Electromagnetic form factor via Minkowski and Euclidean Bethe-Salpeter amplitudes

The electromagnetic form factors calculated through Euclidean Bethe-Salpeter amplitude and through the light-front wave function are compared with the one found using the Bethe-Salpeter amplitude in Minkowski space. The form factor expressed through the Euclidean Bethe-Salpeter amplitude (both within and without static approximation) considerably differs from the Minkowski one, whereas form factor found in the light-front approach is almost indistinguishable from it.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures. Contribution to the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics (FB20), Pisa, Italy, September 10-14, 2007. To be published in "Few-Body Systems

HIV-1 infection of microglial cells in a reconstituted humanized mouse model and identification of compounds that selectively reverse HIV latency.

Most studies of HIV latency focus on the peripheral population of resting memory T cells, but the brain also contains a distinct reservoir of HIV-infected cells in microglia, perivascular macrophages, and astrocytes. Studying HIV in the brain has been challenging, since live cells are difficult to recover from autopsy samples and primate models of SIV infection utilize viruses that are more myeloid-tropic than HIV due to the expression of Vpx. Development of a realistic small animal model would greatly advance studies of this important reservoir and permit definitive studies of HIV latency. When radiation or busulfan-conditioned, immune-deficient NSG mice are transplanted with human hematopoietic stem cells, human cells from the bone marrow enter the brain and differentiate to express microglia-specific markers. After infection with replication competent HIV, virus was detected in these bone marrow-derived human microglia. Studies of HIV latency in this model would be greatly enhanced by the development of compounds that can selectively reverse HIV latency in microglial cells. Our studies have identified members of the CoREST repression complex as key regulators of HIV latency in microglia in both rat and human microglial cell lines. The monoamine oxidase (MAO) and potential CoREST inhibitor, phenelzine, which is brain penetrant, was able to stimulate HIV production in human microglial cell lines and human glial cells recovered from the brains of HIV-infected humanized mice. The humanized mice we have developed therefore show great promise as a model system for the development of strategies aimed at defining and reducing the CNS reservoir

Seismic imaging at the cross-roads: Active, passive, exploration and solid Earth

Science has grown from our need to understand the world around us. Seismology is no different, with earthquakes and their destructive effect on society providing the motivation to understand the Earth's seismic wavefield. The question of when seismology as a science really began is an interesting one, but it is unlikely that there will ever be a universally agreed-upon date, partly because of the incompleteness of the historical record, and partly because the definition of what constitutes science varies from person to person. For instance, one could regard 1889 as the true birth of seismology, because that is when the first distant earthquake was detected by an instrument; in this case Ernst von Rebeur-Paschwitz detected an earthquake in Japan using a pendulum in Potsdam, Germany (Ben-Menahem, 1995). However, even the birth of instrumental seismology could be contested; the so-called Zhang Heng directional “seismoscope” (detects ground motion but not as a function of time) was invented in 132 CE (Rui and Yan-xiang, 2006), and is said to have detected a four-hundred mile distant earthquake which was not felt at the location of the instrument Needham, 1959, Dewey and Byerly, 1969. Prior to instrumental seismology, observations of earthquakes were not uncommon; for instance, Aristotle provided a classification of earthquakes based on the nature of observed ground motion (Ben-Menahem, 1995)

Bethe-Salpeter equation for doubly heavy baryons in the covariant instantaneous approximation

In the heavy quark limit, a doubly heavy baryon is regarded as composed of a heavy diquark and a light quark. We establish the Bethe-Salpeter (BS) equations for the heavy diquarks and the doubly heavy baryons, respectively, to leading order in a $1/m_{Q}$ expansion. The BS equations are solved numerically under the covariant instantaneous approximation with the kernels containing scalar confinement and one-gluon-exchange terms. The masses for the heavy diquarks and the doubly heavy baryons are obtained and the non-leptonic decay widths for the doubly heavy baryons emitting a pseudo-scalar meson are calculated within the model.Comment: Corrections to the text, two references added, version accepted for publication in Physical Review

In memoriam of Andrés Pérez-Estaún

Non

A new vibrational level of the H2+_2^+ molecular ion

A new state of the H$_2^+$ molecular ion with binding energy of 1.09$\times10^{-9}$ a.u. below the first dissociation limit is predicted, using highly accurate numerical nonrelativistic quantum calculations. It is the first L=0 excited state, antisymmetric with respect to the exchange of the two protons. It manifests itself as a huge p-H scattering length of $a=750\pm 5$ Bohr radii.Comment: 6 pages + 3 figure

Manifestation of three-body forces in three-body Bethe-Salpeter and light-front equations

Bethe-Salpeter and light-front bound state equations for three scalar particles interacting by scalar exchange-bosons are solved in ladder truncation. In contrast to two-body systems, the three-body binding energies obtained in these two approaches differ significantly from each other: the ladder kernel in light-front dynamics underbinds by approximately a factor of two compared to the ladder Bethe-Salpeter equation. By taking into account three-body forces in the light-front approach, generated by two exchange-bosons in flight, we find that most of this difference disappears; for small exchange masses, the obtained binding energies coincide with each other.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures, submitted in Few-Body System

Antiproton-Hydrogen annihilation at sub-kelvin temperatures

The main properties of the interaction of ultra low-energy antiprotons ($E\le10^{-6}$ a.u.) with atomic hydrogen are established. They include the elastic and inelastic cross sections and Protonium (Pn) formation spectrum. The inverse Auger process ($Pn+e \to H+\bar{p}$) is taken into account in the framework of an unitary coupled-channels model. The annihilation cross-section is found to be several times smaller than the predictions made by the black sphere absorption models. A family of $\bar{p}H$ nearthreshold metastable states is predicited. The dependence of Protonium formation probability on the position of such nearthreshold S-matrix singularities is analysed. An estimation for the $H\bar{H}$ annihilation cross section is obtained.Comment: latex.tar.gz file, 22 pages, 9 figure