EPIQR-TOBUS: a new generation of refurbishment decision aid methods

In a large majority of European countries, the amount of maintenance and refurbishment works represents nearly 50% of the total amount spent in the building sector. New requirements are being added to the necessity of maintaining or re-establishing the building stock's usage value. They are linked to the determination to reduce energy consumption, pollutant emissions, work site wastes, to improve the Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ) and all the modern conveniences inside buildings. Two European projects, EPIQR (réf. nr.: JOR3-CT96-0044) and TOBUS (réf. nr.: JOR3-CT98-Û235), developed in the IIIrd and IVth framework programs put the foundations of a new generation of refurbishment decision aid tools. A structured diagnosis scheme covering the state of deterioration of the building elements, energy performance, indoor environment quality, functional obsolescence offer a new concept which helps architects and engineers to approach the building refurbishment with a global view of the whole process, to take informed decisions, to construct coherent refurbishment scenarii and calculate a reasonable investment budget in the very first stage of the refurbishment project. EPIQR project addresses residential buildings and it has been finished in 1998, TOBUS addresses office buildings and it is still in course. The support of these methods is a multimedia computer program. Several modules help the users to treat the data collected during a diagnosis survey, to set up refurbishment scenarii and calculate their cost or energy performance, and finally to visualise the results in a comprehensive way and to prepare quality reports. This paper presents the structure and the main features of the method and softwar

Crossover from Luttinger- to Fermi-liquid behavior in strongly anisotropic systems in large dimensions

We consider the low-energy region of an array of Luttinger liquids coupled by a weak interchain hopping. The leading logarithmic divergences can be re-summed to all orders within a self-consistent perturbative expansion in the hopping, in the large-dimension limit. The anomalous exponent scales to zero below the one-particle crossover temperature. As a consequence, coherent quasiparticles with finite weight appear along the whole Fermi surface. Extending the expansion self-consistently to all orders turns out to be crucial in order to restore the correct Fermi-liquid behavior.Comment: Shortened version to appear in Physical Review Letter

Neutrino opacity in magnetised hot and dense nuclear matter

We study the neutrino interaction rates in hot matter at high densities in the presence of uniform magnetic field. The neutrino cross-sections involving both the charged current absorption and neutral current scattering reactions on baryons and leptons have been considered. We have in particular considered the interesting case when the magnetic field is strong enough to completely polarise the protons and electrons in supernovae and neutron stars. The opacity in such a situation is considerably modified and the cross-section develops anisotropy. This has implications for phenomenon invoked in the literature to explain the observed pulsar kicks.Comment: 22 latex pages and 7 postscript figure

`Natural Masslessness Conservation' for neutrinos in two Higgs-doublet models

We present a model which supplements the Standard Electroweak Model with three right-handed neutrinos and one extra scalar doublet which does not develop a vacuum expectation value. With the aid of a discrete symmetry the neutrinos are kept strictly massless. This model has several interesting features. It has unsuppressed lepton flavour violating processes, in particular $\mu \rightarrow e \gamma$, hinting at the possibility that these may soon be within experimental reach. The $Z$ and $W$ interactions become non-diagonal at one loop level. In particular, a non-trivial leptonic mixing matrix is seen to arise from the clash between the charged gauge boson and the charged scalar interactions.Comment: (Latex file, 12 pages. Two figures available upon request). CMU-preprin

Flavour Issues in Leptogenesis

We study the impact of flavour in thermal leptogenesis, including the quantum oscillations of the asymmetries in lepton flavour space. In the Boltzmann equations we find different numerical factors and additional terms which can affect the results significantly. The upper bound on the CP asymmetry in a specific flavour is weaker than the bound on the sum. This suggests that -- when flavour dynamics is included -- there is no model-independent limit on the light neutrino mass scale,and that the lower bound on the reheat temperature is relaxed by a factor ~ (3 - 10).Comment: 19 pages, corrected equations for flavour oscillation

Congenital disorder of glycosylation type Id (CDG Id): phenotypic, biochemical and molecular characterization of a new patient

Summary: Congenital disorders of glycosylation (CDG) are a family of multisystem inherited disorders caused by defects in the biosynthesis of N- or O-glycans. Among the many different subtypes of CDG, the defect of a mannosyltransferase encoded by the human ALG3 gene (chromosome 3q27) is known to cause CDG Id. Six patients with CDG Id have been described in the literature so far. We further delineate the clinical, biochemical, neuroradiological and molecular features of CDG Id by reporting an additional patient bearing a novel missense mutation in the ALG3 gene. All patients with CDG Id display a slowly progressive encephalopathy with microcephaly, severe psychomotor retardation and epileptic seizures. They also share some typical dysmorphic features but they do not present the multisystem involvement observed in other CDG syndromes or any biological marker abnormalities. Unusually marked osteopenia is a feature in some patients and may remain undiagnosed until revealed by pathological fractures. Serum transferrin screening for CDG should be extended to all patients with encephalopathy of unknown origin, even in the absence of multisystem involvemen

CP violation in scatterings, three body processes and the Boltzmann equations for leptogenesis

We obtain the Boltzmann equations for leptogenesis including decay and scattering processes with two and three body initial or final states. We present an explicit computation of the CP violating scattering asymmetries. We analyze their possible impact in leptogenesis, and we discuss the validity of their approximate expressions in terms of the decay asymmetry. In scenarios in which the initial heavy neutrino density vanishes, the inclusion of CP asymmetries in scatterings can enforce a cancellation between the lepton asymmetry generated at early times and the asymmetry produced at later times. We argue that a sizeable amount of washout is crucial for spoiling this cancellation, and we show that in the regimes in which the washouts are particularly weak, the inclusion of CP violation in scatterings yields a reduction in the final value of the lepton asymmetry. In the strong washout regimes the inclusion of CP violation in scatterings still leads to a significant enhancement of the lepton asymmetry at high temperatures; however, due to the independence from the early conditions that is characteristic of these regimes, the final value of the lepton asymmetry remains approximately unchanged.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures. One appendix added. Some numerical results and corresponding figures (mainly fig. 3) corrected. Final version to be published in JHE

On the Possibility of Observing the Shapiro Effect for Pulsars in Globular Clusters

For pulsars in globular clusters, we suggest using observations of the relativistic time delay of their radiation in the gravitational eld of a massive body (the Shapiro effect) located close to the line of sight to detect and identify invisible compact objects and to study the distribution of both visible and dark matter in globular clusters and various components of the Galaxy. We have derived the dependences of the event probability on the Galactic latitude and longitude of sources for two models of the mass distribution in the Galaxy: the classical Bahcall-Soneira model and the more recent Dehnen-Binney model. Using three globular clusters (M15, 47 Tuc, Terzan 5) as an example, we show that the ratios of the probability of the events due to the passages of massive Galactic objects close to the line of sight to the parameter f2 for pulsars in the globular clusters 47 Tuc and M15 are comparable to those for close passages of massive objects in the clusters themselves and are considerably higher than those for the cluster Terzan 5. We have estimated the rates of such events. We have determined the number of objects near the line of sight toward the pulsar that can produce a modulation of its pulse arrival times characteristic of the effect under consideration; the population of brown dwarfs in the Galactic disk, whose concentration is comparable to that of the disk stars, has been taken into account for the first time.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figure

Instability of the marginal commutative model of tunneling centers interacting with metallic environment: Role of the electron-hole symmetry breaking

The role of the electron-hole symmetry breaking is investigated for a symmetrical commutative two-level system in a metal using the multiplicative renormalization group in a straightforward way. The role of the symmetries of the model and the path integral technique are also discussed in detail. It is shown that the electron-hole symmetry breaking may make the model non-commutative and generate the assisted tunneling process which is, however, too small itself to drive the system into the vicinity of the two-channel Kondo fixed point. While these results are in qualitative agreement with those of Moustakas and Fisher (Phys. Rev. B 51, 6908 (1995), ibid 53, 4300 (1996)) the scaling equations turn out to be essentially different. We show that the main reason for this difference is that the procedure for the elimination of the high energy degrees of freedom used by Moustakas and Fisher leaves only the free energy invariant, however, the couplings generated are not connected to the dynamical properties in a straightforward way and should be interpreted with care. These latter results might have important consequences in other cases where the path integral technique is used to produce the scaling equations and calculate physical quantities.Comment: latex, figures in ps file adde

New CP Violation in Neutrino Oscillations

Measurements of CP--violating observables in neutrino oscillation experiments have been studied in the literature as a way to determine the CP--violating phase in the mixing matrix for leptons. Here we show that such observables also probe new neutrino interactions in the production or detection processes. Genuine CP violation and fake CP violation due to matter effects are sensitive to the imaginary and real parts of new couplings. The dependence of the CP asymmetry on source--detector distance is different from the standard one and, in particular, enhanced at short distances. We estimate that future neutrino factories will be able to probe in this way new interactions that are up to four orders of magnitude weaker than the weak interactions. We discuss the possible implications for models of new physics.Comment: ReVTeX, 28 pages, 7 figues. v2: Modifications in section VIII to reflect the fact that some of the couplings that were discussed in this section are irrelevant to our analysis (as pointed out in hep-ph/0112329); Added a discussion in section IX of the relevance of other future experiments that will search for lepton flavor violatio