Combined flavor symmetry violation and lepton number violation in neutrino physics

Heavy singlet neutrinos admit Majorana masses which are not possible for the Standard Model particles. This suggest new possibilities for generating the masses and mixing angles of light neutrinos. We present a model of neutrino physics which combines the source of lepton number violation with the flavor symmetry responsible for the hierarchy in the charged lepton and quark sector. This is accomplished by giving the scalar field effecting the lepton number violation a nonzero charge under the horizontal flavor symmetry. We find an economical model which is consistent with the measured values of the atmospheric and solar neutrino mass-squares and mixing angles.Comment: 6 pages, no figures (published version

Packing defects and the width of biopolymer bundles

The formation of bundles composed of actin filaments and cross-linking proteins is an essential process in the maintenance of the cells' cytoskeleton. It has also been recreated by in-vitro experiments, where actin networks are routinely produced to mimic and study the cellular structures. It has long been observed that these bundles seem to have a well defined width distribution, which has not been adequately described theoretically. We propose here that packing defects of the filaments, quenched and random, contribute an effective repulsion that counters the cross-linking adhesion energy and leads to a well defined bundle width. This is a two-dimensional strain-field version of the classic Rayleigh instability of charged droplets

A possible supersymmetric solution to the discrepancy between B -> \phi K_S and B -> \eta' K_S CP asymmetries

We present a possible supersymmetric solution to the discrepancy between the observed mixing CP asymmetries in B -> \phi K_S and B -> \eta' K_S. We show that due to the different parity in the final states of these processes, their supersymmetric contributions from the R-sector have an opposite sign, which naturally explain the large deviation between S_{\phi K_S} and S_{\eta' K_S}. We also consider the proposed mechanisms to solve the puzzle of the observed large branching ratio of B -> \eta' K and study their impact on S_{eta' K_S}.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure