Self-gravitating system made of axions

We show that the inclusion of an axion-like effective potential in the construction of a self-gravitating system made of scalar fields leads to a decrease on its compactness when the value of the self-interaction coupling constant is increased. By including the current values for the axion mass m and decay constant f_a, we have computed the mass and the radius for self-gravitating systems made of axion particles. It is found that such objects will have asteroid-size masses and radius of few meters, then, the self-gravitating system made of axions could play the role of scalar mini-machos that are mimicking a cold dark matter model for the galactic halo.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. References added. Accepted for publication in Physical Review

Probing nonstandard interactions with reactor neutrinos

New limits on the weak mixing angle and on the electron neutrino effective charge radius in the low energy regime, below 100 MeV, are obtained from a combined fit of all electron-(anti)neutrino electron elastic scattering measurements. We have included the recent TEXONO measurement with a CsI (Tl) detector. Only statistical error of this measurement has been taken into account. Weak mixing angle is found to be sin^2 theta_W = 0.255 +0.022 -0.023. The electron neutrino effective charge radius squared is bounded to be r^2 = (0.9 +0.9 -1.0) x 10^{-32} cm^2. The sensitivity of future low energy neutrino experiments to nonstandard interactions of neutrinos with quarks is also discussed.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, talk given at the Neutrino Oscillation Workshop (NOW 2008), Otranto, Italy, September 6-13, 2008. Misprints correcte

Adverbials and inversion in early english scientific writing

From a historical perspective, the English language shifted from being basically verb final in the Old English period (Traugott 1992: 274) to verb non-final from the Middle English period onwards (Fischer 1992: 371), that is, from SOV to SVO. The layout of the constituents within the clause, however, may be occasionally inverted (from SV to VS) in certain contexts, which "have been qualified as innovations by some scholars and as true verb-second fossils by others" (Nevalainen 1997: 203). From a diachronic point of view, while inversion in Old English is possible whenever the first constituent position is occupied by an object, an adverbial or a PP, inversion in Middle English is just witnessed when the first constituent is a wh-element or, later on, a negative constituent (van Kemenade 1987: 180). Interestingly enough, research on the topic have demonstrated that instances of inversion after adverbials in first constituent position have been found in the early Modern English period, where the remainders of the old verb-second rule can be attested (Nevalainen 1997: 213; Bækken 2000: 393). In my opinion, there is still a gap in the literature since the phenomenon has not been tested in scientific writing yet. All this considered, the present paper has been conceived with the following objectives: 1) to analyse the occurrence of inversion when adverbials (then, therefore, yet, thus and locative PPs) or negative constituents (ne, never, neither and nor) occupy the first constituent position both in main and subordinate clauses; 2) to plot the diachronic development of inversion in the period under study; 3) to investigate the proliferation of the phenomenon across the different text-types; and 4) to evaluate the contribution of conditioning factors such as the typology of the subject or the typology of the clause. The data used as source of evidence come from The Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, i.e. Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT for the period 1375–1500) and Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT for the period 1500–1700).Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Modeling pre-invasive bronchial epithelial lesions

The growth of cancer cells involves many different processes which can only be captured by a complex model. However, simplified models provide a great deal of insight into the fundamental processes involved. In this workshop we proposed two simple models - one discrete stochastic model and one PDE modelto solve a 2-D simplification of the original problem

by way of vs. by means of: On the Expression of Instrumentality in Middle English and Early Modern English

Grammaticalization is defined as “a process whereby a lexical item, with full referential meaning, develops grammatical meaning” (Fischer and Rosenbach 2000: 2; see also Hopper 1991; Diewald and Wischer 2002). According to Rissanen, grammaticalization may occur both with native and borrowed items at any stage of the History of English, being developed from one single lexical item or a group of words (2000: 152). This is the case of by way of and by means of that, according to the OED, were first attested in English at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Their prepositional function is the result of a process of grammaticalization undergone by way and mean, which evolved from noun to preposition in these contexts. Once established in the language, they coexisted until the end of the seventeenth century, the moment when by way of was progressively obliterated as a result of the on-going difffusion of by means of in these environments. Therefore, the present paper has been conceived with the following objectives: 1) to assess the grammaticalization process by which nouns such as way and mean developed prepositional functions for the expression of instrumentality; 2) to analyse the use and distribution of by way of and by means of in the History of English; 3) to investigate the distribution of these competing forms in terms of gender and social class. The source of evidence comes from the Helsinki Corpus of English, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and the Old Bailey Corpus.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The vernacularization of non-native items in early english medical writing

Early Modern English is characterised by an extraordinary lexical growth motivated by two main linguistic processes, borrowing and word-formation (Nevalainen 1999: 332). Within affixation, prefixation grew more than suffixation in early Modern English, probably because prefixes have fewer word-class restrictions and do not change the word-class of the base (Nevalainen 1999: 335). Thus, native and non-native forms competed to achieve a position in the lexicon. This not only increased the English vocabulary, but also modified the traditional derivational system of the language by the introduction of foreign affixes. As far as we have investigated, the topic has been discussed in Present-Day English and in the history of English. However, the literature is still in need of quantitative and qualitative research in the field of early English medical writing. Therefore, the present paper pursues the following objectives: 1) to analyse the use of the native prefix un- and the non-native dis-, in- and non- in early English medical writing; 2) to assess the distribution of these prefixes across genres; 3) to calculate the morphological productivity of the negative prefixes under study; and 4) to evaluate the contribution of qualitative factors, i.e. the origin of the bases, the different word-classes, and the competion among the different negative prefixes. The data come from the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech