Correction to: Does transcranial direct current stimulation improve functional locomotion in people with Parkinson’s disease? A systematic review and meta-analysis

In the original article [1], we mentioned that some study characteristics of the article by Dagan and colleagues [2] were unavailable. However, we realized that the authors provided the relevant information in their supplementary file. As such, we added participant characteristics (i.e., age = 68.8 ± 6.8, gender = 17 M, 3 F, PD duration = 9.0 ± 5.7, and UPDRS Part III at baseline = Total 39.7 ± 14.6) to Table 1, stimulation parameters (i.e., intensity = 3 mA, duration = 20 min, areas = 3 cm2) to Table 2, and methodological quality assessments (i.e., allocation concealment = 1 and Total score = 9) to Table 3. Based on the new information, we updated Fig. 2 with the corrected selection bias and performance bias results. Finally, we confirmed that these corrections did not change the meta-analytic findings in the original article

EP-1518: Evaluation of dynamic delivery quality assurance process for internal target based RapidArc

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White matter development in infants at risk for schizophrenia

Background: Schizophrenia is considered a neurodevelopmental disorder with a pathophysiology that likely begins long before the onset of clinical symptoms. White matter abnormalities have been observed in schizophrenia and we hypothesized that the first 2 years of life is a period in which white matter abnormalities associated with schizophrenia risk may emerge. Methods: 38 infants at high risk for schizophrenia and 202 healthy controls underwent diffusion tensor MRIs after birth and at 1 and 2 years of age. Quantitative tractography was used to determine diffusion properties (fractional anisotropy (FA), axial diffusivity (AD), and radial diffusivity (RD)) of 18 white matter tracts and a general linear model was used to analyze group differences at each age. Results: Adjusting gestational age at birth, postnatal age at MRI, gender, MRI scanner type, and maternal education, neonates at high risk had significantly lower FA (p = 0.02) and AD (p = 0.03) in the superior segment of the left cingulate, and higher RD in the hippocampal segment of the left cingulate (p = 0.04). High risk one year olds had significantly lower FA (p < 0.01) and AD (p = 0.02) in the hippocampal segment of the left cingulate. High risk two year olds had significantly lower FA in the left prefrontal cortico-thalamic tract (p = 0.04) and higher RD in the right uncinate fasciculus (p = 0.04). None of the tract differences remained significant after correction for multiple comparisons. Conclusions: There is evidence of abnormal white matter development in young children at risk for schizophrenia, especially in the hippocampal segment of left cingulum. These results support the neurodevelopmental theory of schizophrenia and indicate that impaired white matter may be present in early childhood

Ground state properties of ferromagnetic metal/conjugated polymer interfaces

We theoretically investigate the ground state properties of ferromagnetic metal/conjugated polymer interfaces. The work is partially motivated by recent experiments in which injection of spin polarized electrons from ferromagnetic contacts into thin films of conjugated polymers was reported. We use a one-dimensional nondegenerate Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) Hamiltonian to describe the conjugated polymer and one-dimensional tight-binding models to describe the ferromagnetic metal. We consider both a model for a conventional ferromagnetic metal, in which there are no explicit structural degrees of freedom, and a model for a half-metallic ferromagnetic colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) oxide which has explicit structural degrees of freedom. The Fermi energy of the magnetic metallic contact is adjusted to control the degree of electron transfer into the polymer. We investigate electron charge and spin transfer from the ferromagnetic metal to the organic polymer, and structural relaxation near the interface. Bipolarons are the lowest energy charge state in the bulk polymer for the nondegenerate SSH model Hamiltonian. As a result electrons (or holes) transferred into the bulk of the polymer form spinless bipolarons. However, there can be spin density in the polymer localized near the interface.Comment: 7 figure

Minimizing energy demand and environmental impact for sustainable NH3 and H2O2 production—A perspective on contributions from thermal, electro-, and photo-catalysis

There is an urgent need to provide adequate and sustainable supplies of water and food to satisfy the demand of an increasing population. Catalysis plays important roles in meeting these needs by facilitating the synthesis of hydrogen peroxide that is used in water decontamination and chemicals production, and ammonia that is used as fertilizer. However, these chemicals are currently produced with processes that are either very energy-intensive or environmentally unfriendly. This article offers the perspectives of the challenges and opportunities in the production of these chemicals, focusing on the roles of catalysis in more sustainable, alternative production methods that minimize energy consumption and environmental impact. While not intended to be a comprehensive review, the article provides a critical review of selected literature relevant to its objectives, discusses areas needed for further research, and potential new directions inspired by new developments in related fields. For each chemical, production by thermal, electro-, and photo-excited processes are discussed. Problems that are common to these approaches and their differences are identified and possible solutions suggested

