Plus-minus construction leads to perfect invisibility

Recent theoretical advances applied to metamaterials have opened new avenues to design a coating that hides objects from electromagnetic radiation and even the sight. Here, we propose a new design of cloaking devices that creates perfect invisibility in isotropic media. A combination of positive and negative refractive indices, called plus-minus construction, is essential to achieve perfect invisibility (i.e., no time delay and total absence of reflection). Contrary to the common understanding that between two isotropic materials having different refractive indices the electromagnetic reflection is unavoidable, our method shows that surprisingly the reflection phenomena can be completely eliminated. The invented method, different from the classical impedance matching, may also find electromagnetic applications outside of cloaking devices, wherever distortions are present arising from reflections.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figure

Analysis of CLAS data on double charge pion electroproduction

Recent developments in phenomenological analysis of the CLAS data on 2$\pi$ electroproduction are presented. The contributions from isobar channels and $P_{11}(1440)$, $D_{13}(1520)$ electrocouplings at $Q^{2}$ from 0.25 to 0.6 GeV$^2$ were determined from the analysis of comprehensive data on differential and fully integrated 2$\pi$ cross sections. Experiment Numbers: E94-005 Group: Hall BComment: Paper compiled for NSTAR2007 meetin

On the background in the γp→ω(π0γ)p\gamma p \to \omega(\pi^0\gamma) p reaction and mixed event simulation

In this paper we evaluate sources of background for the $\gamma p \to \omega p$, with the $\omega$ detected through its $\pi^0 \gamma$ decay channel, to compare with the experiment carried out at ELSA. We find background from $\gamma p \to \pi^0 \pi^0 p$ followed by decay of a $\pi^0$ into two $\gamma$, recombining one $\pi^0$ and one $\gamma$, and from the $\gamma p \to \pi^0 \eta p$ reaction with subsequent decay of the $\eta$ into two photons. This background accounts for the data at $\pi^0 \gamma$ invariant masses beyond 700 MeV, but strength is missing at lower invariant masses which was attributed to photon misidentification events, which we simulate to get a good reproduction of the experimental background. Once this is done, we perform an event mixing simulation to reproduce the calculated background and we find that the method provides a good description of the background at low $\pi^0 \gamma$ invariant masses but fakes the background at high invariant masses, making background events at low invariant masses, which are due to $\gamma$ misidentification events, responsible for the background at high invariant masses which is due to the $\gamma p \to \pi^0 \pi^0 p$ and $\gamma p \to \pi^0 \eta p$ reactions.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

No Effects of Acute Psychosocial Stress on Working Memory in Older People With Type 2 Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) has been considered a public health threat due to its growing prevalence, particularly in the older population. It is important to know the effects of psychosocial stress and its potential consequences for some basic cognitive processes that are important in daily life. Currently, there is very little information about how people with T2D face acute psychosocial stressors, and even less about how their response affects working memory (WM), which is essential for their functionality and independence. Our aim was to characterize the response to an acute laboratory psychosocial stressor and its effects on WM in older people with T2D. Fifty participants with T2D from 52 to 77 years old were randomly assigned to a stress (12 men and 12 women) or control (12 men and 14 women) condition. Mood and physiological (cortisol, C, and salivary alpha-amylase, sAA) responses to tasks were measured. In addition, participants completed a WM test before and after the stress or control task. Our results showed that the TSST elicited higher negative affect and greater C and sAA responses than the control task. No significant differences in WM were observed depending on the exposure to stress or the control task. Finally, participants who showed higher C and sAA responses to the stressor had lower WM performance. Our results indicate that medically treated older adults with T2D show clear, typical mood and physiological responses to an acute psychosocial stressor. Finally, the lack of acute psychosocial stress effects on WM suggests that it could be related to aging and not to this disease, at least when T2D is adequately treated.

Nonlocal Kinetic Equation and Simulations of Heavy Ion Reactions

A kinetic equation which combines the quasiparticle drift of Landau's equation with a dissipation governed by a nonlocal and noninstantaneous scattering integral in the spirit of Enskog corrections is discussed. Numerical values of the off-shell contribution to the Wigner distribution, of the collision duration and of the collision nonlocality are presented for different realistic potentials. On preliminary results we show that simulations of quantum molecular dynamics extended by the nonlocal treatment of collisions leads to a broader proton distribution bringing the theoretical spectra closer towards the experimental values than the local approach.Comment: Proceedings of the Erice School, published as Vol. 42 of "Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics" by ELSEVIE

Concurrent Helminthic Infection Protects Schoolchildren with Plasmodium vivax from Anemia

malaria in rural areas in the municipality of Careiro, in the Western Brazilian Amazon. (n = 9). In children without intestinal helminthes, a significant decrease in the hemoglobin during the malarial attack was seen as compared to the baseline concentration. In the survival analysis, no difference was seen in the time (in days) from the baseline cross-sectional to the first malarial infection, between parasitized and non-parasitized children.

Chiral dynamics of baryon resonances and hadrons in a nuclear medium

In these lectures I make an introduction to chiral unitary theory applied to the meson baryon interaction and show how several well known resonances are dynamically generated, and others are predicted. Two very recent experiments are analyzed, one of them showing the existence of two $\Lambda(1405)$ states and the other one providing support for the $\Lambda(1520)$ resonance as a quasibound state of $\Sigma(1385) \pi$. The use of chiral Lagrangians to account for the hadronic interaction at the elementary level introduces a new approach to deal with the modification of meson and baryon properties in a nuclear medium. Examples of it for $\bar{K}$, $\eta$ and $\phi$ modification in the nuclear medium are presented.Comment: Lectures given in the Workshop on Hadron Physics, Puri (India), march 200

Local and global modes of drug action in biochemical networks

It becomes increasingly accepted that a shift is needed from the traditional target-based approach of drug development to an integrated perspective of drug action in biochemical systems. We here present an integrative analysis of the interactions between drugs and metabolism based on the concept of drug scope. The drug scope represents the set of metabolic compounds and reactions that are potentially affected by a drug. We constructed and analyzed the scopes of all US approved drugs having metabolic targets. Our analysis shows that the distribution of drug scopes is highly uneven, and that drugs can be classified into several categories based on their scopes. Some of them have small scopes corresponding to localized action, while others have large scopes corresponding to potential large-scale systemic action. These groups are well conserved throughout different topologies of the underlying metabolic network. They can furthermore be associated to specific drug therapeutic properties