Elección del verso sobre la prosa en el De Rerum Natura de Lucrecio : La poesía al servicio de la enseñanza

Una acostumbrada y debatida concepción considera inadecuado expresar temas filosóficos por medio del uso de la poesía, pues en líneas generales la poesía no satisface el rigor y claridad necesarios para desarrollar temas científicos. Este conflicto entre contenido y forma es reconocido como una característica de la poesía didáctica que se manifiesta muy bien en el poema de Lucrecio. Sin embargo, Lucrecio no fue el primero en intentar este acercamiento poético a la filosofía con fines persuasivo-instructivos; esta elección, a pesar de contradecir los preceptos de Epicuro, estaba acorde con el modelo de discurso escrito empleado por algunos pensadores pre-socráticos para transmitir conocimientos sobre fenómenos naturales. El estudio de esta preferencia estilística en la obra de Lucrecio nos ayudará a comprender mejor la intención persuasivo-instructiva a la que apunta este controvertido texto y mostrar, a partir de ahí, nuevas luces que puedan ayudar a alcanzar una mejor interpretación del mismoA debated and usual conception considers inadequate to express philosophical subjects by means of poetry, for in a general sense, poetry do not satisfies the necessary rigor and clarity to develop scientific subjects. This conflict between form and content is well known as a didactic poetry feature, and easily recognizable in Lucretius?s poem. Nevertheless, Lucretius was not the first to attempt this poetic approach to philosophy with persuasive-instructive purposes; despite contradicting the Epicurean precepts, this choice was in consonance with the written discourse used by some of the pre Socratic thinkers to transmit knowledge about natural phenomena. The study of this stylistic preference in Lucretius?s work will help us reach a better understanding of the persuasive-instructive intention to which this controversial text aim

Investigation of Quark-Antiquark Interaction Properties using Leading Particle Measurements in e+e- Annihilation

Measurements of heavy quark production in electron-positron collisions are used to analyse the strong interactions between quarks and anti-quarks. A scaling behaviour is observed in distributions of the rapidity change of D*, B*, and B mesons. From these distributions information is obtained on the hadron formation time, effective quark masses, and the potential between quark-antiquark pairs. Predictions for fragmentation functions are presented.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, fig.2 references added, revised version accepted by Physics Letters

Symmetry restoration of the soft pion corrections for the light sea quark distributions in the small xx region

The soft pion correction at high energy may play a crucial role in non-perturbative parts of sea quark distributions. In this paper, we show that, while the soft pion correction for the strange sea qaurk distribution is suppressed in the large and the medium $x$ region compared with that for the up and the down sea quark one, it can become large and SU(3) flavor symmetric in the very small $x$ region. This gives us a good reason for the symmetry restoration of light sea quark distributions required by the mean charge sum rule for the light sea quarks. Then, by estimating this sum rule with the help of the results obtained by the soft pion correction, it is argued that there is a large symmetry restoration of the strange sea quark in the region from $x=10^{-2}$ to $10^{-6}$ at $Q^2\sim 1$ GeV.Comment: 22 pages including 4 eps figures, ReVTeX, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Strongly walk-regular graphs

We study a generalization of strongly regular graphs. We call a graph strongly walk-regular if there is an $\ell >1$ such that the number of walks of length $\ell$ from a vertex to another vertex depends only on whether the two vertices are the same, adjacent, or not adjacent. We will show that a strongly walk-regular graph must be an empty graph, a complete graph, a strongly regular graph, a disjoint union of complete bipartite graphs of the same size and isolated vertices, or a regular graph with four eigenvalues. Graphs from the first three families in this list are indeed strongly $\ell$-walk-regular for all $\ell$, whereas the graphs from the fourth family are $\ell$-walk-regular for every odd $\ell$. The case of regular graphs with four eigenvalues is the most interesting (and complicated) one. Such graphs cannot be strongly $\ell$-walk-regular for even $\ell$. We will characterize the case that regular four-eigenvalue graphs are strongly $\ell$-walk-regular for every odd $\ell$, in terms of the eigenvalues. There are several examples of infinite families of such graphs. We will show that every other regular four-eigenvalue graph can be strongly $\ell$-walk-regular for at most one $\ell$. There are several examples of infinite families of such graphs that are strongly 3-walk-regular. It however remains open whether there are any graphs that are strongly $\ell$-walk-regular for only one particular $\ell$ different from 3

Constraints From Gauge Coupling Unification On The Scale Of Supersymmetry Breaking

We reanalyze precision LEP data and coupling constant unification in the minimal supersymmetric $SU(5)$ model including the evolution of the gaugino masses. We derive general bounds on the primordial gaugino supersymmetry-breaking mass-scale $m_{1/2}$ in terms of the various input parameters. The model cannot accommodate m_{1/2}<1\TeV for values of \as < 0.115, even for extreme $1-\sigma$ values of the other inputs. We emphasize the sensitivity of this type of calculations to the various input parameters.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure not included, ACT-10/9

Extracting ∣Vbc∣|V_{bc}|, mcm_c and mbm_b from Inclusive DD and BB Decays

Using recent results for nonperturbative contributions to the $B$ and $D$ meson inclusive semileptonic widths, a model independent extraction of \vbc, $m_c$ and $m_b$ is made from the experimentally measured $B$ and $D$ lifetimes and semileptonic branching ratios. Constraining the parameters of the HQET at \CO(1/m_Q^2) by the $D$ semileptonic width, \vbc is found to lie in the range .040<\vbc< 0.057. The $c$ and $b$ quark masses are not well constrained due to uncertainty in the relevant scale of $\alpha_s$. These results assume the validity of perturbative QCD at the low scales relevant to semileptonic charm decay. Without making this assumption, somewhat less stringent bounds on $V_{bc}$ from $B$ decay alone may be obtained.Comment: (revised version - contains a more detailed discussion of the uncertainty in our results from the uncertainty in the scale of \alpha_s) 12 pages, 5 figures included, uses harvmac.tex and epsf.tex, UCSD/PTH 93-25, UTPT 93-21, CMU-HEP 93-1

QCD at high energy (experiments)

Recent measurements of QCD interactions involving large momentum transfers are reviewed. The status of measurements of the strong coupling constant is summarised. Recent developments in the measurement and interpretation of deep inelastic scattering, proton-anti-proton collisions and two-photon processes are discussed. While QCD at next-to-leading order gives a qualitative description of many processes, next-to-NLO calculations are now required to allow quantitative information to be extracted from hadron-initiated multijet data. This is illustrated by a discussion of recent data on the photoproduction of dijet events at HERA.Comment: Talk presented at the $31^{\rm st}$ International Conference on High Energy Physics, Amsterdam, 24-31 July 2002. 18 pages, 30 figure

Influence of Light and Heavy Thresholds on SUSY Unification

In this paper we study and compare susy unification using two different approaches in order to take into account the effect of light particle thresholds on the evolution of gauge couplings: the step--function approximation, on the one hand, and a mass dependent procedure, which gives a more accurate description of the dependence of the results on the masses, on the other. We also include the effect of heavy thresholds, when $SU(5)$ is chosen as the unifying group. We find that the mass--dependent procedure excludes scenarios where all susy masses are below $1\;TeV$, and favors a value of $\alpha_3(m_Z)$ near its upper experimental bound, contrary to the results obtained with the step--function approximation. We underline the dependence of the results on the procedure chosen to deal with light thresholds.Comment: 18 pages,LAEFF-93/014,REVTEX-2.1, 5 figures not included, available upon request (include FAX number)