Vacuum Alignment in SUSY A4 Models

In this note we discuss the vacuum alignment in supersymmetric models with spontaneously broken flavour symmetries in the presence of soft supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking terms. We show that the inclusion of soft SUSY breaking terms can give rise to non-vanishing vacuum expectation values (VEVs) for the auxiliary components of the flavon fields. These non-zero VEVs can have an important impact on the phenomenology of this class of models, since they can induce an additional flavour violating contribution to the sfermion soft mass matrix of right-left (RL) type. We carry out an explicit computation in a class of SUSY A4 models predicting tri-bimaximal mixing in the lepton sector. The flavour symmetry breaking sector is described in terms of flavon and driving supermultiplets. We find non-vanishing VEVs for the auxiliary components of the flavon fields and for the scalar components of the driving fields which are of order m_{SUSY} x and m_{SUSY}, respectively. Thereby, m_{SUSY} is the generic soft SUSY breaking scale which is expected to be around 1 TeV and is the VEV of scalar components of the flavon fields. Another effect of these VEVs can be the generation of a mu term.Comment: 23 pages; added a new section on the relation to Supergravity; version accepted for publication in JHE

Understanding key constraints and practice design in Rugby Union place kicking : experiential knowledge of professional kickers and experienced coaches

Place kicks present valuable opportunities to score points in Rugby Union, which are typically performed under varying constraints in competitive performance environments. Previous quantitative studies suggest these interacting constraints can influence fluctuations in place kick success. To further the understanding of how fluctuations in place kicking success emerge, our aim was twofold: i) to explore and identify the key constraints that professional place kickers and experienced place kicking coaches perceive to influence the difficulty of a place kick and ii) to understand the level to which current place kicking practice environments represent these key constraints experienced in performance environments. Six professional place kickers and six experienced place kicking coaches were interviewed. Using a deductive thematic analysis, 11 key constraints were identified: individual constraints of expectation for success and fatigue, task constraints of angle and distance to goalposts, environmental constraints of wind, weather, pitch, and crowd, and situational constraints of previous kicking performance, time remaining and current score margin. Place kicking is typically practised individually or with a small number of place kickers in isolation from team sessions. Where possible, coaches should be encouraged to include place kicking in simulated game scenarios during practice to represent key constraints from performance environments. Our study demonstrates how experiential knowledge can enrich the understanding of sport performance and inform the design of practice environments which simulate relevant constraints of competitive performance to enhance skill adaptation of athletes

Towards the Formalization of Fractional Calculus in Higher-Order Logic

Fractional calculus is a generalization of classical theories of integration and differentiation to arbitrary order (i.e., real or complex numbers). In the last two decades, this new mathematical modeling approach has been widely used to analyze a wide class of physical systems in various fields of science and engineering. In this paper, we describe an ongoing project which aims at formalizing the basic theories of fractional calculus in the HOL Light theorem prover. Mainly, we present the motivation and application of such formalization efforts, a roadmap to achieve our goals, current status of the project and future milestones.Comment: 9 page

Torus equivariant K-stability

It is conjectured that to test the K-polystability of a polarised variety it is enough to consider test-configurations which are equivariant with respect to a torus in the automorphism group. We prove partial results towards this conjecture. We also show that it would give a new proof of the K-polystability of constant scalar curvature polarised manifolds

Do Interventions Designed to Support Shared Decision-Making Reduce Health Inequalities? : A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Copyright: © 2014 Durand et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Background: Increasing patient engagement in healthcare has become a health policy priority. However, there has been concern that promoting supported shared decision-making could increase health inequalities. Objective: To evaluate the impact of SDM interventions on disadvantaged groups and health inequalities. Design: Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials and observational studies.Peer reviewe

Circuit dissection of the role of somatostatin in itch and pain

Stimuli that elicit itch are detected by sensory neurons that innervate the skin. This information is processed by the spinal cord; however, the way in which this occurs is still poorly understood. Here we investigated the neuronal pathways for itch neurotransmission, particularly the contribution of the neuropeptide somatostatin. We find that in the periphery, somatostatin is exclusively expressed in Nppb+ neurons, and we demonstrate that Nppb+somatostatin+ cells function as pruriceptors. Employing chemogenetics, pharmacology and cell-specific ablation methods, we demonstrate that somatostatin potentiates itch by inhibiting inhibitory dynorphin neurons, which results in disinhibition of GRPR+ neurons. Furthermore, elimination of somatostatin from primary afferents and/or from spinal interneurons demonstrates differential involvement of the peptide released from these sources in itch and pain. Our results define the neural circuit underlying somatostatin-induced itch and characterize a contrasting antinociceptive role for the peptide

Diffractive Higgs Production by AdS Pomeron Fusion

The double diffractive Higgs production at central rapidity is formulated in terms of the fusion of two AdS gravitons/Pomerons first introduced by Brower, Polchinski, Strassler and Tan in elastic scattering. Here we propose a simple self-consistent holographic framework capable of providing phenomenologically compelling estimates of diffractive cross sections at the LHC. As in the traditional weak coupling approach, we anticipate that several phenomenological parameters must be tested and calibrated through factorization for a self-consistent description of other diffractive process such as total cross sections, deep inelastic scattering and heavy quark production in the central region.Comment: 53 pages, 8 figure

Stratification of PD-1 blockade response in melanoma using pre- and post-treatment immunophenotyping of peripheral blood

Efficacy of checkpoint inhibitor therapies in cancer varies greatly, with some patients showing complete responses while others do not respond and experience progressive disease. We aimed to identify correlates of response and progression following PD-1-directed therapy by immunophenotyping peripheral blood samples from 20 patients with advanced malignant melanoma before and after treatment with the PD-1 blocking antibody pembrolizumab. Our data reveal that individuals responding to PD-1 blockade were characterised by increased CD8 T cell proliferation following treatment, while progression was associated with an increase in CTLA-4-expressing Treg. Remarkably, unsupervised clustering analysis of pre-treatment T cell subsets revealed differences in individuals that went on to respond to PD-1 blockade compared to individuals that did not. These differences mapped to expression of the proliferation marker Ki67 and the costimulatory receptor CD28 as well as the inhibitory molecules 2B4 and KLRG1. While these results require validation in larger patient cohorts, they suggest that flow cytometric analysis of a relatively small number of T cell markers in peripheral blood could potentially allow stratification of PD-1 blockade treatment response prior to therapy initiation

Sensor fusion of camera, GPS and IMU using fuzzy adaptive multiple motion models

A tracking system that will be used for augmented reality applications has two main requirements: accuracy and frame rate. The first requirement is related to the performance of the pose estimation algorithm and how accurately the tracking system can find the position and orientation of the user in the environment. Accuracy problems of current tracking devices, considering that they are low-cost devices, cause static errors during this motion estimation process. The second requirement is related to dynamic errors (the end-to-end system delay, occurring because of the delay in estimating the motion of the user and displaying images based on this estimate). This paper investigates combining the vision-based estimates with measurements from other sensors, GPS and IMU, in order to improve the tracking accuracy in outdoor environments. The idea of using Fuzzy Adaptive Multiple Models was investigated using a novel fuzzy rule-based approach to decide on the model that results in improved accuracy and faster convergence for the fusion filter. Results show that the developed tracking system is more accurate than a conventional GPS–IMU fusion approach due to additional estimates from a camera and fuzzy motion models. The paper also presents an application in cultural heritage context running at modest frame rates due to the design of the fusion algorithm