NASA Developmental Biology Workshop: A summary

The Life Sciences Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of its continuing assessment of its research program, convened a workshop on Developmental Biology to determine whether there are important scientific studies in this area which warrant continued or expanded NASA support. The workshop consisted of six panels, each of which focused on a single major phylogenetic group. The objectives of each panel were to determine whether gravity plays a role in the ontogeny of their subject group, to determine whether the microgravity of spaceflight can be used to help understand fundamental problems in developmental biology, to develop the rationale and hypotheses for conducting NASA-relevant research in development biology both on the ground and in space, and to identify any unique equipment and facilities that would be required to support both ground-based and spaceflight experiments

Fermi breakup and the Statistical Multifragmentation Model

We demonstrate the close similarity of a generalized Fermi breakup model, in which densities of excited states are taken into account, to the microcanonical statistical multifragmentation model used to describe the desintegration of highly excited fragments of nuclear reactions.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figure

Lorentz Violation and Topologically Trapped Charge Carriers in 2D Materials

The full spectrum of two-dimensional fermion states in a scalar soliton trap with a Lorentz breaking background is investigated in the context of the novel 2D materials, where the Lorentz symmetry should not be strictly valid. The field theoretical model with Lorentz breaking terms represents Dirac electrons in one valley and in a scalar field background. The Lorentz violation comes from the difference between the Dirac electron and scalar mode velocities, which should be expected when modelling the electronic and lattice excitations in 2D materials. We extend the analytical methods developed in the context of 1+1 field theories to explore the effect of the Lorentz symmetry breaking in the charge carrier density of 2D materials in the presence of a domain wall with a kink profile. The width and the depth of the trapping potential from the kink is controlled by the Lorentz violating term, which is reflected analytically in the band structure and properties of the trapped states. Our findings enlarge previous studies of the edge states obtained with domain wall and in strained graphene nanoribbon in a chiral gauge theory

Nuclear isotope thermometry

We discuss different aspects which could influence temperatures deduced from experimental isotopic yields in the multifragmentation process. It is shown that fluctuations due to the finite size of the system and distortions due to the decay of hot primary fragments conspire to blur the temperature determination in multifragmentation reactions. These facts suggest that caloric curves obtained through isotope thermometers, which were taken as evidence for a first-order phase transition in nuclear matter, should be investigated very carefully.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Statistical multifragmentation model with discretized energy and the generalized Fermi breakup. I. Formulation of the model

The Generalized Fermi Breakup recently demonstrated to be formally equivalent to the Statistical Multifragmentation Model, if the contribution of excited states are included in the state densities of the former, is implemented. Since this treatment requires the application of the Statistical Multifragmentation Model repeatedly on the hot fragments until they have decayed to their ground states, it becomes extremely computational demanding, making its application to the systems of interest extremely difficult. Based on exact recursion formulae previously developed by Chase and Mekjian to calculate the statistical weights very efficiently, we present an implementation which is efficient enough to allow it to be applied to large systems at high excitation energies. Comparison with the GEMINI++ sequential decay code shows that the predictions obtained with our treatment are fairly similar to those obtained with this more traditional model.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure