Annulment Actions and the V4: Taking Legislative Conflicts Before the CJEU

The EU member states have been using the action for annulment to challenge the legality of EU measures while pursuing a range of non-legal and essentially political motivations. This also holds for the V4 member states, which have also resorted to annulment actions to judicialize their legislative conflicts within the EU before the CJEU. Among the V4, Poland has been the most frequent litigant, using this institutional tool increasingly actively during the last 10 years. Poland’s behavior appears to confirm expectations of differentiation among this group of member states. It also coincides with a period of political change marked by deep legislative conflicts within the EU. The V4 annulment challenges against EU legislative measures usually made a genuine effort to achieve the legal objective of annulling the challenged legal act. However, there is evidence that they also pursued certain political motivations or a combination of them. These could include the securing of gains in domestic politics, avoiding the local costs of an EU policy misfit and/or promoting a preferred policy position, and/or influencing EU competence arrangements. In a few cases, the litigant member state aimed to avoid concrete material disadvantages. Securing a legal interpretation from the CJEU that would influence the behavior of other EU actors or clarify the law affecting the position of the applicant member state also motivated some of the V4 legal challenges

Rotation intrinsic spin coupling--the parallelism description

For the Dirac particle in the rotational system, the rotation induced inertia effect is analogously treated as the modification of the "spin connection" on the Dirac equation in the flat spacetime, which is determined by the equivalent tetrad. From the point of view of parallelism description of spacetime, the obtained torsion axial-vector is just the rotational angular velocity, which is included in the "spin connection". Furthermore the axial-vector spin coupling induced spin precession is just the rotation-spin(1/2) interaction predicted by Mashhoon. Our derivation treatment is straightforward and simplified in the geometrical meaning and physical conception, however the obtained conclusions are consistent with that of the other previous work.Comment: 10 pages, no figur

Spin 0 and spin 1/2 particles in a spherically symmetric static gravity and a Coulomb field

A relativistic particle in an attractive Coulomb field as well as a static and spherically symmetric gravitational field is studied. The gravitational field is treated perturbatively and the energy levels are obtained for both spin 0 (Klein-Gordon) and spin 1/2 (Dirac) particles. The results are shown to coincide with each other as well as the result of the nonrelativistic (Schrodinger) equation in the nonrelativistic limit.Comment: 12 page

Propagation-enhanced generation of intense high-harmonic continua in the 100-eV spectral region

The study of core electron dynamics through nonlinear spectroscopy requires intense isolated attosecond extreme ultraviolet or even X-ray pulses. A robust way to produce these pulses is high-harmonic generation (HHG) in a gas medium. However, the energy upscaling of the process depends on a very demanding next-generation laser technology that provides multi-terawatt (TW) laser pulses with few-optical-cycle duration and controlled electric field. Here, we revisit the HHG process driven by 16-TW sub-two-cycle laser pulses to reach high intensity in the 100-eV spectral region and beyond. We show that the combination of above barrier-suppression intensity with a long generation medium significantly enhances the isolation of attosecond pulses compared to lower intensities and/or shorter media and this way reduces the pulse duration as well as field-stability requirements on the laser driver. This novel regime facilitates the real-time observation of electron dynamics at the attosecond timescale in atoms, molecules, and solids

Quantum repeated interactions and the chaos game

Inspired by the algorithm of Barnsley's chaos game, we construct an open quantum system model based on the repeated interaction process. We shown that the quantum dynamics of the appropriate fermionic/bosonic system (in interaction with an environment) provides a physical model of the chaos game. When considering fermionic operators, we follow the system's evolution by focusing on its reduced density matrix. The system is shown to be in a Gaussian state (at all time $t$) and the average number of particles is shown to obey the chaos game equation. Considering bosonic operators, with a system initially prepared in coherent states, the evolution of the system can be tracked by investigating the dynamics of the eigenvalues of the annihilation operator. This quantity is governed by a chaos game-like equation from which different scenarios emerge.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figue

Meta-Analysis of the Long Term Success Rate of Different Interventions in Benign Biliary Strictures.

BACKGROUND: Benign biliary stricture is a rare condition and the majority of the cases are caused by operative trauma or chronic inflammation based on various etiology. Although the initial results of endoscopic, percutaneous and surgical treatment are impressive, no comparison about long term stricture resolution is available. AIMS: The goal of this study was to compare the long term disease free survival in benign biliary strictures with various etiology after surgery, percutaneous transhepatic-and endoscopic treatment. METHODS: PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Library were searched by computer and manually for published studies. The investigators selected the publications according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, processed the data and assessed the quality of the selected studies. Meta-analysis of data of 24 publications was performed to compare long term disease free survival of different treatment groups. RESULTS: Compared the subgroups surgery resulted in the highest long term stricture resolution rate, followed by the percutaneous transhepatic treatment, the multiple plastic stent insertion and covered self-expanding metal stents (SEMS), however the difference was not significant. All compared methods are significantly superior to the single plastic stent placement. Long term stricture resolution rate irrespectively of any therapy is still not more than 84%. CONCLUSIONS: In summary, the use of single plastic stent is not recommended. Further randomized studies and innovative technical development are required for improving the treatment of benign biliary strictures

Multiple ionization of argon via multi-XUV-photon absorption induced by 20-GW high-order harmonic laser pulses

We report the observation of multiple ionization of argon through multi-XUV-photon absorption induced by an unprecedentedly powerful laser driven high-order harmonic generation source. Comparing the measured intensity dependence of the yield of the different argon charge states with numerical calculations we can infer the different channels—direct and sequential—underlying the interaction. While such studies were feasible so far only with free electron laser (FEL) sources, this paper connects highly nonlinear XUV processes with the ultrashort time scales inherent to the harmonic pulses and highlights the advanced perspectives of emerging large scale laser research infrastructures

Molecular excitation in the Interstellar Medium: recent advances in collisional, radiative and chemical processes

We review the different excitation processes in the interstellar mediumComment: Accepted in Chem. Re