Vacuum fluctuations of a scalar field near a reflecting boundary and their effects on the motion of a test particle

The contribution from quantum vacuum fluctuations of a real massless scalar field to the motion of a test particle that interacts with the field in the presence of a perfectly reflecting flat boundary is here investigated. There is no quantum induced dispersions on the motion of the particle when it is alone in the empty space. However, when a reflecting wall is introduced, dispersions occur with magnitude dependent on how fast the system evolves between the two scenarios. A possible way of implementing this process would be by means of an idealized sudden switching, for which the transition occurs instantaneously. Although the sudden process is a simple and mathematically convenient idealization it brings some divergences to the results, particularly at a time corresponding to a round trip of a light signal between the particle and the wall. It is shown that the use of smooth switching functions, besides regularizing such divergences, enables us to better understand the behavior of the quantum dispersions induced on the motion of the particle. Furthermore, the action of modifying the vacuum state of the system leads to a change in the particle energy that depends on how fast the transition between these states is implemented. Possible implications of these results to the similar case of an electric charge near a perfectly conducting wall are discussed.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure

Semi-Automated SVG Programming via Direct Manipulation

Direct manipulation interfaces provide intuitive and interactive features to a broad range of users, but they often exhibit two limitations: the built-in features cannot possibly cover all use cases, and the internal representation of the content is not readily exposed. We believe that if direct manipulation interfaces were to (a) use general-purpose programs as the representation format, and (b) expose those programs to the user, then experts could customize these systems in powerful new ways and non-experts could enjoy some of the benefits of programmable systems. In recent work, we presented a prototype SVG editor called Sketch-n-Sketch that offered a step towards this vision. In that system, the user wrote a program in a general-purpose lambda-calculus to generate a graphic design and could then directly manipulate the output to indirectly change design parameters (i.e. constant literals) in the program in real-time during the manipulation. Unfortunately, the burden of programming the desired relationships rested entirely on the user. In this paper, we design and implement new features for Sketch-n-Sketch that assist in the programming process itself. Like typical direct manipulation systems, our extended Sketch-n-Sketch now provides GUI-based tools for drawing shapes, relating shapes to each other, and grouping shapes together. Unlike typical systems, however, each tool carries out the user's intention by transforming their general-purpose program. This novel, semi-automated programming workflow allows the user to rapidly create high-level, reusable abstractions in the program while at the same time retaining direct manipulation capabilities. In future work, our approach may be extended with more graphic design features or realized for other application domains.Comment: In 29th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2016

Basis invariant conditions for supersymmetry in the two-Higgs-doublet model

The minimal supersymmetric standard model involves a rather restrictive Higgs potential with two Higgs fields. Recently, the full set of classes of symmetries allowed in the most general two Higgs doublet model was identified; these classes do not include the supersymmetric limit as a particular class. Thus, a physically meaningful definition of the supersymmetric limit must involve the interaction of the Higgs sector with other sectors of the theory. Here we show how one can construct basis invariant probes of supersymmetry involving both the Higgs sector and the gaugino-higgsino Higgs interactions.Comment: RevTex, 11 pages, v2-small section adde

Regular string-like braneworlds

In this work, we propose a new class of smooth thick string-like braneworld in six dimensions. The brane exhibits a varying brane-tension and an $AdS$ asymptotic behavior. The brane-core geometry is parametrized by the Bulk cosmological constant, the brane width and by a geometrical deformation parameter. The source satisfies the dominant energy condition for the undeformed solution and has an exotic asymptotic regime for the deformed solution. This scenario provides a normalized massless Kaluza-Klein mode for the scalar, gravitational and gauge sectors. The near-brane geometry allows massive resonant modes at the brane for the $s$ state and nearby the brane for $l=1$.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures. Some modifications to match the published version in EPJ

Breast skin-line detection using dynamic programming

In this paper, we present a novel method to extract the breast skin-line based on dynamic programming. Skin-line extraction is an important preprocessing step in CAD systems; however, it is a challenging problem due to the presence of noise, underexposed regions, which results in a low contrast area near the skin-air interface, and artifacts such as labels. Our proposal utilizes the stroma edge to constrain searching for the border. In order to cope with noise, we consider several candidate points for the border interface which are obtained by the Laplace operator applied in pre-defined directions in the mammogram. The breast contour is obtained from the candidate points using a dynamic programming algorithm. This utilizes a criterion of optimality to obtain the optimum contour by minimization of a cost function. The method was evaluated using 82 mammograms whose contour were manually extracted by a radiologist from the mini- MIAS database. The Polyline Distance Measure was evaluated for each contour selected with the proposed method, obtaining a mean error of 2.05 pixels and a standard deviation of 0.80.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT