439 research outputs found
WATERWEB - Water Resource Strategies and Drought Alleviation in Western Balkan Agriculture: An EU INCO-WB Project
A three-year project, within the EU FP6 INCO-WB programme, with four EU and three WB partners,
started in spring 2004 to develop strategies to manage water resources for three regions in Serbia and
Montenegro and Macedonia from a river basin scale through the farm and crop scales to single plant
water use, taking account of environmental, socio-economic and health implications of different types
of land-water use. Consortium members will study river flow, evaporation regimes, rainfall patterns,
runoff and water availability in relation to land management, using GIS to categorize two regions near
Belgrade, Serbia and Ovce Pole, Macedonia. Water quality and nutrient use will be studied in relation
to eutrophication, micro-biological hazards and ecotoxicology on the farm scale, together with trials on
water and nutrient use to test deficit irrigation techniques with maize, grapevine, potato, tomato and
quinoa. Results will be extended to tests on selected local farmsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Structures for Interacting Composite Fermions: Stripes, Bubbles, and Fractional Quantum Hall Effect
Much of the present day qualitative phenomenology of the fractional quantum
Hall effect can be understood by neglecting the interactions between composite
fermions altogether. For example the fractional quantum Hall effect at
corresponds to filled composite-fermion Landau levels,and
the compressible state at to the Fermi sea of composite fermions.
Away from these filling factors, the residual interactions between composite
fermions will determine the nature of the ground state. In this article, a
model is constructed for the residual interaction between composite fermions,
and various possible states are considered in a variational approach. Our study
suggests formation of composite-fermion stripes, bubble crystals, as well as
fractional quantum Hall states for appropriate situations.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure
Phylogenetic and pathotype analysis of Escherichia coli swine isolates from Southern Brazil
The current study evaluated the presence of virulence factors by a multiplex PCR technique and then phylogenetically classified the studied strains into groups A, B1, B2 and D, according to Clermont et al. (2000), in 152 intestinal and extraintestinal swine isolates of Escherichia coli. Seventy seven isolates tested were positive for virulence factors. Phylogenetic characterization placed 21 samples into group A, 65 into B1, 19 into B2 and 47 into D. Fourteen urine samples were classified as uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC), nine were both UPEC and enterotoxigenic E. coli (ETEC) and four were ETEC only. The most common phylogenetic classifications were B1 and D groups. Of the analyzed fecal samples, 25 were classified as ETEC. Phylogenetically, the group of higher occurrence was B1, followed by B2, A and D. For the small intestine samples, 20 were classified as ETEC. Phylogenetic analysis found groups B1 and A to be the most commons in these samples. Six isolated tissue samples were classified as ETEC and most of them were designated as group D by phylogenetic classification. The phylogenetic analysis could be employed in veterinary laboratories in the E. coli isolates screening, including the possibility of vaccine strain selection and epidemiological searches
Mechanical Dissipation in Silicon Flexures
The thermo-mechanical properties of silicon make it of significant interest
as a possible material for mirror substrates and suspension elements for future
long-baseline gravitational wave detectors. The mechanical dissipation in 92um
thick single-crystal silicon cantilevers has been observed over the
temperature range 85 K to 300 K, with dissipation approaching levels down to
phi = 4.4E-7.Comment: 7 pages. Accepted by Phys Lett A, submitted for publication on 28
October 200
Implementation and evaluation of a sari surveillance system in a tertiary hospital in Scotland in 2021/2022
Objective:
To set up and evaluate a new surveillance system for severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) in Scotland.
Study design:
Cross-sectional study and evaluation of surveillance system.
Methods:
The SARI case definition comprised patients aged 16 years or over with an acute respiratory illness presentation requiring testing for influenza and SARS-CoV-2 and hospital admission. Data were collected from SARI cases by research nurses in one tertiary teaching hospital using a bespoke data collection tool from November 2021 to May 2022. Descriptive analyses of SARI cases were carried out. The following attributes of the surveillance system were evaluated according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines: stability, data quality, timeliness, positive predictive value, representativeness, simplicity, acceptability and flexibility.
Results:
The final surveillance dataset comprised 1163 records, with cases peaking in ISO week 50 (week ending 19/12/2021). The system produced a stable stream of surveillance data, with the proportion of SARI records with sufficient information for effective surveillance increasing from 65.4% during the first month to 87.0% over time. Similarly, the proportion where data collection was completed promptly was low initially, but increased to 50%–65% during later periods.
