Leukocyte telomere shortening in Huntington's disease

Huntington's disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disease caused by an expanded CAG repeat. Though symptom onset commonly occurs at midlife and inversely correlates with the CAG repeat expansion, age at clinical onset and progression rate are variable. In the present study we investigated the relationship between leukocyte telomere length (LTL) and HD development. LTL was measured by real-time PCR in manifest HD patients (HD, n = 62), pre-manifest HD patients (pre-HD, n = 38), and age-matched controls (n = 76). Significant LTL differences were observed between the three groups (p < .0001), with LTL values in the order: HD < pre-HD < controls. The relationship between LTL and age was different in the three groups. An inverse relationship between mean LTL and CAG repeat number was found in the pre-HD (p = .03). The overall data seem to indicate that after age 30 years, LT begins to shorten markedly in pre-HD patients according to CAG number and increasing age, up to the values observed in HD. This very suggestive picture allowed us to hypothesize that in pre-manifest HD, LTL could be a measure of time to clinical HD onset. The possible use of LTL as a reliable biomarker to track HD development and progression was evaluated and discussed

Fracture Functions

We present a new approach to semi-inclusive hard processes in QCD by means of $\it Fracture\;Functions$, hybrids between structure and fragmentation functions. We briefly motivate and describe it together with a list of possible applications.Comment: 5 pages, Late

Radiation Problem in Transplanckian Scattering

We investigate hard radiation emission in small-angle transplanckian scattering. We show how to reduce this problem to a quantum field theory computation in a classical background (gravitational shock wave). In momentum space, the formalism is similar to the flat-space light cone perturbation theory, with shock wave crossing vertices added. In the impact parameter representation, the radiating particle splits into a multi-particle virtual state, whose wavefunction is then multiplied by individual eikonal factors. As a phenomenological application, we study QCD radiation in transplanckian collisions of TeV-scale gravity models. We derive the distribution of initial state radiation gluons, and find a suppression at large transverse momenta with respect to the standard QCD result. This is due to rescattering events, in which the quark and the emitted gluon scatter coherently. Interestingly, the suppression factor depends on the number of extra dimensions and provides a new experimental handle to measure this number. We evaluate the leading-log corrections to partonic cross-sections due to the initial state radiation, and prove that they can be absorbed into the hadronic PDF. The factorization scale should then be chosen in agreement with an earlier proposal of Emparan, Masip, and Rattazzi. In the future, our methods can be applied to the gravitational radiation in transplanckian scattering, where they can go beyond the existing approaches limited to the soft radiation case.Comment: 41 pp, v2: minor changes and added refs, conforms with published versio

The UA(1)U_A(1) Problem on the Lattice

If the expression of the topological charge density operator, suggested by fermions obeying the Ginsparg--Wilson relation, is employed, it is possible to prove on the lattice the validity of the Witten--Veneziano formula for the $\eta'$ mass. Recent numerical results from simulations with overlap fermions in 2 (abelian Schwinger model) and 4 (QCD) dimensions give values for the mass of the lightest pseudo-scalar flavour-singlet state that agree with theoretical expectations and/or experimental data.Comment: 3 pages, talk presented by G.C. Rossi at Lattice2001(theorydevelop

A Model for the Big Bounce

I motivate a proposal for modeling, at weak string coupling, the ``Big Bounce" transition from a growing-curvature phase to standard (FRW) cosmology in terms of a pressure-less dense gas of "string-holes" (SH), string states lying on the correspondence curve between strings and black holes. During this phase SH evolve in such a way that temperature and (string-frame) curvature remain $O(M_s)$ and (a cosmological version of) the holographic entropy bound remains saturated. This reasoning also appears to imply a new interpretation of the Hagedorn phase transition in string theory.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

Heating up the cold bounce

Self-dual string cosmological models provide an effective example of bouncing solutions where a phase of accelerated contraction smoothly evolves into an epoch of decelerated Friedmann--Robertson--Walker expansion dominated by the dilaton. While the transition to the expanding regime occurs at sub-Planckian curvature scales, the Universe emerging after the bounce is cold, with sharply growing gauge coupling. However, since massless gauge bosons (as well as other massless fields) are super-adiabatically amplified, the energy density of the maximally amplified modes re-entering the horizon after the bounce can efficiently heat the Universe. As a consequence the gauge coupling reaches a constant value, which can still be perturbative.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figure

Trialogue on the number of fundamental constants

This paper consists of three separate articles on the number of fundamental dimensionful constants in physics. We started our debate in summer 1992 on the terrace of the famous CERN cafeteria. In the summer of 2001 we returned to the subject to find that our views still diverged and decided to explain our current positions. LBO develops the traditional approach with three constants, GV argues in favor of at most two (within superstring theory), while MJD advocates zero.Comment: Version appearing in JHEP; 31 pages late

Effect of Color Screening on Heavy Quarkonia Regge Trajectories

Using an unquenched lattice potential to calculate the spectrum of the bottomonium system, we demonstrate numerically that the effect of pair creation is to produce termination of hadronic Regge trajectories, in contrast to the Veneziano model and the vast majority of phenomenological generalizations. Termination of Regge trajectories may have significant experimental consequences.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, published version including a discussion of coupling to open channel

Large-N bounds on, and compositeness limit of, gauge and gravitational interactions

In a toy model of gauge and gravitational interactions in $D \ge 4$ dimensions, endowed with an invariant UV cut-off $\Lambda$, and containing a large number $N$ of non-self-interacting matter species, the physical gauge and gravitational couplings at the cut-off, $\alpha_g \equiv g^2 \Lambda^{D-4}$ and $\alpha_G \equiv G_N \Lambda^{D-2}$, are shown to be bounded by appropriate powers of ${1\over N}$. This implies that the infinite-bare-coupling (so-called compositeness) limit of these theories is smooth, and can even resemble our world. We argue that such a result, when extended to more realistic situations, can help avoid large-N violations of entropy bounds, solve the dilaton stabilization and GUT-scale problems in superstring theory, and provide a new possible candidate for quintessence.Comment: 8 pages, Latex, minor modifications in notations and reference