Light-Front Holography, Light-Front Wavefunctions, and Novel QCD Phenomena

Light-Front Holography, a remarkable feature of the AdS/CFT correspondence, maps amplitudes in anti-de Sitter (AdS) space to frame-independent light-front wavefunctions of hadrons in physical space-time. The model leads to an effective confining light-front QCD Hamiltonian and a single-variable light-front Schrodinger equation which determines the eigenspectrum and the light-front wavefunctions of hadrons for general spin and orbital angular momentum. The coordinate z in AdS space is identified with a Lorentz-invariant coordinate zeta which measures the separation of the constituents within a hadron at equal light-front time and determines the off-shell dynamics of the bound-state wavefunctions and the fall-off in the invariant mass of the constituents. The soft-wall holographic model, modified by a positive-sign dilaton metric, leads to a remarkable one-parameter description of nonperturbative hadron dynamics -- a semi-classical frame-independent first approximation to the spectra and light-front wavefunctions of meson and baryons. The model predicts a Regge spectrum of linear trajectories with the same slope in the leading orbital angular momentum L of hadrons and the radial quantum number n. The hadron eigensolutions projected on the free Fock basis provides the complete set of valence and non-valence light-front Fock state wavefunctions which describe the hadron's momentum and spin distributions needed to compute measures of hadron structure at the quark and gluon level. The effective confining potential also creates quark- antiquark pairs. The AdS/QCD model can be systematically improved by using its complete orthonormal solutions to diagonalize the full QCD light-front Hamiltonian or by applying the Lippmann-Schwinger method to systematically include the QCD interaction terms. A new perspective on quark and gluon condensates is also presented.Comment: Presented at LIGHTCONE 2011, 23 - 27 May, 2011, Dallas, T

The Complementarity of Eastern and Western Hemisphere Long-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Experiments

We present a general formalism for extracting information on the fundamental parameters associated with neutrino masses and mixings from two or more long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments. This formalism is then applied to the current most likely experiments using neutrino beams from the Japan Hadron Facility (JHF) and Fermilab's NuMI beamline. Different combinations of muon neutrino or muon anti-neutrino running are considered. To extract the type of neutrino mass hierarchy we make use of the matter effect. Contrary to naive expectation, we find that both beams using neutrinos is more suitable for determining the hierarchy provided that the neutrino energy divided by baseline ($E/L$) for NuMI is smaller than or equal to that of JHF. Whereas to determine the small mixing angle, $\theta_{13}$, and the CP or T violating phase $\delta$, one neutrino and the other anti-neutrino is most suitable. We make extensive use of bi-probability diagrams for both understanding and extracting the physics involved in such comparisons.Comment: 21 pages, Latex, 3 postscript figure

Unified graphical summary of neutrino mixing parameters

The neutrino mixing parameters are presented in a number of different ways by the various experiments, e.g., SuperKamiokande, K2K, SNO, KamLAND, and CHOOZ, and also by the Particle Data Group. In this paper, we argue that presenting the data in terms of sin(2)theta, where theta is the mixing angle appropriate for a given experiment, has a direct physical interpretation. For current atmospheric, solar, and reactor neutrino experiments, the sin(2)theta's are effectively the probabilities of finding a given flavor in a particular neutrino mass eigenstate. The given flavor and particular mass eigenstate vary from experiment to experiment; however, the use of sin(2)theta provides a unified picture of all the data. Using this unified picture we present a graphical way to represent these neutrino mixing parameters which includes the uncertainties. All of this is performed in the context of the present experimental status of three neutrino oscillations

Chiral rings, anomalies and loop equations in N=1* gauge theories

We examine the equivalence between the Konishi anomaly equations and the matrix model loop equations in N=1* gauge theories, the mass deformation of N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills. We perform the superfunctional integral of two adjoint chiral superfields to obtain an effective N=1 theory of the third adjoint chiral superfield. By choosing an appropriate holomorphic variation, the Konishi anomaly equations correctly reproduce the loop equations in the corresponding three-matrix model. We write down the field theory loop equations explicitly by using a noncommutative product of resolvents peculiar to N=1* theories. The field theory resolvents are identified with those in the matrix model in the same manner as for the generic N=1 gauge theories. We cover all the classical gauge groups. In SO/Sp cases, both the one-loop holomorphic potential and the Konishi anomaly term involve twisting of index loops to change a one-loop oriented diagram to an unoriented diagram. The field theory loop equations for these cases show certain inhomogeneous terms suggesting the matrix model loop equations for the RP2 resolvent.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures, latex2e, v4: minor changes in introduction and conclusions, 4 references are added, version to appear in JHE