The cosmological constant and the relaxed universe

We study the role of the cosmological constant (CC) as a component of dark energy (DE). It is argued that the cosmological term is in general unavoidable and it should not be ignored even when dynamical DE sources are considered. From the theoretical point of view quantum zero-point energy and phase transitions suggest a CC of large magnitude in contrast to its tiny observed value. Simply relieving this disaccord with a counterterm requires extreme fine-tuning which is referred to as the old CC problem. To avoid it, we discuss some recent approaches for neutralising a large CC dynamically without adding a fine-tuned counterterm. This can be realised by an effective DE component which relaxes the cosmic expansion by counteracting the effect of the large CC. Alternatively, a CC filter is constructed by modifying gravity to make it insensitive to vacuum energy.Comment: 6 pages, no figures, based on a talk presented at PASCOS 201

The Electroweak Standard Model in the Axial Gauge

We derive the Feynman rules of the standard model in the axial gauge. After this we prove that the fields $\phi_W$ and $\phi_Z$ do not correspond to physical particles. As a consequence, these fields cannot appear as incoming or outgoing lines in Feynman graphs. We then calculate the contribution of these fields in the case of a particular decay mode of the top quark.Comment: 16 pages, no figures. Added derivation of polarization su

Polarization Effects in Standard Model Parton Distributions at Very High Energies

We update the earlier work of Refs. arXiv:1703.08562 and arXiv:1712.07147 on parton distribution functions in the full Standard Model to include gauge boson polarization, non-zero input electroweak boson PDFs and next-to-leading-order resummation of large logarithms.Comment: 24 pages, 7 Figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1703.08562, arXiv:1806.1015

Neutron matter under strong magnetic fields: a comparison of models

The equation of state of neutron matter is affected by the presence of a magnetic field due to the intrinsic magnetic moment of the neutron. Here we study the equilibrium configuration of this system for a wide range of densities, temperatures and magnetic fields. Special attention is paid to the behavior of the isothermal compressibility and the magnetic susceptibility. Our calculation is performed using both microscopic and phenomenological approaches of the neutron matter equation of state, namely the Brueckner--Hartree--Fock (BHF) approach using the Argonne V18 nucleon-nucleon potential supplemented with the Urbana IX three-nucleon force, the effective Skyrme model in a Hartree--Fock description, and the Quantum Hadrodynamic formulation with a mean field approximation. All these approaches predict a change from completely spin polarized to partially polarized matter that leads to a continuous equation of state. The compressibility and the magnetic susceptibility show characteristic behaviors, which reflect that fact. Thermal effects tend to smear out the sharpness found for these quantities at T=0. In most cases a thermal increase of 10 MeV is enough to hide the signals of the change of polarization. The set of densities and magnetic field intensities for which the system changes it spin polarization is different for each model. However, there is an overall agreement between the three theoretical descriptions.Comment: updated to correspond with the published versio

Parameterizable Views for Process Visualization

In large organizations different users or user groups usually have distinguished perspectives over business processes and related data. Personalized views on the managed processes are therefore needed. Existing BPM tools, however, do not provide adequate mechanisms for building and visualizing such views. Very often processes are displayed to users in the same way as drawn by the process designer. To tackle this inflexibility this paper presents an advanced approach for creating personalized process views based on well-defined, parameterizable view operations. Respective operations can be flexibly composed in order to reduce or aggregate process information in the desired way. Depending on the chosen parameterization of the applied view operations, in addition, different "quality levels" with more or less relaxed properties can be obtained for the resulting process views (e.g., regarding the correctness of the created process view scheme). This allows us to consider the specific needs of the different applications utilizing process views (e.g., process monitoring tools or process editors). Altogether, the realized view concept contributes to better deal with complex, long-running business processes with hundreds up to thousands of activities

Influential cited references in FEMS Microbiology Letters: lessons from Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS)

The journal FEMS Microbiology Letters covers all aspects of microbiology including virology. On which scientific shoulders do the papers published in this journal stand? Which are the classic papers used by the authors? We aim to answer these questions in this study by applying the Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) analysis to all papers published in this journal between 1977 and 2017. In total, 16 837 publications with 410 586 cited references are analyzed. Mainly, the studies published in the journal FEMS Microbiology Letters draw knowledge from methods developed to quantify or characterize biochemical substances such as proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, or carbohydrates and from improvements of techniques suitable for studies of bacterial genetics. The techniques frequently used for studying the genetic of microorganisms in FEMS Microbiology Letters' studies were developed using samples prepared from microorganisms. Methods required for the investigation of proteins, carbohydrates, or lipids were mostly transferred from other fields of life science to microbiology

Origin and reduction of wakefields in photonic crystal accelerator cavities

Photonic crystal (PhC) defect cavities that support an accelerating mode tend to trap unwanted higher-order modes (HOMs) corresponding to zero-group-velocity PhC lattice modes at the top of the bandgap. The effect is explained quite generally from photonic band and perturbation theoretical arguments. Transverse wakefields resulting from this effect are observed in a hybrid dielectric PhC accelerating cavity based on a triangular lattice of sapphire rods. These wakefields are, on average, an order of magnitude higher than those in the waveguide-damped Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) copper cavities. The avoidance of translational symmetry (and, thus, the bandgap concept) can dramatically improve HOM damping in PhC-based structures.Comment: 11 pages, 18 figures, 2 table