20,239 research outputs found
Measuring neutrino masses with supernova neutrinos
A new method to study the effects of neutrino masses on a supernova neutrino
signal is proposed. The method relies exclusively on the analysis of the full
statistics of neutrino events, it is independent of astrophysical assumptions,
and does not require the observation of any additional phenomenon to trace
possible delays in the neutrino arrival times. A statistics of several
thousands of events as could be collected by SuperKamiokande, would allow to
explore a neutrino mass range somewhat below 1eV.Comment: 3 pages; contribution to the proceedings of X Marcel Grossmann
Meeting, Rio de Janeiro, 20-26 July 200
“Not Like a Big Gap, Something We Could Handle”: Facilitating Shifts in Paradigm in the Supervision of Mathematics Graduates upon Entry into Mathematics Education
Mathematics is the discipline that a significant majority of most incoming researchers in mathematics education have prior qualifications and experience in. Upon entry into the field of mathematics education research, these newcomers–often students on a postgraduate programme in mathematics education–need a broadened understanding on how to read, converse, write and conduct research in the largely unfamiliar territory of mathematics education. The intervention into the practices of post-graduate teaching and supervision in the field of mathematics education that I describe here aims at fostering this broadened understanding and thus facilitating newcomers’ participation in the practices of the mathematics education research community. Here I outline the theoretical underpinnings of the intervention and exemplify one of its parts (an Activity Set designed to facilitate incoming students’ engagement with the mathematics education research literature). I supplement the discussion of the intervention with comments sampled from student interview and student written evaluation data as well as observations of the activities’ implementation. The main themes touched upon include: learning how to identify appropriate mathematics education literature; reading increasingly more complex writings in mathematics education; coping with the complexity of literate mathematics education discourse; working towards a contextualised understanding of literate mathematics education discourse. I conclude with indicating the directions that the intervention, and its evaluation, is currently taking and a brief discussion of broader implications, theoretical as well as concerning the supervision and teaching of post-graduate students in mathematics education
Effects of a general set of interactions on neutrino propagation in matter
This talk is based on the article hep-ph/9903517 written in collaboration
with Sven Bergmann and Yuval Grossman. An analysis of the effective potential
for neutrino propagation in matter, assuming a generic set of Lorentz invariant
non-derivative interactions is presented. In addition to vector and axial
vector couplings, also tensor interactions can give coherent effects if the
medium is polarized, and the components of a tensor potential transverse to the
direction of neutrino propagation can induce a neutrino spin-flip.Comment: 7 pages; plenary talk given at COSMO-99, Trieste, Italy, Sept 27 -
Oct 2, 199
Do bold shakeups of the learning-teaching agreement work? A commognitive perspective on a LUMOS low lecture innovation
Mathematics undergraduates, and their lecturers, often describe the transition into university mathematics as a process of enculturation into new mathematical practices and new ways of constructing and conveying mathematical meaning (Nardi, 1996). Whatcharacterises the breadth and intensity of this enculturation varies according to factors such as (Artigue, Kent & Batanero, 2007): student background and preparedness for university level studies of mathematics; the aims and scope of each of the courses that thestudents take in the early days of their arrival at university; how distant the pedagogical approaches taken in these courses are from those taken in the secondary schools that the students come from; the students’ affective dispositions towards the subject and their expectations for what role mathematics is expected to play in their professional life. On their part, lecturers’ views on their pedagogical role may also vary according to factors such as (Nardi, 2008): length of teaching experience; type of courses (pure, applied, optional, compulsory etc.) they teach; perceptions of the goals of university mathematics teaching (such as to facilitate access to the widest possible population of participants in mathematics or select those likely to push the frontiers of the discipline); and, crucially, institutional access to innovative practices, e.g. through funded, encouraged and acknowledged research into such practices.In this paper I draw on my experiences as a member of the International Advisory Board of the LUMOS project (Barton & Paterson, 2013) to comment on aspects of aforementioned student enculturation. Here I see this enculturation as the adaptation of different ways to act and communicate mathematically. I take a perspective on these ways to act and communicate as discourses and I treat the changes to the mathematical and pedagogical perspectives of those who act as discursive shifts. To this purpose, I deploythe approach introduced by Anna Sfard (2008) and known as the commognitive approach
Naturally large Yukawa hierarchies
The spontaneous breaking of the quark/lepton flavor symmetry by
means of three multiplets of scalar `Yukawa fields' admits vacua with one O(1)
and two vanishing vacuum expectation values (vevs) for each multiplet. If the
number of generations is equal to three, and only in this case, the vanishing
vevs are lifted to exponentially suppressed entries by the inclusion of
symmetry invariant logarithmic terms. A strong hierarchy for the Yukawa
couplings and a quark mixing matrix that approaches a diagonal form are
obtained in a natural way from O(1) parameters. This scenario provides a
concrete realization of the minimal flavor violation hypothesis.Comment: 8 pages. Added two references. Section 2a and 3 revised. Results
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