Control of the Polymorphism of Calcium Carbonate Produced by Self-Healing in the Cracked Part of Cementitious Materials

Cracking is an inherent development in reinforced concrete structures and can lead to serious damages during their service period. The repeated occurrence of such damages can enlarge the cracks, thereby allowing other deteriorating elements such as CO2 and Cl− to further infiltrate the concrete, which can seriously compromise the concrete structure. This study focuses on the type of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) crystals generated by the self-healing phenomenon. Owing to polymorphism, CaCO3 has three types of crystal forms—calcite, vaterite, and aragonite—whose formation can be controlled by the temperature and pH. Vaterite has the highest density among these crystals, and it is expected to be capable of self-healing. Therefore, experiments were conducted to establish the conditions required to promote the generation of vaterite. A saturated Ca(OH)2 solution with CO2 nanobubbles (CN) was employed for effective self-healing. The temperature was controlled at 20, 40, and 60 °C, and the pH was controlled at 9.0, 10.5, and 12.0. The results showed that the self-healing of cracks occurred both on the surface and internally, and the main product of the self-healing phenomenon was vaterite in CaCO3 crystals at a pH of 9.0 and a temperature of 40 °C. Furthermore, the addition of a saturated Ca(OH)2 solution with CO2 nanobubbles (CN) resulted in the most effective self-healing of the surface and internal cracks

CP--violating Chargino Contributions to the Higgs Coupling to Photon Pairs in the Decoupling Regime of Higgs Sector

In most supersymmetric theories, charginos $\tilde{\chi}^\pm_{1,2}$ belong to the class of the lightest supersymmetric particles and the couplings of Higgs bosons to charginos are in general complex so that the CP--violating chargino contributions to the loop--induced coupling of the lightest Higgs boson to photon pairs can be sizable even in the decoupling limit of large pseudoscalar mass $m_A$ with only the lightest Higgs boson kinematically accessible at future high energy colliders. We introduce a specific benchmark scenario of CP violation consistent with the electric dipole moment constraints and with a commonly accepted baryogenesis mechanism in the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model. Based on the benchmark scenario of CP violation, we demonstrate that the fusion of the lightest Higgs boson in linearly polarized photon--photon collisions can allow us to confirm the existence of the CP--violating chargino contributions {\it even in the decoupling regime of the Higgs sector} for nearly degenerate SU(2) gaugino and higgsino mass parameters of about the electroweak scale.Comment: 1+13 pages, 3 eps figure

Escape fraction of ionizing photons from high-redshift galaxies in cosmological SPH simulations

Combing the three-dimensional radiative transfer (RT) calculation and cosmological SPH simulations, we study the escape fraction of ionizing photons (f_esc) of high-redshift galaxies at z=3-6. Our simulations cover the halo mass range of M_h = 10^9 - 10^12 M_sun. We postprocess several hundred simulated galaxies with the Authentic Radiative Transfer (ART) code to study the halo mass dependence of f_esc. In this paper, we restrict ourselves to the transfer of stellar radiation from local stellar population in each dark matter halo. We find that the average f_esc steeply decreases as the halo mass increases, with a large scatter for the lower mass haloes. The low mass haloes with M_h ~ 10^9 M_sun have large values of f_esc (with an average of ~ 0.4), whereas the massive haloes with M_h ~ 10^11 M_sun show small values of f_esc (with an average of ~ 0.07). This is because in our simulations, the massive haloes show more clumpy structure in gas distribution, and star-forming regions are embedded inside these clumps, making it more difficult for the ionizing photons to escape. On the other hand, in low mass haloes, there are often conical regions of highly ionized gas due to the shifted location of young star clusters from the center of dark matter halo, which allows the ionizing photons to escape more easily than in the high-mass haloes. By counting the number of escaped ionizing photons, we show that the star-forming galaxies can ionize the intergalactic medium at z=3-6. The main contributor to the ionizing photons is the haloes with M_h < 10^10 M_sun owing to their high f_esc. The large dispersion in f_esc suggests that there may be various sizes of H{\sc ii} bubbles around the haloes even with the same mass in the early stages of reionization. We also examine the effect of UV background radiation field on f_esc using simple, four different treatment of UV background.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS, A full resolution version is available at http://www.ccs.tsukuba.ac.jp/Astro/Members/yajima/Yajima2010.pd

Spin-Hall effect: Back to the Beginning on a Higher Level

The phenomena of the spin-Hall effect, initially proposed over three decades ago in the context of asymmetric Mott skew scattering, was revived recently by the proposal of a possible intrinsic spin-Hall effect originating from a strongly spin-orbit coupled band structure. This new proposal has generated an extensive debate and controversy over the past two years. The purpose of this workshop, held at the Asian Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics, was to bring together many of the leading groups in this field to resolve such issues and identify future challenges. We offer this short summary to clarify the now settled issues on some of the more controversial aspects of the debate and help refocus the research efforts in new and important avenues.Comment: 4 pages, Summary of the APCTP Workshop on the Spin-Hall Effect and Related Issue

