Situations in traffic - how quickly they change

Spatio-temporal correlations of intensity of traffic are analysed for one week data collected in the motorway M-30 around Madrid in January 2009. We found that the lifetime of these correlations is the shortest in the evening, between 6 and 8 p.m. This lifetime is a new indicator how much attention of drivers is demanded in given traffic conditions.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

SUSY and Dark Matter Constraints from the LHC

The ability of the LHC to make statements about the dark matter problem is considered, with a specific focus on supersymmetry. After reviewing the current strategies for supersymmetry searches at the LHC (in both CMS and ATLAS), some key ATLAS studies are used to demonstrate how one could establish that SUSY exists before going on to measure the relic density of a neutralino WIMP candidate. Finally, the general prospects for success at the LHC are investigated by looking at different points in the MSSM parameter space.Comment: Talk given at the XLIrst Rencontres de Moriond session devoted to Electroweak Interactions And Unified Theories in March 2006, to be published in the associated proceedings. 10 pages, 8 figure

Chiral Symmetry and s-wave Low-Lying Meson-Baryon Resonances

The $s-$wave meson-baryon scattering is analyzed for the isospin-strangeness $I=1/2, S=0$ and $I=0,S=-1$ sectors, in a Bethe-Salpeter coupled channel formalism incorporating Chiral Symmetry. For both sectors, four channels have been considered: $\pi N$, $\eta N$, $K \Lambda$, $K \Sigma$ and $\pi \Sigma$, $\bar K N$, $\eta \Lambda$, $K \Xi$, respectively. The needed two particle irreducible matrix amplitudes are taken from lowest order Chiral Perturbation Theory in a relativistic formalism. There appear undetermined low energy constants, as a consequence of the renormalization of the amplitudes, which are obtained from fits to the available data: elastic $\pi N$ phase-shifts, $\pi^- p \to \eta n$ and $\pi^- p \to K^0 \Lambda$ cross sections and to $\pi\Sigma\to\pi\Sigma$ mass-spectrum, the elastic $\bar K N \to \bar K N$ and $\bar K N\to \pi \Sigma$ $t$--matrices and to the $K^- p \to \eta \Lambda$ cross section data. The position and residues of the complex poles in the second Riemann sheet of the scattering amplitude determine masses, widths and branching ratios of the $S_{11}-$ $N$(1535) and $-N$(1650) and $S_{01}-$ $\Lambda$(1405) and $-\Lambda$(1670) resonances, in reasonable agreement with experiment. A good overall description of data, from threshold up to around 2 GeV is achieved despite the fact that three-body channels have not been explicitly included.Comment: 5 Pages, 2 figures, invited contribution to Focus Session on Nature of Threshold N*, to be published in Proceedings of Nstar 2002, Pittsburgh, USA, October 9-12, 2002 (World Scientific

Spontaneous, collective coherence in driven, dissipative cavity arrays

We study an array of dissipative tunnel-coupled cavities, each interacting with an incoherently pumped two-level emitter. For cavities in the lasing regime, we find correlations between the light fields of distant cavities, despite the dissipation and the incoherent nature of the pumping mechanism. These correlations decay exponentially with distance for arrays in any dimension but become increasingly long ranged with increasing photon tunneling between adjacent cavities. The interaction-dominated and the tunneling-dominated regimes show markedly different scaling of the correlation length which always remains finite due to the finite photon trapping time. We propose a series of observables to characterize the spontaneous build-up of collective coherence in the system.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, including supplemental material (with 4 pages, 1 figure). This is a shorter version with some modifications in the supplemental material (a gap in the proof was closed and calculations significantly generalized and improved

Faint emission lines in the Galactic H II regions M16, M20 and NGC 3603

We present deep echelle spectrophotometry of the Galactic {\hii} regions M16, M20 and NGC 3603. The data have been taken with the Very Large Telescope Ultraviolet-Visual Echelle Spectrograph in the 3100 to 10400 \AA range. We have detected more than 200 emission lines in each region. Physical conditions have been derived using different continuum and line intensity ratios. We have derived He$^{+}$, C$^{++}$ and O$^{++}$ abundances from pure recombination lines as well as abundances from collisionally excited lines for a large number of ions of different elements. We have obtained consistent estimations of the temperature fluctuation parameter, {\ts}, using different methods. We also report the detection of deuterium Balmer lines up to D$\delta$ (M16) and to D$\gamma$ (M20) in the blue wings of the hydrogen lines, which excitation mechanism seems to be continuum fluorescence. The temperature fluctuations paradigm agree with the results obtained from optical CELs and the more uncertain ones from far IR fine structure CELs in NGC 3603, although, more observations covering the same volume of the nebula are necessary to obtain solid conclusions.Comment: 22 pages, 13 Tables, 7 Figures. Accepted for publication by MNRA