Supporting undergraduate engineering student mental health.

The culture within engineering education can lead to the normalization of stress, which has the potential to impact student mental health. In particular, there have been reports on the perceived stress of the engineering education environment, perceived difficulty of an engineering degree and an increasing body of quantitative and qualitative evidence highlighting mental health and wellbeing challenges experienced by engineering students. Further, engineering students are resistant to seeking professional help for their mental health, which has been proven reduce the potential for progression to more chronic or severe mental health disorders. Investigating the mental health and wellbeing of engineering students specifically is important due to a global lack of engineers and increased need for engineering graduates. While the reasons for this skills deficit are not clear, calls for education reform to address the problem have been growing for some time. Further, more engineers are leaving the sector internationally due to burnout and this can differentially impact female engineering professionals. Concerns are also being raised about the mental health of engineering professionals in the UK and beyond. The literature on mental health in engineering highlights the importance of shifting the narrative around prioritization of mental health in engineering. Through this workshop, we aim to provide engineering faculty with the tools to normalize discussions around mental health in the classroom and promote a culture of wellness in engineering. Through creating a culture that is supportive of mental health in the engineering classroom, we aim to create an engineering workforce that understands the importance of prioritization of mental health as they progress through their careers

Grey matter volume and cortical structure in Prader-Willi syndrome compared to typically developing young adults.

Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder of genomic imprinting, presenting with a characteristic overeating disorder, mild to moderate intellectual disability, and a variable range of social and behavioral difficulties. Consequently, widespread alterations in neural structure and developmental and maturational trajectory would be expected. To date, there have been few quantitative and systematic studies of brain morphology in PWS, although alterations of volume and of cortical organisation have been reported. This study aimed to investigate, in detail, the structure of grey matter and cortex in the brain in a sample of young adults with PWS in a well-matched case-controlled analysis. 20 young adults with PWS, aged 19-27 years, underwent multiparameter mapping magnetic resonance imaging sequences, from which measures of grey matter volume, cortical thickness and magnetisation transfer saturation, as a proxy measure of myelination, were examined. These variables were investigated in comparison to a control group of 40 typically developing young adults, matched for age and sex. A voxel-based morphometry analysis identified large and widespread bilateral clusters of both increased and decreased grey matter volume in the brain in PWS. In particular, widespread areas of increased volume encompassed parts of the prefrontal cortex, especially medially, the majority of the cingulate cortices, from anterior to posterior aspects, insula cortices, and areas of the parietal and temporal cortices. Increased volume was also reported in the caudate, putamen and thalamus. The most ventromedial prefrontal areas, in contrast, showed reduced volume, as did the parts of the medial temporal lobe, bilateral temporal poles, and a small cluster in the right lateral prefrontal cortex. Analysis of cortical structure revealed that areas of increased volume in the PWS group were largely driven by greater cortical thickness. Conversely, analysis of myelin content using magnetisation transfer saturation indicated that myelination of the cortex was broadly similar in the PWS and control groups, with the exception of highly localised areas, including the insula. The bilateral nature of these abnormalities suggests a systemic biological cause, with possible developmental and maturational mechanisms discussed, and may offer insight into the contribution of imprinted genes to neural development

Constraints on Dark Matter from Colliders

We show that colliders can impose strong constraints on models of dark matter, in particular when the dark matter is light. We analyze models where the dark matter is a fermion or scalar interacting with quarks and/or gluons through an effective theory containing higher dimensional operators which represent heavier states that have been integrated out of the effective field theory. We determine bounds from existing Tevatron searches for monojets as well as expected LHC reaches for a discovery. We find that colliders can provide information which is complementary or in some cases even superior to experiments searching for direct detection of dark matter through its scattering with nuclei. In particular, both the Tevatron and the LHC can outperform spin dependent searches by an order of magnitude or better over much of parameter space, and if the dark matter couples mainly to gluons, the LHC can place bounds superior to any spin independent search.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figure

