Non-native plants have invaded nearly all ecosystems and represent a major component of global ecological change. Plant invasions frequently change the composition and structure of vegetation communities, which can alter animal communities and ecosystem processes. We reviewed 87 articles published in the peer-reviewed literature to evaluate responses of arthropod communities and functional grou...

Two-loop effective potential in quantum field theory in curved space-time. ABSTRACT 1) temporal postal address; The method of the calculation of effective potential (in linear curvature approximation and at any loop) in massless gauge theory in curved space-time by the direct solution of renormalization group equation is given. The closed expression for two-loop effective potential is obtained....

In contrast to standard critical phenomena, disordered systems need to be treated via the Functional Renormalization Group. The latter leads to a coarse grained disorder landscape, which after a finite renormalization becomes non-analytic, thus overcoming the predictions of the seemingly exact dimensional reduction. We review recent progress on how the nonanalytic effective action can be measur...

Radiative corrections to both perturbative and non-perturbative contributions are added to existing calculations of the Isgur-Wise function ξIW . To this end, we develop a method for calculating two-loop integrals in the heavy quark effective theory involving two different scales. The inclusion of O(αs) terms causes ξIW to decrease as compared to the lowest order result and shows the importance...

The algebraic connectivity of a graph G is the second smallest eigenvalue of its Laplacian matrix. Let Bn be the set of all bicyclic graphs of order n. In this paper, we determine the last four bicyclic graphs (according to their smallest algebraic connectivities) among all graphs in Bn when n > 13. This result, together with our previous results on trees and unicyclic graphs, can be used to fu...

Deformation spaces Hom(π,G)/G of representations of the fundamental group π of a surface Σ in a Lie group G admit natural actions of the mapping class group ModΣ, preserving a Poisson structure. When G is compact, the actions are ergodic. In contrast if G is noncompact semisimple, the associated deformation space contains open subsets containing the Fricke-Teichmüller space upon which ModΣ acts...

In an earlier publication, we have introduced a method to obtain, at large N , the effective action for d-dimensional manifolds in a N -dimensional disordered environment. This allowed to obtain the Functional Renormalization Group (FRG) equation for N = ∞ and was shown to reproduce, with no need for ultrametric replica symmetry breaking, the predictions of the Mézard-Parisi solution. Here we c...

I present a mini-review on the physics of heavy flavour baryons where I concentrate on the HQET description of their exclusive decay modes. In particular I discuss the structure of current-induced bottom baryon to charm baryon transitions, and the structure of pion and photon transitions between heavy charm or bottom baryons in the Heavy Quark Symmetry limit as mQ → ∞. The emphasis is on the st...

Understanding the functional consequences of biodiversity loss is a major goal of ecology. Animal-mediated pollination is an essential ecosystem function and service provided to mankind. However, little is known how pollinator diversity could affect pollination services. Using a substitutive design, we experimentally manipulated functional group (FG) and species richness of pollinator communiti...