Conclusion:
SARI surveillance was successfully established in one hospital, but for a national system, additional sentinel hospital sites across Scotland, with flexibility to ensure consistently high data completeness and timeliness are needed. Data collection should be automated where possible, and demands on clinicians minimised. SARI surveillance should be embedded and resourced as part of a national respiratory surveillance strategy
Upgraded photon calorimeter with integrating readout for Hall A Compton Polarimeter at Jefferson Lab
The photon arm of the Compton polarimeter in Hall A of Jefferson Lab has been
upgraded to allow for electron beam polarization measurements with better than
1% accuracy. The data acquisition system (DAQ) now includes an integrating
mode, which eliminates several systematic uncertainties inherent in the
original counting-DAQ setup. The photon calorimeter has been replaced with a
Ce-doped GSO crystal, which has a bright output and fast response, and works
well for measurements using the new integrating method at electron beam
energies from 1 to 6 GeV.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figure
Rescattering and chiral dynamics in B\to \rho\pi decay
We examine the role of B^0(\bar B^0) \to \sigma \pi^0 \to \pi^+\pi^- \pi^0
decay in the Dalitz plot analysis of B^0 (\bar B^0) \to \rho\pi \to
\pi^+\pi^-\pi^0 decays, employed to extract the CKM parameter \alpha. The
\sigma \pi channel is significant because it can break the relationship between
the penguin contributions in B\to\rho^0\pi^0, B\to\rho^+\pi^-, and
B\to\rho^-\pi^+ decays consequent to an assumption of isospin symmetry. Its
presence thus mimics the effect of isospin violation. The \sigma\pi^0 state is
of definite CP, however; we demonstrate that the B\to\rho\pi analysis can be
generalized to include this channel without difficulty. The \sigma or
f_0(400-1200) ``meson'' is a broad I=J=0 enhancement driven by strong \pi\pi
rescattering; a suitable scalar form factor is constrained by the chiral
dynamics of low-energy hadron-hadron interactions - it is rather different from
the relativistic Breit-Wigner form adopted in earlier B\to\sigma\pi and
D\to\sigma\pi analyses. We show that the use of this scalar form factor leads
to an improved theoretical understanding of the measured ratio Br(\bar B^0 \to
\rho^\mp \pi^\pm) / Br(B^-\to \rho^0 \pi^-).Comment: 26 pages, 8 figs, published version. typos fixed, minor change
Search for Higgs bosons decaying to tautau pairs in ppbar collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV
We present a search for the production of neutral Higgs bosons decaying into
tautau pairs in ppbar collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV. The
data, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5.4 fb-1, were collected by
the D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. We set upper limits at the
95% C.L. on the product of production cross section and branching ratio for a
scalar resonance decaying into tautau pairs, and we then interpret these limits
as limits on the production of Higgs bosons in the minimal supersymmetric
standard model (MSSM) and as constraints in the MSSM parameter space.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, submitted to PL
Measurement of the photon-jet production differential cross section in collisions at \sqrt{s}=1.96~\TeV
We present measurements of the differential cross section dsigma/dpT_gamma
for the inclusive production of a photon in association with a b-quark jet for
photons with rapidities |y_gamma|< 1.0 and 30<pT_gamma <300 GeV, as well as for
photons with 1.5<|y_gamma|< 2.5 and 30< pT_gamma <200 GeV, where pT_gamma is
the photon transverse momentum. The b-quark jets are required to have pT>15 GeV
and rapidity |y_jet| < 1.5. The results are based on data corresponding to an
integrated luminosity of 8.7 fb^-1, recorded with the D0 detector at the
Fermilab Tevatron Collider at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV. The measured cross
sections are compared with next-to-leading order perturbative QCD calculations
using different sets of parton distribution functions as well as to predictions
based on the kT-factorization QCD approach, and those from the Sherpa and
Pythia Monte Carlo event generators.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Phys. Lett.
Limits on anomalous trilinear gauge boson couplings from WW, WZ and Wgamma production in pp-bar collisions at sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV
We present final searches of the anomalous gammaWW and ZWW trilinear gauge
boson couplings from WW and WZ production using lepton plus dijet final states
and a combination with results from Wgamma, WW, and WZ production with leptonic
final states. The analyzed data correspond to up to 8.6/fb of integrated
luminosity collected by the D0 detector in pp-bar collisions at sqrt{s}=1.96
TeV. We set the most stringent limits at a hadron collider to date assuming two
different relations between the anomalous coupling parameters
Delta\kappa_\gamma, lambda, and Delta g_1^Z for a cutoff energy scale Lambda=2
TeV. The combined 68% C.L. limits are -0.057<Delta\kappa_\gamma<0.154,
-0.015<lambda<0.028, and -0.008<Delta g_1^Z<0.054 for the LEP parameterization,
and -0.007<Delta\kappa<0.081 and -0.017<lambda<0.028 for the equal couplings
parameterization. We also present the most stringent limits of the W boson
magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole moments.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, submitted to PL
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