Strength recovery of concrete exposed to freezing-thawing by self-healing of cementitious materials using synthetic fiber

In this study, it is possible to disperse effectively cracked using synthetic fiber, an examination of the most suitable self-healing conditions was performed on the above crack width 0.1mm. As a result, effective crack dispersion using polyvinyl alcohol(PVA) fibers with polar OH-groups, as well as improved self-healing for cracks that are larger than 0.1 mm in width, posing concerns of CO2 gas and Cl-penetration, were observed. Also, CO3 2-reacts with Ca2+ in the concrete crack, resulting in the precipitation of a carbonate compound, CaCO3. Based on this, it is deemed possible for the recovery of effective water tightness and strength recovery through effective freezing-thawing resistance to be made from cracks that are larger than 0.1mm in width. In addition, it was determined that, as for the most suitable self-healing conditions in the inside and surface of the cracks, calcium hydroxide (Ca(OH)2) solution with CO2 micro-bubble was more effective in promoting the self-healing capability than water with CO2 micro-bubble. Copyright © 2017 VBRI Press

Relaxed fine-tuning in models with non-universal gaugino masses

We study, in a bottom-up approach, the fine-tuning problem between soft SUSY breaking parameters and the $\mu$-term for the successful electroweak symmetry breaking in the minimal supersymmetric standard model. It is shown that certain nontrivial ratios between gaugino masses, that is non-universal gaugino masses, are necessary at the GUT scale, in order for the fine-tuning to be reduced above 10 % order. In addition, when all the gaugino masses should be regarded as independent ones in their origins, a small gluino mass $M_3 \lesssim 120$ GeV and a non-vanishing $A$-term $A_t \sim O(M_3)$ associated to top squarks are also required at the GUT scale as well as the non-universality. On the other hand, when we consider some UV theory, which fixes ratios of soft SUSY breaking parameters as certain values with the overall magnitude, heavier spectra are allowed. It is favored that the gluino and wino masses are almost degenerate at the weak scale, while wider region of bino mass is favorable.Comment: 17 pages, 29 figure

Scherk-Schwarz Supersymmetry Breaking for Quasi-localized Matter Fields and Supersymmetry Flavor Violation

We examine the soft supersymmetry breaking parameters induced by the Scherk-Schwarz (SS) boundary condition in 5-dimensional orbifold field theory in which the quark and lepton zero modes are quasi-localized at the orbifold fixed points to generate the hierarchical Yukawa couplings. In such theories, the radion corresponds to a flavon to generate the flavor hierarchy and at the same time plays the role of the messenger of supersymmetry breaking. As a consequence, the resulting soft scalar masses and trilinear $A$-parameters of matter zero modes at the compactification scale are highly flavor-dependent, thereby can lead to dangerous flavor violations at low energy scales. We analyze in detail the low energy flavor violations in SS-dominated supersymmetry breaking scenario under the assumption that the compactification scale is close to the grand unification scale and the 4-dimensional effective theory below the compactification scale is given by the minimal supersymmetric standard model. Our analysis can be applied to any supersymmetry breaking mechanism giving a sizable $F$-component of the radion superfield, e.g. the hidden gaugino condensation model.Comment: revtex4, 22 pages, some numerical errors are corrected in phenomenological analysis, main conclusion does not chang

Effective supersymmetric theory and muon anomalous magnetic moment with R parity violation

The effective supersymmetric theory (ESUSY) with R parity conservation cannot give a large anomalous magnetic moment of $\mu$. It is pointed out that the flavor conservation and a large $(g-2)_\mu$ within the experimental limits are achievable in the ESUSY with R parity violating couplings involving the third generation superparticles.Comment: LaTeX file of 14 pages, including 4 figure

No-Scale Solution to Little Hierarchy

We show that the little hierarchy problem can be solved in the no-scale supergravity framework. In this model the supersymmetry breaking scale is generated when the electroweak symmetry breaking condition is satisfied and therefore, unlike usual supersymmetric models, the correlation between the electroweak symmetry breaking scale and the average stop mass scale can be justified. This correlation solves the little hierarchy puzzle. Using minimal supergravity boundary conditions, we find that the parameter space predicted by no-scale supergravity is allowed by all possible experimental constraints. The predicted values of supersymmetric particle masses are low enough to be very easily accessible at the LHC. This parameter space will also be probed in the upcoming results from the dark matter direct detection experiments.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure