Comment on "Quantum diffusion of 3-He impurities in solid 4- He"

In this comment I show that the experimental data on quantum diffusion of 3-He impurities in solid 4-He can be explained using the adopted quasiparticle theory. The contention by E.G. Kisvarsanyi and N.S. Sullivan (KS) in Phys.Rev.B v. 48, 16557 (1993) as well as in their Reply (ibid. v. 55, 3989 (1997)) to the Grigor'ev's Comment (Phys.Rev. B v. 55, 3987 (1997)) that "Pushkarov's theory of phonon scattering fails to fit the data by very large factors" is groundless and may result from their bad arithmetical error. This means that the phonon-impurity scattering mechanism of diffusion is consistent with experiment and its neglecting by KS makes their results questionable.Comment: RevTex, 5 pages, no figures, to be published in Phys.Rev.

Hadron Spectroscopy with CLAS and CLAS12

The CLAS detector completed a highly successful data-taking lifetime in 2012. The mass range accessible with the CEBAF 6 GeV electron beam and the large solid angle of the detector made it the premier facility for studying baryon resonances. The analysis of a great number of final states with differing polarization states is underway and will lead to a greater understanding of the existing nucleon resonances. In the meantime, preparation for an upgraded detector, CLAS12, is progressing. With commissioning due to start in 2016 with a 11 GeV electron beam CLAS12 will kinematically favour the study of mesons. In particular, it will look to resolve outstanding questions as to the make-up of mesonic states in terms of hybrid states with gluonic constituents; states of pure glue; or tetraquark/molecular configurations

An antigen-driven B-cell response within the salivary glands of patients with Sjögren’s syndrome

Infection with a bacterium or virus induces the production of antibodies, specialised protein molecules that bind to and eliminate the microorganism. These antibodies are produced by B-cells that are stimulated by antigen (any foreign protein or carbohydrate) in the lymph nodes and spleen. During this process, they diversify their variable region genes (V-genes), encoding the antigen-binding region of the antibody, by switching on machinery that mutates the V-genes at a very high rate (somatic hypermutation). In autoimmune diseases, B-cells produce autoantibodies against self-antigens present on the patient's own tissues. Clusters of B- and T-cells are frequently found in the target organs of autoimmune disease. The aim of the work described here was to determine whether these clusters of cells are responding to stimulation by antigen. For this purpose we investigated the B-cell response in patients with an autoimmune disease affecting the salivary and lachrymal glands. By cloning and sequencing the expressed V-genes from indvidual clusters of cells in the salivary glands, we were able to show that the B-cells in these clusters are undergoing clonal proliferation, somatic hypermutation and antigen selection. The presence of similar structures in the target tissues of other autoimmune diseases suggests that this is a widespread phenomenon

Airflow distortion at instrument sites on the FS Polarstern

Wind speed measurements obtained from research ships are prone to systematic errors caused by the distortion of the air flow around the ship’s hull and superstructure. In this report the air flow around the FS Polarstern is simulated for a wind speed of 15 ms-1 blowing directly over the bows of the ship using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The airflow distortion at five anemometer sites has been quantified. All anemometers in this study were located on the lattice mast attached to the crane on the forecastle. The crane was extended in two positions with the anemometers 11.2m and 14.2m forward of the bows. All the anemometers experienced moderate to severe flow distortion, with the wind speed being decelerated by 6% to 15% depending on the instrument location. The flow had been displaced vertically by between 0.1m and 0.7m, with the displacement increasing with height

State-dependent Importance Sampling for a Slow-down Tandem Queue

In this paper we investigate an advanced variant of the classical (Jackson) tandem queue, viz. a two-node system with server slow-down. The slow-down mechanism has the primary objective to protect the downstream queue from frequent overflows, and it does so by reducing the service speed of the upstream queue as soon as the number of jobs in the downstream queue reaches some pre-specified threshold. To assess the efficacy of such a policy, techniques are needed for evaluating overflow metrics of the second queue. We focus on the estimation of the probability of the following rare event: overflow in the downstream queue before exhausting the system, starting from any given state in the state space.\ud Due to the rarity of the event under consideration, naive, direct Monte Carlo simulation is often infeasible. We therefore rely on the application of importance sampling to obtain variance reduction. The principal contribution of this paper is that we construct an importance sampling scheme that is asymptotically efficient. In more detail, the paper addresses the following issues. (i) We rely on powerful heuristics to identify the exponential decay rate of the probability under consideration, and verify this result by applying sample-path large deviations techniques. (2) Immediately from these heuristics, we develop a proposal for a change of measure to be used in importance sampling. (3) We prove that the resulting algorithm is asymptotically efficient, which effectively means that the number of runs required to obtain an estimate with fixed precision grows subexponentially in the buffer size. We stress that our method to prove asymptotic efficiency is substantially shorter and more straightforward than those usually provided in the literature. Also our setting is more general than the situations analyzed so far, as we allow the process to start off at any state of the state space, and in addition we do not impose any conditions on the values of the arrival rate and service rates, as long as the underlying queueing system is stable

The Drained Strength of Bentonite Enhanced Sand

INTRODUCTION Barriers with a low hydraulic conductivity are used as part of waste containment systems to prevent groundwater contamination by liquids from the waste. Commonly barriers are either a geomembrane (usually an HDPE sheet), a mineral layer or a combination of the two. Recently there has been increasing interest in the use of bentonite±sand mixtures as the mineral layer, in both land®ll liners and vertical cut-off walls, partly because they are less susceptible to frost damage and desiccation cracking than compacted clay (Dixon et al., 1985; Kraus et al., 1997). Currently there is uncertainty about the strength and bearing capacity of these materials. This note reports drained strength data for bentonite±sand mixtures and proposes that trends in these data are mainly the result of variations in the relative density of the sand

Backpressure-based control protocols: design and computational aspects

Congestion control in packet-based networks is often realized by feedback protocols. In this paper we assess their performance under a back-pressure mechanism that has been proposed and standardized for Ethernet metropolitan networks. In such a mechanism the service rate of an upstream queue is reduced when the downstream queue is congested, in order to protect the downstream queue. We study a Markovian model that captures the essentials of the protocol, but at the same time allows for numerical analysis. We first derive explicit results for the stability condition of the model (which turns out to be nontrivial). Then we present logarithmic estimates of the probability of buffer overflow in the second queue, which are subsequentially used when devising an efficient simulation procedure based on importance sampling. We conclude the paper by presenting a number of numerical results, and some general design guidelines