We investigate the potential of a flavor pure high gamma electron capture electron neutrino beam directed towards a large Water Cherenkov detector with 500 kt fiducial mass. The energy of the neutrinos is reconstructed by the position measurement within the detector and superb energy resolution capabilities could be achieved. We estimate the requirements for such a scenario to be competitive to...

External markers for determination of nutrient digestibility have often been evaluated in conventional dry feeds but less often in conventional feeds such as human-type diets used in animal model studies. In the present study, 5 ileal-cannulated pigs were fed 5 types of soft bread-based diets supplemented with Cr(2)O(3) and AIA as digestibility markers for 1 wk in a Latin square design. Ileal c...

A planetary microlensing event occurs when a planet perturbs one of the two images created in a point-mass microlensing event, causing a deviation from the standard Paczyński curve. Determination of the two physical parameters that can be extracted from a planetary microlensing event, the planet/star mass ratio q, and the planet/star separation in units of the stellar Einstein ring, yp, is hamp...

We study how the eightfold-degeneracy in the (θ13, δ) plane observed in γ ∼ 100 β-beams can be reduced by periodically changing the ions in the storage ring. This “ions cocktail” allows to change the neutrino energy, at fixed γ, by choosing ions with different decay energies. We propose to combine the standard He and Ne beams with Li and B ones. These latter two ions have peaked νe → νμ oscilla...

We show how the topological string partition function, which is known to capture the degeneracies of a gas of BPS spinning M2-branes in M-theory compactified to 5 dimensions, is related to a 4-dimensional D-brane system that consists of single D6-brane bound to lower-dimensional branes. This system is described by a topologically twisted U(1) gauge theory, that has been conjecturally identified...

Disk arrays are commonly designed to ensure that stored data will always be able to withstand a disk failure, but meeting this goal comes at a significant cost in performance. We show that this is unnecessary. By trading away a fraction of the enormous reliability provided by disk arrays, it is possible to achieve performance that is almost as good as a non-parityprotected set of disks. In part...

The variation of the expansion rate of the Universe with time produces an evolution in the cosmological redshift of distant sources (for example quasar Lyman-α absorption lines), that might be directly observed by future ultra stable, high-resolution spectrographs (such as CODEX) coupled to extremely large telescopes (such as European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope, ELT). This...

We examine the use of two superbeam neutrino oscillation experiments with baselines <∼ 1000 km to resolve parameter degeneracies inherent in the three-neutrino analysis of such experiments. We find that with appropriate choices of neutrino energies and baselines two experiments with different baselines can provide a much better determination of the neutrino mass ordering than a single experimen...

Ecological stoichiometry suggests that plant Nitrogen (N)-to-Phosphorus (P) ratios respond to changes in both soil N:P stoichiometry and soil N and P availability. Thus we would expect that soil and plant N:P ratios be significantly related along natural gradients of soil development such as those associated with primary ecological successions. Here we explicitly search for linkages between pla...

The union of axis-aligned boxes results in a constrained structure that is advantageous for solving certain geometrical problems. A widely used scheme for solid modelling systems is the boundary representation (Brep). We present a method to obtain the B-rep of a union of axis-aligned boxes. Our method computes all boundary vertices, and additional information for each vertex that allows us to a...