Rational curves on fibered Calabi-Yau manifolds

We show that a smooth projective complex manifold of dimension greater than two endowed with an elliptic fiber space structure and with finite fundamental group always contains a rational curve, provided its canonical bundle is relatively trivial. As an application of this result, we prove that any Calabi-Yau manifold that admits a fibration onto a curve whose general fibers are abelian varieties always contains a rational curve

Latest evidence for a late time vacuum -- geodesic CDM interaction

We perform a reconstruction of the coupling function between vacuum energy and geodesic cold dark matter using the latest observational data. We bin the interaction in seventeen redshift bins but use a correlation prior to prevent rapid, unphysical oscillations in the coupling function. This prior also serves to eliminate any dependence of the reconstruction on the binning method. We use two different forms of the correlation prior, finding that both give similar results for the reconstruction of the dark matter -- dark energy interaction. Calculating the Bayes factor for each case, we find no meaningful evidence for deviation from the null interacting case, i.e. $\Lambda$CDM, in our reconstruction.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures. Version 2 matches published version in Physics of the Dark Universe (Figure 2 updated to better show H0 and sigma 8 tensions, additional discussion of results added in section 4.1

Short and highly efficient synthetic promoters for melanoma-specific gene expression.

Here, we report the construction and functional analysis of synthetic promoters designed for gene therapy applications requiring strong and specific gene expression in melanoma cell lines. We have analysed the transcriptional activity of different combinations of two transcriptional regulatory modules, a melanocyte-specific element from the human tyrosinase promoter and a cell-cycle-specific element from the human alpha-fetoprotein promoter. Transient expression assays in different cell lines show that several of these composite synthetic promoters can drive a strong and selective expression of a reporter gene in melanoma cell, providing us with a new powerful tool for gene therapy of melanomas

Semileptonic Form Factors

I report the current status of the heavy-light decay constants, the bag parameters and the semileptonic form factors. I compare the heavy-light decay constants with Wilson-Wilson and clover-clover fermions. Systematic errors such as scale setting and renormalization factors are also discussed. 1/M dependences for the heavy-light semileptonic form factors near $q^2 = q^2_max$ with clover-clover and NRQCD-Wilson fermions are found to be small.Comment: 12 pgs. 15 figures. Talk presented at LATTICE9

Renormalization of the effective theory for heavy quarks at small velocity

The slope of the Isgur-Wise function at the normalization point, $\xi^{(1)}(1)$,is one of the basic parameters for the extraction of the $CKM$ matrix element $V_{cb}$ from exclusive semileptonic decay data. A method for measuring this parameter on the lattice is the effective theory for heavy quarks at small velocity $v$. This theory is a variant of the heavy quark effective theory in which the motion of the quark is treated as a perturbation. In this work we study the lattice renormalization of the slow heavy quark effective theory. We show that the renormalization of $\xi^{(1)}(1)$ is not affected by ultraviolet power divergences, implying no need of difficult non-perturbative subtractions. A lattice computation of $\xi^{(1)}(1)$ with this method is therefore feasible in principle. The one-loop renormalization constants of the effective theory for slow heavy quarks are computed to order $v^2$ together with the lattice-continuum renormalization constant of $\xi^{(1)}(1)$ . We demonstrate that the expansion in the heavy-quark velocity reproduces correctly the infrared structure of the original (non-expanded) theory to every order. We compute also the one-loop renormalization constants of the slow heavy quark effective theory to higher orders in $v^2$ and the lattice-continuum renormalization constants of the higher derivatives of the $\xi$ function. Unfortunately, the renormalization constants of the higher derivatives are affected by ultraviolet power divergences, implying the necessity of numerical non-perturbative subtractions. The lattice computation of higher derivatives of the Isgur-Wise function seems therefore problematic.Comment: Latex, 43 pages, 5 figures available by fax upon request. To be published in Nucl. Phys