NNLO QED contribution to the μe→μe\mu e\to \mu e elastic scattering

We present the current status of the Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order QED contribution to the $\mu e$-scattering. Particular focus is given to the techniques involved to tackle the virtual amplitude and their automatic implementation. Renormalization of the amplitude will be also discuss in details.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, contribution to the Workshop on "Flavour changing and conserving processes" 2019 (FCCP2019), 29-31 August 2019, Villa Orlandi, Anacapri, Capri Island, Ital

Muscle 5′-Adenylic Acid Aminohydrolase: KINETIC PROPERTIES OF RAT MUSCLE ENZYME TREATED WITH PYRIDOXAL 5′-PHOSPHATE

Abstract The treatment of purified rat muscle AMP deaminase with pryidoxal-5'-P produces a decrease of the enzyme activity which is time- and pyridoxal-5'-P concentration-dependent. The reaction is reversible and can be changed to an irreversible reaction by reduction with NaBH4. The reduced pyridoxal-5'-P-AMP deaminase complex shows an absorption spectrum which is typical for pyridoxamine derivatives. Chromatographic analyses confirm the formation of a Schiff base between pyridoxal-5'-P and the e-amino group of lysine residues in the enzyme. The loss of activity is not a simple inactivation process due to modification of the catalytic site of the enzyme. GTP and ATP, which are allosteric inhibitors of AMP deaminase, show a protective effect against pyridoxal-5'-P inactivation whereas KCl at high concentration exerts a little protection and Pi and P-creatine are ineffective. The reduced pyridoxal-5'-P-AMP deaminase derivative with 30 to 35% residual activity and 6 to 7 moles of pyridoxal-5'-P bound per mole of protein has different kinetic and regulatory properties from the native enzyme: Vmax is the same but the Km value is increased; the enzyme shows a homotropic cooperativity also in the presence of activators, K+ and ADP, and is no longer sensitive to GTP, ATP, and high salt concentration inhibitions. Pi and P-creatine still exert an inhibitory effect. These kinetic properties are similar to those of the native enzyme in the presence of nucleoside triphosphates. The reduced pyridoxal-5'-P-AMP deaminase derivative prepared in the presence of GTP is still sensitive to inhibition by nucleoside triphosphates. It is likely that pyridoxal-5'-P binds at or near the binding sites for these compounds

A classification of meteorite impact craters

Systematic classification of meteorite impact craters for lunar and planetary crater

Anti-inflammatory activity of chondroitin sulfate

SummaryThe pharmacokinetics of chondroitin sulfate (CS, Condrosulf®, IBSA, Lugano, Switzerland) were investigated in rats and in healthy volunteers using CS tritiated at the reducing end and CS labeled with 131I or 99mTc respectively. A rapid absorption of orally administered CS is observed in rats and in humans when the drug is dissolved in water. Lower and delayed absorption is observed when CS is administered in gastroresistant capsules. The absolute bio-availability is 15 and 12% for rats and humans respectively. The CS shows a tropism for cartilagineous tissues in rats and for knee tissues in humans as demonstrated by scintigraphic analysis with 99mTc-CS. Monomers, oligo and polysaccharides produced by enzymatic hydrolysis of CS appear in the blood and tissues together with native CS. The effects of partially depolymerized (m.m. 3 to 15 kD) and desulfated fractions on human leukocytes were investigated. CS and its fractions inhibit the directional chemotaxis induced by zymosan-activated serum, are able to decrease the phagocytosis and the release of lysozyme induced by zymosan and to protect the plasma membrane from oxygen reactive species. In rats the oral administration of CS significantly decreases granuloma formation due to sponge implants and cell migration and lysosomal enzyme release in carrageenan pleurisy. Compared with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (indomethacin ibuprofen), CS appears to be more effective on cellular events of inflammation than on edema formation. It is noteworthy that CS is devoid of dangerous effects on the stomach, platelets and kidneys. In synovial fluid of patients requiring joint aspiration, treated orally for 10 days with CS (800 mg/day) the hyaluronate concentration and the intrinsic viscosity significantly increased, while collagenolytic activity, phospholipase A2 and N-acetylglucosaminidase (NAG) decreased.These results give an insight into the mechanism of the anti-inflammatory and chondroprotective actions demonstrated by this drug in a number of clinical trials in, patients with osteoarthritis

