Scattering Amplitudes For All Masses and Spins

We introduce a formalism for describing four-dimensional scattering amplitudes for particles of any mass and spin. This naturally extends the familiar spinor-helicity formalism for massless particles to one where these variables carry an extra SU(2) little group index for massive particles, with the amplitudes for spin S particles transforming as symmetric rank 2S tensors. We systematically characterise all possible three particle amplitudes compatible with Poincare symmetry. Unitarity, in the form of consistent factorization, imposes algebraic conditions that can be used to construct all possible four-particle tree amplitudes. This also gives us a convenient basis in which to expand all possible four-particle amplitudes in terms of what can be called "spinning polynomials". Many general results of quantum field theory follow the analysis of four-particle scattering, ranging from the set of all possible consistent theories for massless particles, to spin-statistics, and the Weinberg-Witten theorem. We also find a transparent understanding for why massive particles of sufficiently high spin can not be "elementary". The Higgs and Super-Higgs mechanisms are naturally discovered as an infrared unification of many disparate helicity amplitudes into a smaller number of massive amplitudes, with a simple understanding for why this can't be extended to Higgsing for gravitons. We illustrate a number of applications of the formalism at one-loop, giving few-line computations of the electron (g-2) as well as the beta function and rational terms in QCD. "Off-shell" observables like correlation functions and form-factors can be thought of as scattering amplitudes with external "probe" particles of general mass and spin, so all these objects--amplitudes, form factors and correlators, can be studied from a common on-shell perspective.Comment: 79 page

Nuclear wastewater decontamination by 3D-Printed hierarchical zeolite monoliths

3D-printed monoliths of zeolites chabazite and 4A were made, characterized, and shown effective for removing strontium and caesium from water

T Oligo-Primed Polymerase Chain Reaction (TOP-PCR): A Robust Method for the Amplification of Minute DNA Fragments in Body Fluids.

Body fluid DNA sequencing is a powerful noninvasive approach for the diagnosis of genetic defects, infectious agents and diseases. The success relies on the quantity and quality of the DNA samples. However, numerous clinical samples are either at low quantity or of poor quality due to various reasons. To overcome these problems, we have developed T oligo-primed polymerase chain reaction (TOP-PCR) for full-length nonselective amplification of minute quantity of DNA fragments. TOP-PCR adopts homogeneous "half adaptor" (HA), generated by annealing P oligo (carrying a phosphate group at the 5' end) and T oligo (carrying a T-tail at the 3' end), for efficient ligation to target DNA and subsequent PCR amplification primed by the T oligo alone. Using DNA samples from body fluids, we demonstrate that TOP-PCR recovers minute DNA fragments and maintains the DNA size profile, while enhancing the major molecular populations. Our results also showed that TOP-PCR is a superior method for detecting apoptosis and outperforms the method adopted by Illumina for DNA amplification

Neural plasticity in common forms of chronic headaches

Headaches are universal experiences and among the most common disorders. While headache may be physiological in the acute setting, it can become a pathological and persistent condition.The mechanisms underlying the transition from episodic to chronic pain have been the subject of intense study. Using physiological and imaging methods, researchers have identified a number of different forms of neural plasticity associated with migraine and other headaches, including peripheral and central sensitization, and alterations in the endogenous mechanisms of pain modulation. While these changes have been proposed to contribute to headache and pain chronification, some findings are likely the results of repetitive noxious stimulation, such as atrophy of brain areas involved in pain perception and modulation. In this review, we provide a narrative overview of recent advances on the neuroimaging, electrophysiological and genetic aspects of neural plasticity associated with the most common forms of chronic headaches, including migraine, cluster headache, tension-type headache, and medication overuse headache

Detach and Adapt: Learning Cross-Domain Disentangled Deep Representation

While representation learning aims to derive interpretable features for describing visual data, representation disentanglement further results in such features so that particular image attributes can be identified and manipulated. However, one cannot easily address this task without observing ground truth annotation for the training data. To address this problem, we propose a novel deep learning model of Cross-Domain Representation Disentangler (CDRD). By observing fully annotated source-domain data and unlabeled target-domain data of interest, our model bridges the information across data domains and transfers the attribute information accordingly. Thus, cross-domain joint feature disentanglement and adaptation can be jointly performed. In the experiments, we provide qualitative results to verify our disentanglement capability. Moreover, we further confirm that our model can be applied for solving classification tasks of unsupervised domain adaptation, and performs favorably against state-of-the-art image disentanglement and translation methods.Comment: CVPR 2018 Spotligh