On Love-type waves in a finitely deformed magnetoelastic layered half-space

In this paper, the propagation of Love-type waves in a homogeneously and finitely deformed layered half-space of an incompressible non-conducting magnetoelastic material in the presence of an initial uniform magnetic field is analyzed. The equations and boundary conditions governing linearized incremental motions superimposed on an underlying deformation and magnetic field for a magnetoelastic material are summarized and then specialized to a form appropriate for the study of Love-type waves in a layered half-space. The wave propagation problem is then analyzed for different directions of the initial magnetic field for two different magnetoelastic energy functions, which are generalizations of the standard neo-Hookean and Mooney–Rivlin elasticity models. The resulting wave speed characteristics in general depend significantly on the initial magnetic field as well as on the initial finite deformation, and the results are illustrated graphically for different combinations of these parameters. In the absence of a layer, shear horizontal surface waves do not exist in a purely elastic material, but the presence of a magnetic field normal to the sagittal plane makes such waves possible, these being analogous to Bleustein–Gulyaev waves in piezoelectric materials. Such waves are discussed briefly at the end of the paper

A Convex Max-Flow Segmentation of LV Using Subject-Specific Distributions on Cardiac MRI

Abstract. This work studies the convex relaxation approach to the left ventricle (LV) segmentation which gives rise to a challenging multi-region seperation with the geometrical constraint. For each region, we consider the global Bhattacharyya metric prior to evaluate a gray-scale and a ra-dial distance distribution matching. In this regard, the studied problem amounts to finding three regions that most closely match their respective input distribution model. It was previously addressed by curve evolution, which leads to sub-optimal and computationally intensive algorithms, or by graph cuts, which result in heavy metrication errors (grid bias). The proposed convex relaxation approach solves the LV segmentation through a sequence of convex sub-problems. Each sub-problem leads to a novel bound of the Bhattacharyya measure and yields the convex formulation which paves the way to build up the efficient and reliable solver. In this respect, we propose a novel flow configuration that accounts for labeling-function variations, in comparison to the existing flow-maximization con-figurations. We show it leads to a new convex max-flow formulation which is dual to the obtained convex relaxed sub-problem and does give the exact and global optimums to the original non-convex sub-problem. In addition, we present such flow perspective gives a new and simple way to encode the geometrical constraint of optimal regions. A comprehen-sive experimental evaluation on sufficient patient subjects demonstrates that our approach yields improvements in optimality and accuracy over related recent methods.

Measurement of the B0-anti-B0-Oscillation Frequency with Inclusive Dilepton Events

The $B^0$-$\bar B^0$ oscillation frequency has been measured with a sample of 23 million \B\bar B pairs collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric B Factory at SLAC. In this sample, we select events in which both B mesons decay semileptonically and use the charge of the leptons to identify the flavor of each B meson. A simultaneous fit to the decay time difference distributions for opposite- and same-sign dilepton events gives $\Delta m_d = 0.493 \pm 0.012{(stat)}\pm 0.009{(syst)}$ ps$^{-1}$.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Physical Review Letter

The ‘mosaic habitat’ concept in human evolution: past and present

The habitats preferred by hominins and other species are an important theme in palaeoanthropology, and the ‘mosaic habitat’ (also referred to as habitat heterogeneity) has been a central concept in this regard for the last four decades. Here we explore the development of this concept – loosely defined as a range of different habitat types, such as woodlands, riverine forest and savannah within a limited spatial area– in studies of human evolution in the last sixty years or so. We outline the key developments that took place before and around the time when the term ‘mosaic’ came to wider palaeoanthropological attention. To achieve this we used an analysis of the published literature, a study of illustrations of hominin evolution from 1925 onwards and an email survey of senior researchers in palaeoanthropology and related fields. We found that the term mosaic starts to be applied in palaeoanthropological thinking during the 1970’s due to the work of a number of researchers, including Karl Butzer and Glynn Isaac , with the earliest usage we have found of ‘mosaic’ in specific reference to hominin habitats being by Adriaan Kortlandt (1972). While we observe a steady increase in the numbers of publications reporting mosaic palaeohabitats, in keeping with the growing interest and specialisation in various methods of palaeoenvironmental reconstruction, we also note that there is a lack of critical studies that define this habitat, or examine the temporal and spatial scales associated with it. The general consensus within the field is that the concept now requires more detailed definition and study to evaluate its role in human evolution

Measurement of the CP-Violating Asymmetry Amplitude sin2β\beta

We present results on time-dependent CP-violating asymmetries in neutral B decays to several CP eigenstates. The measurements use a data sample of about 88 million Y(4S) --> B Bbar decays collected between 1999 and 2002 with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric-energy B Factory at SLAC. We study events in which one neutral B meson is fully reconstructed in a final state containing a charmonium meson and the other B meson is determined to be either a B0 or B0bar from its decay products. The amplitude of the CP-violating asymmetry, which in the Standard Model is proportional to sin2beta, is derived from the decay-time distributions in such events. We measure sin2beta = 0.741 +/- 0.067 (stat) +/- 0.033 (syst) and |lambda| = 0.948 +/- 0.051 (stat) +/- 0.017 (syst). The magnitude of lambda is consistent with unity, in agreement with the Standard Model expectation of no direct CP violation in these modes