BACKGROUND Aligned with the international call for universal coverage of affordable and quality health care, the government of Tajikistan is undertaking reforms of its health system aiming amongst others at reducing the out-of-pocket expenditures (OPE) of patients seeking care. Household surveys were conducted in 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2011 to explore the scale and determinants of OPE of users in...

Nanographite-like lamellae are obtained by the self-assembly of rectangular OPE amphiphiles peripherally decorated with polar and paraffinic chains.

We present a new, but simple, randomised order-preserving encryption (OPE) scheme based on the general approximate common divisor problem (GACDP). This scheme requires only O(1) arithmetic operations for encryption and decryption. We show that the scheme has optimal information leakage under the assumption of uniformly distributed plaintexts, and we indicate that this property extends to some n...

One-loop quark contributions to the dimension-four gluon condensate term in the operator product expansion (OPE) of the scalar glueball correlation function are calculated in the MS scheme in the chiral limit of nf quark flavours. The presence of quark effects is shown not to alter the cancellation of infrared (IR) singularities in the gluon condensate OPE coefficients. The dimension-four gluon...

We perform a QCD sum rule analysis for the light scalar meson σ (f0(600)) with a tetraquark current related to the instanton picture for QCD vacuum. We demonstrate that instanton current, including equal weights of scalar and pseudoscalar diquarkantidiquarks, leads to a strong cancelation between the contributions of high dimension operators in the operator product expansion (OPE). Furthermore,...

We derive and analyze predictions of both the hard-wall and dilaton soft-wall AdS/QCD approximations for the scalar glueball correlator and decay constants. We confront the results with QCD information from the lattice, the operator product expansion (OPE), a hypothetical UV gluon mass associated with the short-distance behavior of the heavy-quark potential, and a low-energy theorem based on th...