Charge conservation and time-varying speed of light

It has been recently claimed that cosmologies with time dependent speed of light might solve some of the problems of the standard cosmological scenario, as well as inflationary scenarios. In this letter we show that most of these models, when analyzed in a consistent way, lead to large violations of charge conservation. Thus, they are severly constrained by experiment, including those where $c$ is a power of the scale factor and those whose source term is the trace of the energy-momentum tensor. In addition, early Universe scenarios with a sudden change of $c$ related to baryogenesis are discarded.Comment: 4 page

Grass burning under our feet: Indigenous enterprise development in a political economy of whiteness

In this article we discuss some of our findings from two research projects that explore opportunities for Indigenous enterprise development in remote locations in Northern and Central Australia. Based on a series of focus groups and in-depth interviews with Indigenous community leaders, Traditional Owners, government officials, Land Council officials and other stakeholders, we discuss barriers to economic development faced by Indigenous communities in remote regions. We argue that many of these barriers are the material effects of discursive practices of ‘whiteness’ in the political economy. We discuss the relationships between institutions and Indigenous communities that constitute the Indigenous political economy and argue that these relationships are informed by discursive practices of whiteness and colonial-capitalist relations of power. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for management learning and public policy

The Formation of Cosmic Structures in a Light Gravitino Dominated Universe

We analyse the formation of cosmic structures in models where the dark matter is dominated by light gravitinos with mass of $100$ eV -- 1 keV, as predicted by gauge-mediated supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking models. After evaluating the number of degrees of freedom at the gravitinos decoupling ($g_*$), we compute the transfer function for matter fluctuations and show that gravitinos behave like warm dark matter (WDM) with free-streaming scale comparable to the galaxy mass scale. We consider different low-density variants of the WDM model, both with and without cosmological constant, and compare the predictions on the abundances of neutral hydrogen within high-redshift damped Ly--$\alpha$ systems and on the number density of local galaxy clusters with the corresponding observational constraints. We find that none of the models satisfies both constraints at the same time, unless a rather small $\Omega_0$ value (\mincir 0.4) and a rather large Hubble parameter (\magcir 0.9) is assumed. Furthermore, in a model with warm + hot dark matter, with hot component provided by massive neutrinos, the strong suppression of fluctuation on scales of \sim 1\hm precludes the formation of high-redshift objects, when the low--$z$ cluster abundance is required. We conclude that all different variants of a light gravitino DM dominated model show strong difficulties for what concerns cosmic structure formation. This gives a severe cosmological constraint on the gauge-mediated SUSY breaking scheme.Comment: 28 pages,Latex, submitted for publication to Phys.Rev.

Astroparticle Physics with a Customized Low-Background Broad Energy Germanium Detector

The MAJORANA Collaboration is building the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR, a 60 kg array of high purity germanium detectors housed in an ultra-low background shield at the Sanford Underground Laboratory in Lead, SD. The MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR will search for neutrinoless double-beta decay of 76Ge while demonstrating the feasibility of a tonne-scale experiment. It may also carry out a dark matter search in the 1-10 GeV/c^2 mass range. We have found that customized Broad Energy Germanium (BEGe) detectors produced by Canberra have several desirable features for a neutrinoless double-beta decay experiment, including low electronic noise, excellent pulse shape analysis capabilities, and simple fabrication. We have deployed a customized BEGe, the MAJORANA Low-Background BEGe at Kimballton (MALBEK), in a low-background cryostat and shield at the Kimballton Underground Research Facility in Virginia. This paper will focus on the detector characteristics and measurements that can be performed with such a radiation detector in a low-background environment.Comment: Submitted to NIMA Proceedings, SORMA XII. 9 pages, 4 figure

Effect of age, sex and gender on pain sensitivity: A narrative review

© 2017 Eltumi And Tashani. Introduction: An increasing body of literature on sex and gender differences in pain sensitivity has been accumulated in recent years. There is also evidence from epidemiological research that painful conditions are more prevalent in older people. The aim of this narrative review is to critically appraise the relevant literature investigating the presence of age and sex differences in clinical and experimental pain conditions. Methods: A scoping search of the literature identifying relevant peer reviewed articles was conducted on May 2016. Information and evidence from the key articles were narratively described and data was quantitatively synthesised to identify gaps of knowledge in the research literature concerning age and sex differences in pain responses. Results: This critical appraisal of the literature suggests that the results of the experimental and clinical studies regarding age and sex differences in pain contain some contradictions as far as age differences in pain are concerned. While data from the clinical studies are more consistent and seem to point towards the fact that chronic pain prevalence increases in the elderly findings from the experimental studies on the other hand were inconsistent, with pain threshold increasing with age in some studies and decreasing with age in others. Conclusion: There is a need for further research using the latest advanced quantitative sensory testing protocols to measure the function of small nerve fibres that are involved in nociception and pain sensitivity across the human life span. Implications: Findings from these studies should feed into and inform evidence emerging from other types of studies (e.g. brain imaging technique and psychometrics) suggesting that pain in the older humans may have unique characteristics that affect how old patients respond to intervention

Search for leptophobic Z ' bosons decaying into four-lepton final states in proton-proton collisions at root s=8 TeV

Peer reviewe

Search for black holes and other new phenomena in high-multiplicity final states in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

Peer reviewe

Measurements of differential production cross sections for a Z boson in association with jets in pp collisions at root s=8 TeV

Peer reviewe

Measurement of the mass difference between top quark and antiquark in pp collisions at root s=8 TeV

Peer reviewe