Quark condensate in two-flavor QCD

We compute the condensate in QCD with two flavors of dynamical fermions using numerical simulation. The simulations use overlap fermions, and the condensate is extracted by fitting the distribution of low lying eigenvalues of the Dirac operator in sectors of fixed topological charge to the predictions of Random Matrix Theory.Comment: revtex, 18 pages, 4 postscript figures. V.2, the published version, corrects an error for the shape facto

Phylogenetics of Cucumis (Cucurbitaceae)

Background: Melon, Cucumis melo, and cucumber, C. sativus, are among the most widely cultivated crops worldwide. Cucumis, as traditionally conceived, is geographically centered in Africa, with C. sativus and C. hystrix thought to be the only Cucumis species in Asia. This taxonomy forms the basis for all ongoing Cucumis breeding and genomics efforts. We tested relationships among Cucumis and related genera based on DNA sequences from chloroplast gene, intron, and spacer regions (rbcL, matK, rpl20-rps12, trnL, and trnL-F), adding nuclear internal transcribed spacer sequences to resolve relationships within Cucumis. Results: Analyses of combined chloroplast sequences (4,375 aligned nucleotides) for 123 of the 130 genera of Cucurbitaceae indicate that the genera Cucumella, Dicaelospermum, Mukia, Myrmecosicyos, and Oreosyce are embedded within Cucumis. Phylogenetic trees from nuclear sequences for these taxa are congruent, and the combined data yield a well-supported phylogeny. The nesting of the five genera in Cucumis greatly changes the natural geographic range of the genus, extending it throughout the Malesian region and into Australia. The closest relative of Cucumis is Muellerargia, with one species in Australia and Indonesia, the other in Madagascar. Cucumber and its sister species, C. hystrix, are nested among Australian, Malaysian, and Western Indian species placed in Mukia or Dicaelospermum and in one case not yet formally described. Cucumis melo is sister to this Australian/Asian clade, rather than being close to African species as previously thought. Molecular clocks indicate that the deepest divergences in Cucumis, including the split between C. melo and its Australian/Asian sister clade, go back to the mid-Eocene. Conclusion: Based on congruent nuclear and chloroplast phylogenies we conclude that Cucumis comprises an old Australian/Asian component that was heretofore unsuspected. Cucumis sativus evolved within this Australian/Asian clade and is phylogenetically far more distant from C. melo than implied by the current morphological classification

QCD at high baryon density in a random matrix model

A high density diquark phase seems to be a generic feature of QCD. If so it should also be reproduced by random matrix models. We discuss a specific one in which the random matrix elements of the Dirac operator are supplemented by a finite chemical potential and by non-random elements which model the formation of instanton-anti-instanton molecules. Comparing our results to those found in a previous investigation by Vanderheyden and Jackson we find additional support for our starting assumption, namely that the existence of a high density diquark phase is common to all QCD-like models.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, final version to appear in Eur.Phys.J.

A search for millimetric emission from Gamma Ray Bursts

We have used the 2- year Differential Microwave Radiometer data from the COsmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite to systematically search for millimetric (31 - 90 GHz) emission from the Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) in the Burst And Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) GRB 3B catalog. The large beamsize of the COBE instrument (7 degs FWHM) allows for an efficient search of the large GRB positional error boxes, although it also means that fluxes from (point source) GRB objects will be somewhat diluted. A likelihood analysis has been used to look for a change in the level of millimetric emission from the locations of 81 GRB events during the first two years (1990 & 1991) of the COBE mission. The likelihood analysis determined that we did not find any significant millimetric signal before or after the occurance of the GRB. We find 95% confidence level upper limits of 175, 192 and 645 Jy or, in terms of fluxes, of 9.6, 16.3 and 54.8 10^{-13} erg/cm^2/s, respectively at 31, 53 and 90 GHz. We also look separately at different classes of GRBs, including a study of the top ten (in peak flux) GRBs, the "short burst" and "long burst" subsets, finding similar upper limits. While these limits may be somewhat higher than one would like, we estimate that using this technique with future planned missions could push these limits down to \sim 1 mJy.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figures, to be published in The Astrophysical Journa

