Spontaneous Breaking of Flavor Symmetry and Naturalness of Nearly Degenerate Neutrino Masses and Bi-maximal Mixing

The gauge model with $SO(3)_{F}$ flavor symmetry and three Higgs triplets is studied. We show how the intriguing nearly degenerate neutrino mass and bi-maximal mixing scenario comes out naturally after spontaneous breaking of the symmetry. The hierarchy between the neutrino mass-squared differences, which is needed for reconciling both solar and atmospheric neutrino data, is naturally resulted from an approximate permutation symmetry. The model can also lead to interesting phenomena on lepton-flavor violations via the $SO(3)_{F}$ gauge interactions.Comment: 13 pages, latex, no figures, the version appearing in SCIENCE IN CHINA (Series A), Vol.35 No.9 (2000

Association of LRP1B Mutation With Tumor Mutation Burden and Outcomes in Melanoma and Non-small Cell Lung Cancer Patients Treated With Immune Check-Point Blockades

Background: Tumor mutation burden (TMB) have been served as the most prevalent biomarkers to predict immunotherapy response. LRP1B (low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1B) is frequently mutated in melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and other tumors; however, its association with TMB and survival in patients with immunotherapy remains unknown.Methods: We curated somatic mutation data and clinicopathologic information from 332 melanoma immunotherapy samples for discovery and 113 NSCLC samples for further corroboration. Bayesian variants non-negative matrix factorization was used to extract tumor mutational signatures. Multivariate Cox and logistic regression models were applied to adjust confounding factors. The CIBERSORT and GSEA algorithm were separately used to infer leukocyte relative abundance and significantly enriched pathways.Results: Patients with LRP1B mutation were identified to be associated with prolonged survival in both immunotherapy cohort. Higher tumor mutation burden was found in LRP1B mutated patients, and the association remained significant after controlling for age, gender, stage, mutations in TP53 and ATR, and mutational signatures. Immune response and cell cycle regulation circuits were among the top enriched pathways in samples with LRP1B mutations.Conclusion: Our studies suggested sequencing even a single, frequently mutated gene may provide insight into genome-wide mutational burden, and may serve as a biomarker to predict immune response

A New Direct Process to Prepare YBa2Cu3O7-&#61540; films on Biaxially Textured Ag{110}<211>

YBCO films were successfully prepared on biaxially textured Ag{110} substrates by using pulsed laser deposition. X-ray diffraction results showed that the degree of preferential orientation of Ag{110} substrates varied with increasing annealing temperature. With a thin template layer deposited at low temperature, YBCO film with c-axis orientation and in-plane biaxial alignment could be obtained at high deposition temperature. Scanning electron microscopy observation revealed that YBCO grains enlarged but Ag grains on the surface of the YBCO films became smaller with increasing deposition temperature. At optimal deposition conditions, Ag atoms diffuse into the YBCO grain boundaries, and then fill in the weak-link regions in the YBCO film, resulting in the conduction easier. Jc value of 5&#61620;105A/cm2 was obtained at 77K and zero magnetic field for the best YBCO film in our work.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

A Systematic Approach for Inertial Sensor Calibration of Gravity Recovery Satellites and Its Application to Taiji-1 Mission

High-precision inertial sensors or accelerometers can provide us references of free-falling motions in gravitational field in space. They serve as the key payloads for gravity recovery missions such as the CHAMP, the GRACE-type missions, and the planned Next Generation Gravity Missions. In this work, a systematic method of electrostatic inertial sensor calibrations for gravity recovery satellites is suggested, which is applied to and verified with the Taiji-1 mission. With this method, the complete operating parameters including the scale factors, the center of mass offset vector and the intrinsic biased acceleration can be precisely calibrated with only two sets of short-term in-orbit experiments. Taiji-1 is the first technology demonstration satellite of the "Taiji Program in Space", which, in its final extended phase in 2022, could be viewed as operating in the mode of a high-low satellite-to-satellite tracking gravity mission. Based on the calibration principles, swing maneuvers with time span about 200 s and rolling maneuvers for 19 days were conducted by Taiji-1 in 2022. The inertial sensor's operating parameters are precisely re-calibrated with Kalman filters and are updated to the Taiji-1 science team. Data from one of the sensitive axis is re-processed with the updated operating parameters, and the performance is found to be slightly improved compared with former results. This approach could be of high reference value for the accelerometer or inertial sensor calibrations of the GFO, the Chinese GRACE-type mission, and the Next Generation Gravity Missions. This could also shed some light on the in-orbit calibrations of the ultra-precision inertial sensors for future GW space antennas because of the technological inheritance between these two generations of inertial sensors.Comment: 24 pages, 19 figure

Two Higgs Bi-doublet Left-Right Model With Spontaneous P and CP Violation

A left-right symmetric model with two Higgs bi-doublet is shown to be a consistent model for both spontaneous P and CP violation. The flavor changing neutral currents can be suppressed by the mechanism of approximate global U(1) family symmetry. We calculate the constraints from neural $K$ meson mass difference $\Delta m_K$ and demonstrate that a right-handed gauge boson $W_2$ contribution in box-diagrams with mass well below 1 TeV is allowed due to a cancellation caused by a light charged Higgs boson with a mass range $150 \sim 300$ GeV. The $W_2$ contribution to $\epsilon_K$ can be suppressed from appropriate choice of additional CP phases appearing in the right-handed Cabbibo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix. The model is also found to be fully consistent with $B^0$ mass difference $\Delta m_B$, and the mixing-induced CP violation quantity $\sin2\beta_{J/\psi}$, which is usually difficult for the model with only one Higgs bi-doublet. The new physics beyond the standard model can be directly searched at the colliders LHC and ILC.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, typos corrected, 1 figure added, published versio

The Taiwan Birth Panel Study: a prospective cohort study for environmentally- related child health

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Taiwan Birth Panel Study (TBPS) is a prospective follow-up study to investigate the development of child health and disease in relation to in-utero and/or early childhood environmental exposures. The rationale behind the establishment of such a cohort includes the magnitude of potential environmental exposures, the timing of exposure window, fatal and children's susceptibility to toxicants, early exposure delayed effects, and low-level or unknown neurodevelopmental toxicants.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A total of 486 mother-infant paired was enrolled from April 2004 to January 2005 in this study. Maternal blood before delivery, placenta and umbilical cord blood at birth, and mothers' urine after delivery were collected. The follow-up was scheduled at birth, 4, 6 months, and 1, 2, 3 and 5 years. The children's blood, urine, hair, and saliva were collected at 2 years of age and children's urine was collected at 5 years of age as well. The study has been approved by the ethical committee of National Taiwan University Hospital. All the subjects signed the inform consent on entering the study and each of the follow up.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Through this prospective birth cohort, the main health outcomes were focused on child growth, neurodevelopment, behaviour problem and atopic diseases. We investigated the main prenatal and postnatal factors including smoking, heavy metals, perfluorinated chemicals, and non-persistent pesticides under the consideration of interaction of the environment and genes.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This cohort study bridges knowledge gaps and answers unsolved issues in the low-level, prenatal or postnatal, and multiple exposures, genetic effect modification, and the initiation and progression of "environmentally-related childhood diseases."</p

Das Unbekannte erforschen – der Wert der Grundlagenforschung

Kohse-Höinghaus K, Fuchs H, Zhang T, Wu Y. Das Unbekannte erforschen – der Wert der Grundlagenforschung. Angewandte Chemie. 2019;131(50):18048-18050

Explore the Unknown-The Value of Basic Research.

Kohse-Höinghaus K, Fuchs H, Zhang T, Wu Y. Explore the Unknown-The Value of Basic Research. Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English). 2019;58(50):17882-17884.The Beijing Declaration on basic research was recently signed by Presidents of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina. With this undertaking both academies underlined their joint efforts to "promote the scientific spirit", strive for excellence, encourage collaborative, inclusive and responsible scientific research, and foster a favorable environment for scientific development. © 2019 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

Global Gravity Field Model from Taiji-1 Observations

Taiji-1 is the first technology demonstration satellite of the Taiji program of China's space-borne gravitational wave antenna. After the demonstration of the key individual technologies, Taiji-1 continues collecting the data of the precision orbit determinations, satellite attitudes, and non-conservative forces exerted on the S/C. Therefore, during its free-fall, Taiji-1 can be viewed as operating in the high-low satellite-to-satellite tracking mode of a gravity recovery mission. In this work, we have selected and analyzed the one month data from Taiji-1's observations, and developed the techniques to resolve the long term interruptions and disturbances in the data due to the scheduled technology demonstration experiments. The first global gravity model TJGM-r1911, that independently derived from China's own satellite mission, is successfully built from Taiji-1's observations. Compared with gravity models from CHAMP and other satellite gravity missions, the accuracy discrepancies exist, which is mainly caused by the data discontinuity problem. As the extended free-falling phase been approved, Taiji-1 could serve as a gravity recovery mission for China since 2022 and it will provide us the independent measurement of both the static and the monthly time-variable global gravity field