Lagrangian particle paths and ortho-normal quaternion frames

Experimentalists now measure intense rotations of Lagrangian particles in turbulent flows by tracking their trajectories and Lagrangian-average velocity gradients at high Reynolds numbers. This paper formulates the dynamics of an orthonormal frame attached to each Lagrangian fluid particle undergoing three-axis rotations, by using quaternions in combination with Ertel's theorem for frozen-in vorticity. The method is applicable to a wide range of Lagrangian flows including the three-dimensional Euler equations and its variants such as ideal MHD. The applicability of the quaterionic frame description to Lagrangian averaged velocity gradient dynamics is also demonstrated.Comment: 9 pages, one figure, revise

Elucidating the structural composition of a Fe-N-C catalyst by nuclear and electron resonance techniques

Fe–N–C catalysts are very promising materials for fuel cells and metal–air batteries. This work gives fundamental insights into the structural composition of an Fe–N–C catalyst and highlights the importance of an in‐depth characterization. By nuclear‐ and electron‐resonance techniques, we are able to show that even after mild pyrolysis and acid leaching, the catalyst contains considerable fractions of α‐iron and, surprisingly, iron oxide. Our work makes it questionable to what extent FeN4 sites can be present in Fe–N–C catalysts prepared by pyrolysis at 900 °C and above. The simulation of the iron partial density of phonon states enables the identification of three FeN4 species in our catalyst, one of them comprising a sixfold coordination with end‐on bonded oxygen as one of the axial ligands

Flavor changing scalar couplings and tγ(Z)t\gamma(Z) production at hadron colliders

We calculate the contributions of the flavor changing scalar ($FCS$) couplings arised from topcolor-assisted technicolor ($TC2$) models at tree-level to the $t\gamma$ and $tZ$ production at the Tevatron and $LHC$ experiments. We find that the production cross sections are very small at the Tevatron with $\sqrt{s}=1.96TeV$, which is smaller than 5 fb in most of the parameter space of $TC2$ models. However, the virtual effects of the $FCS$ couplings on the $t\gamma(Z)$ production can be easily detected at the $LHC$ with $\sqrt{s}=14TeV$ via the final state $\gamma l\bar{\nu}b$ ($l^{+}l^{-}l\bar{\nu}b$).Comment: 10 pages,5 figure

Lagrangian analysis of alignment dynamics for isentropic compressible magnetohydrodynamics

After a review of the isentropic compressible magnetohydrodynamics (ICMHD) equations, a quaternionic framework for studying the alignment dynamics of a general fluid flow is explained and applied to the ICMHD equations.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, submitted to a Focus Issue of New Journal of Physics on "Magnetohydrodynamics and the Dynamo Problem" J-F Pinton, A Pouquet, E Dormy and S Cowley, editor

Measuring the W-t-b Interaction at the ILC

The large top quark mass suggests that the top plays a pivotal role in Electroweak symmetry-breaking dynamics and, as a result, may have modified couplings to Electroweak bosons. Hadron colliders can provide measurements of these couplings at the ~10% level, and one of the early expected triumphs of the International Linear Collider is to reduce these uncertainties to the per cent level. In this article, we propose the first direct measurement of the Standard Model W-t-b coupling at the ILC, from measurements of t tbar-like signals below the t tbar production threshold. We estimate that the ILC with 100 fb^{-1} can measure a combination of the coupling and top width to high precision, and when combined with a direct measurement of the top width from the above-threshold scan, results in a model-independent measurement of the W-t-b interaction of the order of ~ 3%

A study of top polarization in single-top production at the LHC

This paper complements the study of single top production at the LHC aiming to estimate the sensitivity of different observables to the magnitude of the effective couplings. In a previous paper the dominant $W$-gluon fusion mechanism was considered, while here we extend the analysis to the subdominant (10% with our set of experimental cuts) s-channel process. In order to distinguish left from right effective couplings it is required to consider polarized cross-sections and/or include $m_b$ effects. The spin of the top is accessible only indirectly by measuring the angular distribution of its decay products. We show that the presence of effective right-handed couplings implies necessarily that the top is not in a pure spin state. We discuss to what extent quantum interference terms can be neglected in the measurement and therefore simply multiply production and decay probabilities clasically. The coarsening involved in the measurement process makes this possible. We determine for each process the optimal spin basis where theoretical errors are minimized and, finally, discuss the sensitivity in the s-channel to the effective right-handed coupling. The results presented here are all analytical and include $m_b$ corrections. They are derived within the narrow width approximation for the top.Comment: 30 pages, 14 figure