Improving meson two-point functions by low-mode averaging

Some meson correlation functions have a large contribution from the low lying eigenmodes of the Dirac operator. The contribution of these eigenmodes can be averaged over all positions of the source. This can improve the signal in these channels significantly. We test the method for meson two-point functions.Comment: Talk given at Lattice2004(spectrum), Fermilab, June 21-26, 200

Detection of suspicious interactions of spiking covariates in methylation data

BACKGROUND: In methylation analyses like epigenome-wide association studies, a high amount of biomarkers is tested for an association between the measured continuous outcome and different covariates. In the case of a continuous covariate like smoking pack years (SPY), a measure of lifetime exposure to tobacco toxins, a spike at zero can occur. Hence, all non-smokers are generating a peak at zero, while the smoking patients are distributed over the other SPY values. Additionally, the spike might also occur on the right side of the covariate distribution, if a category "heavy smoker" is designed. Here, we will focus on methylation data with a spike at the left or the right of the distribution of a continuous covariate. After the methylation data is generated, analysis is usually performed by preprocessing, quality control, and determination of differentially methylated sites, often performed in pipeline fashion. Hence, the data is processed in a string of methods, which are available in one software package. The pipelines can distinguish between categorical covariates, i.e. for group comparisons or continuous covariates, i.e. for linear regression. The differential methylation analysis is often done internally by a linear regression without checking its inherent assumptions. A spike in the continuous covariate is ignored and can cause biased results. RESULTS: We have reanalysed five data sets, four freely available from ArrayExpress, including methylation data and smoking habits reported by smoking pack years. Therefore, we generated an algorithm to check for the occurrences of suspicious interactions between the values associated with the spike position and the non-spike positions of the covariate. Our algorithm helps to decide if a suspicious interaction can be found and further investigations should be carried out. This is mostly important, because the information on the differentially methylated sites will be used for post-hoc analyses like pathway analyses. CONCLUSIONS: We help to check for the validation of the linear regression assumptions in a methylation analysis pipeline. These assumptions should also be considered for machine learning approaches. In addition, we are able to detect outliers in the continuous covariate. Therefore, more statistical robust results should be produced in methylation analysis using our algorithm as a preprocessing step

The Tunneling Hybrid Monte-Carlo algorithm

The hermitian Wilson kernel used in the construction of the domain-wall and overlap Dirac operators has exceptionally small eigenvalues that make it expensive to reach high-quality chiral symmetry for domain-wall fermions, or high precision in the case of the overlap operator. An efficient way of suppressing such eigenmodes consists of including a positive power of the determinant of the Wilson kernel in the Boltzmann weight, but doing this also suppresses tunneling between topological sectors. Here we propose a modification of the Hybrid Monte-Carlo algorithm which aims to restore tunneling between topological sectors by excluding the lowest eigenmodes of the Wilson kernel from the molecular-dynamics evolution, and correcting for this at the accept/reject step. We discuss the implications of this modification for the acceptance rate.Comment: improved discussion in appendix B, RevTeX, 19 page

Diffractive charged meson pair production

We investigate the possibility to measure the nonforward gluon distribution function by means of diffractively produced \pi^+\pi^- and K^+K^- pairs in polarized lepton nucleon scattering. The resulting cross sections are small and are dominated by the gluonic contribution. We find relatively large spin asymmetries, both for \pi^+\pi^- and for K^+K^- pairs.Comment: 15 pages, version with changed kinematical cuts, to be pubished in Phys.Lett.

Reweighting towards the chiral limit

We propose to perform fully dynamical simulations at small quark masses by reweighting in the quark mass. This approach avoids some of the technical difficulties associated with direct simulations at very small quark masses. We calculate the weight factors stochastically, using determinant breakup and low mode projection to reduce the statistical fluctuations. We find that the weight factors fluctuate only moderately on nHYP smeared dynamical Wilson-clover ensembles, and we could successfully reweight 16^4, (1.85fm)^4 volume configurations from m_q = 20MeV to m_q = 5MeV quark masses, reaching the epsilon-regime. We illustrate the strength of the method by calculating the low energy constant F from the epsilon-regime pseudo-scalar correlator.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure