Experimental Overview of Light Mesons

The light quark $uds$ mesons have been a foundation of our understanding of the strong interaction for decades. New experiments with modern detectors and large data sets are furthering our understanding of the spectrum and dynamics of these states. In this paper, I review several recent results on the spectroscopy of light mesons and discuss the future of this field.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures, plenary talk presented at XVII International Conference on Hadron Spectroscopy and Structure, Salamanca, Spain, 25-29 September, 201

Wedded to the car : women, employment and the importance of private transport.

This article draws on primary research undertaken with over 3,000 women in the North East of England to explore the links between women, transport and the labour market. The research was funded by ESF and develops a new conceptual framework to analyse the importance of private transport in allowing women to access employment. The article subsequently informed the development of local transport strategies in the North East and has been utilised by the DoT to support the development of links between transport and social inclusion at a national level

Giant Molecular clouds: what are they made from, and how do they get there?

We analyse the results of four simulations of isolated galaxies: two with a rigid spiral potential of fixed pattern speed, but with different degrees of star-formation induced feedback, one with an axisymmetric galactic potential and one with a `live' self-gravitating stellar component. Since we use a Lagrangian method we are able to select gas that lies within giant molecular clouds (GMCs) at a particular timeframe, and to then study the properties of this gas at earlier and later times. We find that gas which forms GMCs is not typical of the interstellar medium at least 50 Myr before the clouds form and reaches mean densities within an order of magnitude of mean cloud densities by around 10 Myr before. The gas in GMCs takes at least 50 Myr to return to typical ISM gas after dispersal by stellar feedback, and in some cases the gas is never fully recycled. We also present a study of the two-dimensional, vertically-averaged velocity fields within the ISM. We show that the velocity fields corresponding to the shortest timescales (that is, those timescales closest to the immediate formation and dissipation of the clouds) can be readily understood in terms of the various cloud formation and dissipation mechanisms. Properties of the flow patterns can be used to distinguish the processes which drive converging flows (e.g.\ spiral shocks, supernovae) and thus molecular cloud formation, and we note that such properties may be detectable with future observations of nearby galaxies.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Quasistatic dynamical systems

We introduce the notion of a quasistatic dynamical system, which generalizes that of an ordinary dynamical system. Quasistatic dynamical systems are inspired by the namesake processes in thermodynamics, which are idealized processes where the observed system transforms (infinitesimally) slowly due to external influence, tracing out a continuous path of thermodynamic equilibria over an (infinitely) long time span. Time-evolution of states under a quasistatic dynamical system is entirely deterministic, but choosing the initial state randomly renders the process a stochastic one. In the prototypical setting where the time-evolution is specified by strongly chaotic maps on the circle, we obtain a description of the statistical behaviour as a stochastic diffusion process, under surprisingly mild conditions on the initial distribution, by solving a well-posed martingale problem. We also consider various admissible ways of centering the process, with the curious conclusion that the "obvious" centering suggested by the initial distribution sometimes fails to yield the expected diffusion.Comment: 40 page

Time for Change in U.S. Farm Policy: Fundamental Reform Emphasizing Institutions Based on Agriculture’s ‘Multifunctionality’?

Agricultural Policy, Farm Subsidy, Subsidies

Cloud and Star Formation in Spiral Arms

We present the results from simulations of GMC formation in spiral galaxies. First we discuss cloud formation by cloud-cloud collisions, and gravitational instabilities, arguing that the former is prevalent at lower galactic surface densities and the latter at higher. Cloud masses are also limited by stellar feedback, which can be effective before clouds reach their maximum mass. We show other properties of clouds in simulations with different levels of feedback. With a moderate level of feedback, properties such as cloud rotations and virial parameters agree with observations. Without feedback, an unrealistic population of overly bound clouds develops. Spiral arms are not found to trigger star formation, they merely gather gas into more massive GMCs. We discuss in more detail interactions of clouds in the ISM, and argue that these are more complex than early ideas of cloud-cloud collisions. Finally we show ongoing work to determine whether the Milky Way is a flocculent or grand design spiral.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, to be published in Seychelles conference "Lessons from the Local Group", ed. K. C. Freeman, B. G. Elmegreen, D. L. Block, and M. Woolway (Dordrecht: Springer), 201

Dawes Review 4: Spiral Structures in Disc Galaxies

The majority of astrophysics involves the study of spiral galaxies, and stars and planets within them, but how spiral arms in galaxies form and evolve is still a fundamental problem. Major progress in this field was made primarily in the 1960s, and early 1970s, but since then there has been no comprehensive update on the state of the field. In this review, we discuss the progress in theory, and in particular numerical calculations, which unlike in the 1960s and 1970s, are now commonplace, as well as recent observational developments. We set out the current status for different scenarios for spiral arm formation, the nature of the spiral arms they induce, and the consequences for gas dynamics and star formation in different types of spiral galaxies. We argue that, with possible the exception of barred galaxies, spiral arms are transient, recurrent and initiated by swing amplified instabilities in the disc. We suppose that unbarred m = 2 spiral patterns are induced by tidal interactions, and slowly wind up over time. However the mechanism for generating spiral structure does not appear to have significant consequences for star formation in galaxies.Comment: 44 pages, 20 pages, review article accepted for publication in PAS

Use of data from patient records for research : a model for best practice?

In the UK National Health Service (NHS), the registered list and the clinical records of patients are an invaluable resource for the quality assurance of clinical care in General Practice (e.g. audit) and for service development and quality initiatives. These records are also powerful instruments for the conduct of research in primary care. General practitioners are the "guardians" of these demographic and clinical data and, indeed, the use of patient data from these records for research in the past has given us many examples of excellent research which have had a direct impact on the care of our patients and the advice we give them.peer-reviewe

Smoothness of Heat Kernel Measures on Infinite-Dimensional Heisenberg-Like Groups

We study measures associated to Brownian motions on infinite-dimensional Heisenberg-like groups. In particular, we prove that the associated path space measure and heat kernel measure satisfy a strong definition of smoothness.Comment: 15 page