Heterogeneous nucleation in polymer crystallization

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The effect of talc, sodium benzoate, boron nitride, saccharin and sorbitol on the nucleation and crystallisation of PP, PE, PB, POM, PHB, PET and Nylon 66 has been investigated by DSC, light microscopy and electron microscopy. The effectiveness of the nucleating agent has been evaluated by the study of the interfacial layer between the polymer and the substrate of densely packed particles using light microscopy and by quantitative analysis of the DSC cooling exotherms, obtained from polymers with homogeneously dispersed nucleating agent. It has been found that the crystallisation temperature of the nucleated polymer is exponentially dependent on the concentration of the nucleating particles. This has been explained solely by the decrease in the average distance between the nuclei, with no changes in the crystallization kinetics. The extent of the shift in the crystallisation temperature of a heterogeneously nucleated polymer has been found to be related to the initial number of spherulites present in the un-nucleated polymer. The highest shift in the crystallization temperature has been obtained from partially molten polymers (self nucleation); the shift which can be obtained with the best nucleating agents is approaching this level. Electron microscopy studies, especially the diffraction patterns obtained from the nucleating interface, have shown a good crystallographic correlation between the polymer matrix and the nucleant. Thus, the correlation between the growth direction of the spherulite lamellae and the nucleating facet is good for all active nucleants, but a perfect match of the molecular spacing in this plane (epitaxy) has been observed only for very strong nucleants

Celia López Alcalde, Josep Puig Montada, Pedro Roche Arnas † (eds.), Legitimation of Political Power in Medieval Thought. Acts of the XIX Annual Colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale, Alcalá 18-20 September 2013

The volume collects the essays profoundly debated at XIX Annual Colloquium of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Philosophy, organized by the «Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale», SIEPM, the «Sociedad de Filosofía Medieval», SOFIME, and the University of Alcalá, which took place in Alcalá de Henares in 2013, one of the philosophically liveliest medieval center. The Colloquium was sponsored and funded also by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture, Ra-mon Areces Foundation, Complutense University of Madrid, Center for Political and Constitutional Studies (Madrid), and Society for Medieval Philosophy (Zaragoza)

The Krohn-Rhodes Logics

We present a new family of modal temporal logics of the past, obtained by extending Past LTL with a rich set of temporal operators based on the theory by Krohn and Rhodes for automata cascades. The theory says that every automaton can be expressed as a cascade of some basic automata called prime automata. They are the building blocks of all automata, analogously to prime numbers being the building blocks of all natural numbers. We show that Past LTL corresponds to cascades of one kind of prime automata called flip-flops. In particular, the temporal operators of Past LTL are captured by flip-flops, and they cannot capture any other prime automaton, confining the expressivity within the star-free regular languages. We propose novel temporal operators that can capture other prime automata, and hence extend the expressivity of Past LTL. Such operators are infinitely-many, and they yield an infinite number of logics capturing an infinite number of distinct fragments of the regular languages. The result is a yet unexplored landscape of extensions of Past LTL, that we call Krohn-Rhodes Logics, each of them with the potential of matching the expressivity required by specific applications

Cavity control of Excitons in two dimensional Materials

We propose a robust and efficient way of controlling the optical spectra of two-dimensional materials and van der Waals heterostructures by quantum cavity embedding. The cavity light-matter coupling leads to the formation of exciton-polaritons, a superposition of photons and excitons. Our first principles study demonstrates a reordering and mixing of bright and dark excitons spectral features and in the case of a type II van-der-Waals heterostructure an inversion of intra and interlayer excitonic resonances. We further show that the cavity light-matter coupling strongly depends on the dielectric environment and can be controlled by encapsulating the active 2D crystal in another dielectric material. Our theoretical calculations are based on a newly developed non-perturbative many-body framework to solve the coupled electron-photon Schr\"odinger equation in a quantum-electrodynamical extension of the Bethe-Salpeter approach. This approach enables the ab-initio simulations of exciton-polariton states and their dispersion from weak to strong cavity light-matter coupling regimes. Our method is then extended to treat van der Waals heterostructures and encapsulated 2D materials using a simplified Mott-Wannier description of the excitons that can be applied to very large systems beyond reach for fully ab-initio approaches.Comment: 32 pages. 10 figures, 2 tabl

Stream Reasoning in Temporal Datalog

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in extending traditional stream processing engines with logical, rule-based, reasoning capabilities. This poses significant theoretical and practical challenges since rules can derive new information and propagate it both towards past and future time points; as a result, streamed query answers can depend on data that has not yet been received, as well as on data that arrived far in the past. Stream reasoning algorithms, however, must be able to stream out query answers as soon as possible, and can only keep a limited number of previous input facts in memory. In this paper, we propose novel reasoning problems to deal with these challenges, and study their computational properties on Datalog extended with a temporal sort and the successor function (a core rule-based language for stream reasoning applications)