Open heavy-flavour production in pp and Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC, measured with ALICE at central rapidity

The ALICE experiment studies nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC in order to investigate the properties of QCD matter at extreme energy densities. The measurement of open charm and open beauty production allows to investigate the interaction of heavy quarks with the hot and dense medium formed in high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions. In particular, in-medium energy loss is predicted to be different for gluons, light quarks and heavy quarks and to depend on the medium energy density and size. ALICE has measured open heavy-flavour particle production at central rapidity in several decay channels in Pb-Pb and pp collisions at sqrt{s_NN} = 2.76 TeV and sqrt{s} = 2.76, 7 TeV respectively. The results obtained from the reconstruction of D meson decays at central rapidity and from electrons from heavy-flavour hadron decay will be presented.Comment: Proceedings of the International Conference "Primordial QCD Matter in LHC Era -Implication of QCD results on the early universe", El Cairo, 4th-8th December 201

Changes to university IPR regulations in Europe and the impact on academic patenting

This article develops a general framework to describe the changes in university IPR regulations in Europe and their effects on the patenting activities of universities and on knowledge transfer processes. Understanding the effects of changes in IPR regulations on academic patenting is a complex issue, and parallels with the US case can be misleading. First, despite the general trend towards institutional ownership, university IPR regulations in Europe remain extremely differentiated and there is no one-to-one mapping to the US system. Second, it is difficult to disentangle the quantitative and qualitative effects of changes in IPR ownership regulations on academic patenting activities from the effects of concurrent transformations in the institutional, cultural and organizational landscape surrounding academic knowledge transfer. The article proposes a review and typological classification of national university IPR ownership systems on the basis of their development since 2000, and uses it to analyze the aggregate dynamics of academic patent ownership in several European countries. The analysis of patterns of ownership of academic patents shows that there has been a general increase in university patenting since 1990, with a significant slowdown (and even reduction in some countries) after early 2000s accompanied by a switch in academic patents ownership in favor of university ownership though preserving the European specificity of high company ownership of academic invented patents

Recursion relations for Double Ramification Hierarchies

In this paper we study various properties of the double ramification hierarchy, an integrable hierarchy of hamiltonian PDEs introduced in [Bur15] using intersection theory of the double ramification cycle in the moduli space of stable curves. In particular, we prove a recursion formula that recovers the full hierarchy starting from just one of the Hamiltonians, the one associated to the first descendant of the unit of a cohomological field theory. Moreover, we introduce analogues of the topological recursion relations and the divisor equation both for the hamiltonian densities and for the string solution of the double ramification hierarchy. This machinery is very efficient and we apply it to various computations for the trivial and Hodge cohomological field theories, and for the $r$-spin Witten's classes. Moreover we prove the Miura equivalence between the double ramification hierarchy and the Dubrovin-Zhang hierarchy for the Gromov-Witten theory of the complex projective line (extended Toda hierarchy).Comment: Revised version, to be published in Communications in Mathematical Physics, 27 page

A novel iterative strategy for protein design

We propose and discuss a novel strategy for protein design. The method is based on recent theoretical advancements which showed the importance to treat carefully the conformational free energy of designed sequences. In this work we show how computational cost can be kept to a minimum by encompassing negative design features, i.e. isolating a small number of structures that compete significantly with the target one for being occupied at low temperature. The method is succesfully tested on minimalist protein models and using a variety of amino acid interaction potentials.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure