Two gamma quarkonium and positronium decays with Two-Body Dirac equations of constraint dynamics

Two-Body Dirac equations of constraint dynamics provide a covariant framework to investigate the problem of highly relativistic quarks in meson bound states. This formalism eliminates automatically the problems of relative time and energy, leading to a covariant three dimensional formalism with the same number of degrees of freedom as appears in the corresponding nonrelativistic problem. It provides bound state wave equations with the simplicity of the nonrelativistic Schroedinger equation. Unlike other three-dimensional truncations of the Bethe-Salpeter equation, this covariant formalism has been thoroughly tested in nonperturbatives contexts in QED, QCD, and nucleon-nucleon scattering. Here we continue the important studies of this formalism by extending a method developed earlier for positronium decay into two photons to tests on the sixteen component quarkonium wave function solutions obtained in meson spectroscopy. We examine positronium decay and then the two-gamma quarkonium decays of eta_c, eta'_c, chi_0c, chi_2c, and pi-zero The results for the pi-zero, although off the experimental rate by 13%, is much closer than the usual expectations from a potential model.Comment: 4 pages. Presented at Second Meeting of APS Topical Group on Hadron Physics, Nashville, TN, Oct 22-24. Proceedings to be published by Journal of Physics (UK), Conference Serie

Association of antihypertensive monotherapy with serum sodium and potassium levels in Chinese patients

<b>Background</b> International guidelines on management of hypertension recommend any major classes of antihypertensive drugs. However, the low prescribing rate of thiazides has been attributed to concerns about electrolyte disturbances and studies between antihypertensive drug classes and hyponatremia/hypokalemia among Chinese patients were scarce. <p></p> <b>Methods</b> From clinical databases we included 2,759 patients who received their first-ever antihypertensive monotherapy from January 2004 to June 2007 in a large territory of Hong Kong. We studied the plasma sodium and potassium levels 8 weeks after prescriptions and factors associated with hyponatremia and hypokalemia by multivariable regression analyses. <p></p> <b>Results</b> Among major antihypertensive drug classes, thiazide users had the lowest sodium level (139.6 mEq/l, 95% confidence interval (CI) 139.3, 140.0, P < 0.001) and patients-prescribed calcium channel blockers (CCBs; 3.92 mEq/l, 95% CI 3.89, 3.95) or thiazide diuretics (3.99 mEq/l, 95% CI 3.93, 4.04) had the lowest potassium levels (P < 0.001). Multivariate analysis reported that advanced age (>/=70 years, odds ratio (OR) 7.49, 95% CI 2.84, 19.8, P < 0.001), male gender (OR 2.38, 95% CI 1.45, 3.91, P < 0.001), and thiazide users (OR 2.42, 95% CI 1.29, 4.56, P = 0.006) were significantly associated with hyponatremia, while renin-angiotensin system (RAS) (OR 0.31, 95% CI 0.13, 0.73, P = 0.008) and beta-blockers (BBs) (OR 0.35, 95% CI 0.23, 0.54, P < 0.001) users were less likely to present with hypokalemia. However, the proportions having normonatremic (95.1%) and normokalemic (89.4%) levels were high. <p></p> <b>Conclusions</b> In view of the low prevalence of hyponatremia and hypokalemia associated with thiazides, physicians should not be deterred from prescribing thiazide diuretics as first-line antihypertensive agents as recommended by most international guidelines

Non-Langevin behaviour of the uncompensated magnetisation in nanoparticles of artificial ferritin

The magnetic behaviour of nanoparticles of antiferromagnetic ferritin has been investigated by 57Fe Mossbauer absorption spectroscopy and magnetisation measurements, in the temperature range 2.5K-250K and with magnetic fields up to 7T. Samples containing nanoparticles with an average number of Fe atoms ranging from 400 to 2500 were studied. The value of the anisotropy energy per unit volume was determined and found to be in the range 3-6 10**5 ergs/cm3, which is a value typical for ferric oxides. By comparing the results of the two experimental methods at large field, we show that, contratry to what is currently assumed, the uncompensated magnetisation of the feritin cores in the superparamagnetic regime does not follow a Langevin law. For magnetic fields below the spin-flop field, we propose an approximate law for the field and temperature variation of the uncompensated magnetisation which has so far never been applied in antiferromagnetic systems. This approach should more generally hold for randomly oriented antiferro- magnetic nanoparticles systems with weak uncompensated moments.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figure