Pionic effects in deep inelastic scattering off nuclei

The structure functions calculated in the Chiral bag model reproduce quite well, after appropriate perturbative evolution to large energy scales, the experimental data. We use these results to interpret the structure of the $EMC$ data as a quenching of the pion decay constant due to the in medium behavior of the nucleon. This explanation supports recent proposals of this phenomenon whose origin is the scale invariance of the $QCD$ lagrangian.Comment: 7 pages, figures not included, ftuv92-2

Heavy meson interquark potential

The resolution of Dyson-Schwinger equations leads to the freezing of the QCD running coupling (effective charge) in the infrared, which is best understood as a dynamical generation of a gluon mass function, giving rise to a momentum dependence which is free from infrared divergences. We calculate the interquark potential for heavy mesons by assuming that it is given by a massive One Gluon Exchange potential and compare with phenomenologyical fits inspired by lattice QCD. We apply these potential forms to the description of quarkonia and conclude that, even though some aspects of the confinement mechanism are absent in the Dyson Schwinger formalism, the results for the spectrum are surprisingly accurate. We discuss explanations for this outcome.Comment: 13 pages and 6 figure

The COLD-SAT Experiment for Cryogenic Fluid Management Technology

Future national space transportation missions will depend on the use of cryogenic fluid management technology development needs for these missions. In-space testing will be conducted in order to show low gravity cryogenic fluid management concepts and to acquire a technical data base. Liquid H2 is the preferred test fluid due to its propellant use. The design of COLD-SAT (Cryogenic On-orbit Liquid Depot Storage, Acquisition, and Transfer Satellite), an Expendable Launch Vehicle (ELV) launched orbital spacecraft that will perform subcritical liquid H2 storage and transfer experiments under low gravity conditions is studied. An Atlas launch vehicle will place COLD-SAT into a circular orbit, and the 3-axis controlled spacecraft bus will provide electric power, experiment control, and data management, attitude control, and propulsive accelerations for the experiments. Low levels of acceleration will provide data on the effects that low gravity might have on the heat and mass transfer processes used. The experiment module will contain 3 liquid H2 tanks; fluid transfer, pressurization and venting equipment; and instrumentation

The Gluon Spin in the Chiral Bag Model

We study the gluon polarization contribution at the quark model renormalization scale to the proton spin, $\Gamma$, in the chiral bag model. It is evaluated by taking the expectation value of the forward matrix element of a local gluon operator in the axial gauge $A^+=0$. It is shown that the confining boundary condition for the color electric field plays an important role. When a solution satisfying the boundary condition for the color electric field, which is not the conventionally used but which we favor, is used, the $\Gamma$ has a positive value for {\it all} bag radii and its magnitude is comparable to the quark spin polarization. This results in a significant reduction in the relative fraction of the proton spin carried by the quark spin, which is consistent with the small flavor singlet axial current measured in the EMC experiments.Comment: Corrections to figure

Instantaneous flowrate measurements in high-pressure liquid flows

A new flowmeter suitable for high-pressure flows and with a prompt dynamic response is presented. It is constituted by two pressure transducers installed on the monitored high-pressure pipe at a fixed distance one from the other, together with a low-pressure flowmeter that provides a time-averaged flowrate. The measurement algorithm consists of an ordinary differential equation obtained by combining the mass conservation partial differential equation and the momentum balance one applied to the considered piece of pipe comprised between the two pressure transducers. Due to the absence of a master instrument that can be employed as reference to verify the consistency of the measured flowrate, the flowmeter accuracy has been demonstrated by means of numerical models of various hydraulic components, rigorously validated through pressure measurements. The flow ripple of gear pumps has been measured, as well as the flowrate entering a Common Rail injector. For all these cases, the measured flowrate and the one obtained by means of the numerical model are in very good agreement, leading to a robust validation of the presented measurement device

Investigation into the Specificity of Angiotensin II-induced Behavioral Desensitization

Angiotensin II (AngII) plays a key role in maintaining body fluid homeostasis. The physiological and behavioral effects of central AngII include increased blood pressure and fluid intake. In vitro experiments demonstrate that repeated exposure to AngII reduces the efficacy of subsequent AngII, and behavioral studies indicate that prior icv AngII administration reduces the dipsogenic response to AngII administered later. Specifically, rats given a treatment regimen of three icv injections of a large dose of AngII, each separated by 20 min, drink less water in response to a test injection of AngII than do vehicle-treated controls given the same test injection. The present studies were designed to test three potential explanations for the reduced dipsogenic potency of AngII after repeated administration. To this end, we tested for motor impairment caused by repeated injections of AngII, for a possible role of visceral distress or illness, and for differences in the pressor response to the final test injection of AngII.We found that repeated injections of AngII neither affected drinking stimulated by carbachol nor did they produce a conditioned flavor avoidance. Furthermore, we found no evidence that differences in the pressor response to the final test injection of AngII accounted for the difference in intake. In light of these findings, we are able to reject these three explanations for the observed behavioral desensitization, and, we suggest instead that the mechanism for this phenomenon may be at the level of the receptor

Few-shot re-identification of the speaker by social robots

Nowadays advanced machine learning, computer vision, audio analysis and natural language understanding systems can be widely used for improving the perceptive and reasoning capabilities of the social robots. In particular, artificial intelligence algorithms for speaker re-identification make the robot aware of its interlocutor and able to personalize the conversation according to the information gathered in real-time and in the past interactions with the speaker. Anyway, this kind of application requires to train neural networks having available only a few samples for each speaker. Within this context, in this paper we propose a social robot equipped with a microphone sensor and a smart deep learning algorithm for few-shot speaker re-identification, able to run in real time over an embedded platform mounted on board of the robot. The proposed system has been experimentally evaluated over the VoxCeleb1 dataset, demonstrating a remarkable re-identification accuracy by varying the number of samples per speaker, the number of known speakers and the duration of the samples, and over the SpReW dataset, showing its robustness in real noisy environments. Finally, a quantitative evaluation of the processing time over the embedded platform proves that the processing pipeline is almost immediate, resulting in a pleasant user experience