ASSESSMENT OF SOIL-RADIUM CONTENT, INDOOR RADON ACTIVITY AND THE ASSOCIATED RADIATION RISKS IN KOHIMA TOWN, NAGALAND

Measurements of the radium content in soil samples and adjacent indoor radon activity measurement from sites located in Kohima town of Nagaland is reported. Solid State Nuclear Track Detectors (LR-115 Type2 films) was used and the radium content are found to vary from 14.56 to 27.29 Bq.kg-1 with an arithmetic mean value of 18.98 ± 2.89 Bq.kg-1 and a geometric mean value of 18.78 ± 1.15 Bq.kg-1 inthe studied soil samples. The indoor radon activity concentrations measured are found to range between 25.9 to 75.5 Bq.m-3 with an arithmetic mean value of 49.2 ± 14.7 Bq.m-3 and a geometric mean value of 47.13 ± 1.35 Bq.m-3. A weak positive linear correlation is observed between radium content of the soil samples and indoor radon activity concentration at the study sites

Octant of θ23\theta_{23}, MH, 0νββ0\nu\beta\beta decay and vacuum alignment of A4 A_{4} flavour symmetry in an inverse seesaw model

Measurements of disappearance channel of long baseline accelerator based experiments (like NO$\nu$A) are inflicted with the problem of octant degeneracy. In these experiments, the mass hierarchy (MH) sensitivity depends upon the value of CP-violating phase $\delta_{CP}$. Moreover, MH of light neutrino masses is still not fixed. Also, the flavour structure of fermions is yet not fully understood. We discuss all these issues, in a highly predictive, low-scale inverse seesaw (ISS) model within the framework of $A_4$ flavour symmetry. Recent global analysis has shown a preference for normal hierarchy and higher octant of $\theta_{23}$, and hence we discuss our results with reference to these, and find that the vacuum alignment of $A_4$ triplet flavon (1,-1,-1) favours these results. Finally, we check if our very precise prediction on $m_{ee}$ and the lightest neutrino mass falls within the range of sensitivities of the neutrinoless double beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) experiments. We note that when octant of $\theta_{23}$ and MH is fixed by more precise measurements of future experiments, then through our results, it would be possible to precisely identify the favourable vacuum alignment corresponding to the $A_{4}$ triplet field as predicted in our model.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure

Exploring the feasibility of the cLFV decay μ→e+γ \mu \rightarrow e + \gamma in inverse and linear seesaw mechanisms with A4A_4 flavour symmetry

Flavour symmetries are required to explain the observed flavour structure of fundamental particles. In this work, we investigate the rare charged lepton flavour violating (cLFV) decay process ($\mu \rightarrow e\gamma$) in two of the low scale ($\sim$TeV) seesaw models: (i) the Inverse seesaw (ISS) and (ii) Linear seesaw (LSS) models within the framework of $A_{4}$ flavour symmetry. Apart from the $A_{4}$ flavour symmetry, some other symmetries like $U(1)_{X}$, $Z_4$ and $Z_5$ are included to construct the Lagrangian. We use results from our previous work where we computed unknown neutrino oscillation parameters within $3 \sigma$ limits of their global best fit values, and apply those results to compute the branching ratio (BR) of the muon decay for both the seesaw models. Next we compare our results with the current experimental bounds and sensitivity limits of BR($\mu \rightarrow e\gamma$) as projected by various experiments, and present a comparative analysis that which of the two models is more likely to be tested by which current/future experiment. This is done for various values of currently allowed non-unitarity parameter. This comparative study will help us to pinpoint that which of the low scale seesaw models and triplet flavon VEV alignments will be more viable and favourable for testing under a common flavour symmetry ($A_{4}$ here), and hence can help discriminate between the two models.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figure

Reordering of Source Side for a Factored English to Manipuri SMT System

Similar languages with massive parallel corpora are readily implemented by large-scale systems using either Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) or Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Translations involving low-resource language pairs with linguistic divergence have always been a challenge. We consider one such pair, English-Manipuri, which shows linguistic divergence and belongs to the low resource category. For such language pairs, SMT gets better acclamation than NMT. However, SMT’s more prominent phrase- based model uses groupings of surface word forms treated as phrases for translation. Therefore, without any linguistic knowledge, it fails to learn a proper mapping between the source and target language symbols. Our model adopts a factored model of SMT (FSMT3*) with a part-of-speech (POS) tag as a factor to incorporate linguistic information about the languages followed by hand-coded reordering. The reordering of source sentences makes them similar to the target language allowing better mapping between source and target symbols. The reordering also converts long-distance reordering problems to monotone reordering that SMT models can better handle, thereby reducing the load during decoding time. Additionally, we discover that adding a POS feature data enhances the system’s precision. Experimental results using automatic evaluation metrics show that our model improved over phrase-based and other factored models using the lexicalised Moses reordering options. Our FSMT3* model shows an increase in the automatic scores of translation result over the factored model with lexicalised phrase reordering (FSMT2) by an amount of 11.05% (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy), 5.46% (F1), 9.35% (Precision), and 2.56% (Recall), respectively

