of $^{16}$O and $^{40}$Ca come out in substantially better agreement with experiment as compared to non-relativistic approaches. As a by-product of our study, it turns out that the Fock exchange-terms, ignored in a previous investigation, are not negligible.Comment: