CHANGING WRINKLES TO SMILES WITH PALLIATIVE CARE FOR THE ELDERLY!

Over the past years, the conscious and collaborative efforts of Peoples and Planners world-wide have shown a reduction in mortality and increase in the life expectancy at birth. Thus, the world will be over loaded with aged people one century ahead; on the other hand, we in India have cheated this particular group for last 65 years by not providing any special care package for them – the Elderly: presenting them the “geriatric care”! The then Director-General of the World Health Organization, Gro Harlem Brundtland in 1999 had said “Population ageing is, rst and foremost, a success story for public health policies as well as social and economic development”. Thus, the WHO has aptly chosen the theme “Ageing and health: Good health adds life to years” for 2012. The focus is how good health throughout life can help older men and women lead full and productive lives and be a resource for their families and communities.[1] It is predicted that within the next five years, the number of adults aged 65 years and over will outnumber children under the age of 5 and by 2050, all children under the age of 14. Between 2000 and 2050, the proportion of the world’s population over 60 years will double from about 11% to 22% with the most rapid and dramatic demographic changes being seen in low and middle income countries.[2

New vector-scalar contributions to neutrinoless double beta decay and constraints on R-parity violation

We show that in minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) with R-parity breaking as well as in the left-right symmetric model, there are new observable contributions to neutrinoless double beta decay arising from hitherto overlooked diagrams involving the exchange of one W boson and one scalar boson. In particular, in the case of MSSM, the present experimental bounds on neutrinoless double beta decay lifetime improves the limits on certain R-parity violating couplings by about two orders of magnitude. It is shown that similar diagrams also lead to enhanced rates for $\mu^-\rightarrow e^+$ conversion in nuclei, which are in the range accessible to ongoing experiments.Comment: Latex file; 9 pages; 3 figures available on reques

Type II Seesaw and a Gauge Model for the Bimaximal Mixing Explanation of Neutrino Puzzles

We present a gauge model for the bimaximal mixing pattern among the neutrinos that explains both the atmospheric and solar neutrino data via large angle vacuum oscillation among the three known neutrinos. The model does not include righthanded neutrinos but additional Higgs triplets which acquire naturally small vev's due to the type II seesaw mechanism. A combination of global $L_e-L_{\mu}-L_{\tau}$ and $S_3$ symmetries constrain the mass matrix for both charged leptons and neutrinos in such a way that the bimaximal pattern emerges naturally at the tree level and needed splittings among neutrinos at the one loop level. This model predicts observable branching ratios for $\tau\to \mu \mu\mu$, which could be used to test it.Comment: Latex file, 8 pages, five figures include

Giant Tunneling Magnetoresistance, Glassiness, and the Energy Landscape at Nanoscale Cluster Coexistence

We present microscopic results on the giant tunneling magnetoresistance that arises from the nanoscale coexistence of ferromagnetic metallic (FMM) and antiferromagnetic insulating (AFI) clusters in a disordered two dimensional electron system with competing double exchange and superexchange interactions. Our Monte Carlo study allows us to map out the different field regimes in magnetotransport and correlate it with the evolution of spatial structures. At coexistence, the isotropic O(3) model shows signs of slow relaxation, and has a high density of low energy metastable states, but no genuine glassiness. However, in the presence of weak magnetic anisotropy, and below a field dependent irreversibility temperature $T_{irr}$, the response on field cooling (FC) differs distinctly from that on zero field cooling (ZFC). We map out the phase diagram of this `phase coexistence glass', highlight how its response differs from that of a standard spin glass, and compare our results with data on the manganites.Comment: Final published versio

Cosmology of Brane-Bulk Models in Five Dimensions

We study the cosmology of models with four space and one time dimension where our universe is a 3-brane and report a few results which extend existing work in several directions. Assuming a stable fifth dimension, we obtain a solution for the metric, which does not depend on any arbitrary parameters. We discuss some implications of this result.Comment: Minor changes: brane energy conservation law and some typos corrected. All main results unchanged. 11 pages, no figures, LaTeX fil

Reconciling Supersymmetry and Left-Right Symmetry

We construct the minimal supersymmetric left-right theory and show that at the renormalizable level it requires the existence of an intermediate $B-L$ breaking scale. The subsequent symmetry breaking down to MSSM automatically preserves R-symmetry. Furthermore, unlike in the nonsupersymmetric version of the theory, the see-saw mechanism takes its canonical form. The theory predicts the existence of a triplet of Higgs scalars much lighter than the $B-L$ breaking scale.Comment: 4 pages, revtex, no figure