Hadron-hadron and hadron-nuclei collisions at high energies

A brief review is made of the present situation of hadron-hadron and hadron-nuclei total elastic and inelastic cross sections at high energiesComment: 7 page

Science,technology and society

We shall discuss some aspects of science and technology, their increasing role in the society, the fast advances in modern science, the apparent decrease of interest of the young generation in basic sciences, the importance of proper science popularization for better public education and awareness in scientific fields.Comment: Lecture at the 7th School on Non-Accelerator Astroparticle Physics, Trieste,Italy,200

The CNGS Neutrino Beam

The CERN to Gran Sasso Neutrino beam (CNGS) was commissioned at CERN in early August 2006 and was first sent at low intensity to Gran Sasso on August 17, 2006. The Borexino, LVD and OPERA experiments continued the commissioning of their detectors and started taking data with practically no dead time. The CNGS collected several hundred events with clean time distributions.Comment: 11 pages, 14 EPS figures. Lecture given at the 2nd Latin American School on Cosmic Rays and Astrophysics, Puebla, Mexico, 30th August - 8th September 200

A waiting time phenomenon for thin film equations

We prove the occurrence of a waiting time phenomenon for solutions to fourth order degenerate parabolic differential equations which model the evolution of thin films of viscous fluids. In space dimension less or equal to three, we identify a general criterion on the growth of initial data near the free boundary which guarantees that for sufficiently small times the support of strong solutions locally does not increase. It turns out that this condition only depends on the smoothness of the diffusion coefficient in its point of degeneracy. Our approach combines a new version of Stampacchia's iteration lemma with weighted energy or entropy estimates. On account of numerical experiments, we conjecture that the aforementioned growth criterion is optimal

Search for possible neutrino radiative decays during the 2001 total solar eclipse

We present the results of the observations performed in the occasion of the June 21, 2001 total solar eclipse, looking for visible photons emitted trough a possible radiative decay of solar neutrinos. We establish lower limits for the neutrino proper lifetimes larger than 1000 s/eV, for neutrino masses larger than 0.01 eV.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures, accepted by Astopart. Phys, updated reference

Spreading equilibria under mildly singular potentials: pancakes versus droplets

We study global minimizers of a functional modeling the free energy of thin liquid layers over a solid substrate under the combined effect of surface, gravitational, and intermolecular potentials. When the latter ones have a mild repulsive singularity at short ranges, global minimizers are compactly supported and display a microscopic contact angle of π/ 2. Depending on the form of the potential, the macroscopic shape can either be droplet-like or pancake-like, with a transition profile between the two at zero spreading coefficient for purely repulsive potentials. These results generalize, complete, and give mathematical rigor to de Gennes’ formal discussion of spreading equilibria. Uniqueness and non-uniqueness phenomena are also discussed