Running coupling constant of ten-flavor QCD with the Schr\"odinger functional method

Walking technicolor theory attempts to realize electroweak symmetry breaking as the spontaneous chiral symmetry breakdown caused by the gauge dynamics with slowly varying gauge coupling constant and large mass anomalous dimension. Many-flavor QCD is one of the candidates owning these features. We focus on the SU(3) gauge theory with ten flavors of massless fermions in the fundamental representation, and compute the gauge coupling constant in the Schr\"odinger functional scheme. Numerical simulation is performed with $O(a)$-unimproved lattice action, and the continuum limit is taken in linear in lattice spacing. We observe evidence that this theory possesses an infrared fixed point.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figures. v2) remarks on the continuum limit added, analysis simplified and done with more statistics, conclusion unchanged, version accepted for publication in PR

Effect on water mass structure in West Japan by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake tsunami

The 2011 Tohoku earthquake tsunami devastated the coastal zone in east Japan. It was also reached to the Pacific coast in west Japan area. The most reports have been limited reaching time and height of tsunami. However, it is important to consider the effect on water mass structure by tsunami waves from the viewpoint of sustainable fisheries industry or conservation of marine ecosystem. In this study, from the analysis for monitoring data in Shikoku and Seto Inland Sea, temporal breaking the stratification and the appearance of high-frequency component were confirmed

Realistic assumptions about spatial locations and clustering of premises matter for models of foot-and-mouth disease spread in the United States

Spatially explicit livestock disease models require demographic data for individual farms or premises. In the U.S., demographic data are only available aggregated at county or coarser scales, so disease models must rely on assumptions about how individual premises are distributed within counties. Here, we addressed the importance of realistic assumptions for this purpose. We compared modeling of foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreaks using simple randomization of locations to premises configurations predicted by the Farm Location and Agricultural Production Simulator (FLAPS), which infers location based on features such as topography, land-cover, climate, and roads. We focused on three premises-level Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Removed models available from the literature, all using the same kernel approach but with different parameterizations and functional forms. By computing the basic reproductive number of the infection (R0) for both FLAPS and randomized configurations, we investigated how spatial locations and clustering of premises affects outbreak predictions. Further, we performed stochastic simulations to evaluate if identified differences were consistent for later stages of an outbreak. Using Ripley's K to quantify clustering, we found that FLAPS configurations were substantially more clustered at the scales relevant for the implemented models, leading to a higher frequency of nearby premises compared to randomized configurations. As a result, R0 was typically higher in FLAPS configurations, and the simulation study corroborated the pattern for later stages of outbreaks. Further, both R0 and simulations exhibited substantial spatial heterogeneity in terms of differences between configurations. Thus, using realistic assumptions when de-aggregating locations based on available data can have a pronounced effect on epidemiological predictions, affecting if, where, and to what extent FMD may invade the population. We conclude that methods such as FLAPS should be preferred over randomization approaches