Correlation of water’s physico-chemical characteristics and trematode parasites of Channa punctata (Bloch) in Awangsoi lake, Manipur, India

Infection with trematode parasites can lead to severe change in nutrient content and may result in host mortalities and character of a water body may influence the parasitic fauna. Hence a study was carried out from 2010 to 2011 to find out a correlation of water’s physic-chemical characteristics and trematode parasites of Channa punctata (Bloch) in Awangsoi Lake, Manipur, India. During the present investigation three species of trematodes were recorded. In the present study there were concurrent infections by two or more parasite species. The percentage of infection was positively correlated with temperature, pH, DO and conductivity in Awangsoi Lake. There was a significant positive correlation (r = 0.652; p<0.05) with FCO2 and a negative correlation with alkalinity. Seasonal variation in the occurrence of these parasites may be attributed to ecological conditions, particularly distribution of intermediate hosts and also the age of the host and the life cycle of the parasite species

Evaluation of anti-inflammatory effects of the aqueous extract of Stephania rotunda in experimental animals

Background: The objective of the current study was to analyse the anti-inflammatory effects of the aqueous extract of Stephania rotunda in experimental animals. Methods: It was an experimental study conducted in the experimental laboratory with 30 acclimatized healthy albino rats and mice divided into 5 groups namely A, B, C, D, and E fed with the aqueous extract of Stephania rotunda in laboratory conditions to assess the anti-inflammatory property using Carrageenan induced rat paw oedema for acute inflammation, granuloma pouch for sub-acute inflammation and Formaldehyde induced arthritis for chronic inflammation from 17th December 2019 to 22nd January 2021. Aspirin was taken as the standard drug. Data was analysed using Chi-square test. Results: In assessment for acute inflammation, the aqueous extract of Stephania rotunda in the doses of 500 mg/kg, 1000 mg/kg and 2000 mg/kg for groups B, C and D respectively produced 17.12%, 17.12% and 18.78% inhibition of paw oedema which was statistically significant when compared to 22.65% inhibition produced by 100mg/kg of the standard drug aspirin in group E. The groups B, C and D with the extract doses of 500mg/kg, 1000mg/kg and 2000mg/kg produced 43%, 60% and 77% inhibitions of exudate formation respectively which statistically was significant as compared to the Standard aspirin of group E which produced 62% inhibition of exudate formation. In chronic inflammation testing, both the extract and standard drugs produced highly significant inhibition of paw oedema when compared to inhibition produced by the Control. Conclusions: The aqueous extract of Stephania rotunda was found to be a potent anti-inflammatory drug when compared with Aspirin. Further tests are required in a larger scale so as to ascertain the effects for human consumption

Generalization of Linearized Gouy-Chapman-Stern Model of Electric Double Layer for Nanostructured and Porous Electrodes: Deterministic and Stochastic Morphology

We generalize linearized Gouy-Chapman-Stern theory of electric double layer for nanostructured and morphologically disordered electrodes. Equation for capacitance is obtained using linear Gouy-Chapman (GC) or Debye-$\rm{\ddot{u}}$ckel equation for potential near complex electrode/electrolyte interface. The effect of surface morphology of an electrode on electric double layer (EDL) is obtained using "multiple scattering formalism" in surface curvature. The result for capacitance is expressed in terms of the ratio of Gouy screening length and the local principal radii of curvature of surface. We also include a contribution of compact layer, which is significant in overall prediction of capacitance. Our general results are analyzed in details for two special morphologies of electrodes, i.e. "nanoporous membrane" and "forest of nanopillars". Variations of local shapes and global size variations due to residual randomness in morphology are accounted as curvature fluctuations over a reference shape element. Particularly, the theory shows that the presence of geometrical fluctuations in porous systems causes enhanced dependence of capacitance on mean pore sizes and suppresses the magnitude of capacitance. Theory emphasizes a strong influence of overall morphology and its disorder on capacitance. Finally, our predictions are in reasonable agreement with recent experimental measurements on supercapacitive mesoporous systems