Detection of Circulating Filarial Antigen

Affinity binding to specific solid phase antibody, immune complex binding to Raji cells or PEG precipitation of immune complexes was used in conjunction with Western blotting to detect circulating filarial antigen in filarial sera. A high molecular weight antigen was present in free as well as complex form. PEG precipitation method revealed specific filarial antigens in the low molecular weight region also

Spontaneous breaking of conformal invariance, solitons and gravitational waves in theories of conformally invariant gravitation

We study conformal gravity as an alternative theory of gravitation. For conformal gravity to be phenomenologically viable requires that the conformal symmetry is not manifest at the energy scales of the other known physical forces. Hence we require a mechanism for the spontaneous breaking of conformal invariance. In this paper we study the possibility that conformal invariance is spontaneously broken due to interactions with conformally coupled matter fields. The vacuum of the theory admits conformally non-invariant solutions corresponding to maximally symmetric space-times and variants thereof. These are either de Sitter space-time or anti-de Sitter space-time in the full four space-time dimensions or in a lower dimensional sub-space. We consider in particular normalizable, linearized gravitational perturbations around the anti-de Sitter background. Exploiting the conformal flatness of this space-time, we show to second order, that these gravitational fluctuations, that are taken to be fourier decomposable, carry zero energy-momentum. This squares well with the theorem that asymptotically flat space-times conformal gravity contain zero energy and momentum \cite{bhs}. We also show the possibility of domain wall solitons interpolating between the ground states of spontaneously broken conformal symmetry that we have found. These solitons necessarily require the vanishing of the scalar field, repudiating the recent suggestion \cite{f} that the conformal symmetry could be quarantined to a sterile sector of the theory by choosing an appropriate field redefinition.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, colour viewing helpful, version to be published in PR

Static and dynamic calibrations of MSFC's plug-nozzle special test section /redesigned 1967/

Calibration of plug nozzle special test sectio

Instantons and the Ground State of the Massive Schwinger Model

We study the massive Schwinger model, quantum electrodynamics of massive, Dirac fermions, in 1+1 dimensions; with space compactified to a circle. In the limit that transitions to fermion--anti-fermion pairs can be neglected, we study the full ground state. We focus on the effect of instantons which mediate tunnelling transitions in the induced potential for the dynamical degree of freedom in the gauge field.Comment: 17 pages, plain te

Fate of the false monopoles: induced vacuum decay

We study a gauge theory model where there is an intermediate symmetry breaking to a meta- stable vacuum that breaks a simple gauge group to a U (1) factor. Such models admit the existence of meta-stable magnetic monopoles, which we dub false monopoles. We prove the existence of these monopoles in the thin wall approximation. We determine the instantons for the collective coordinate that corresponds to the radius of the monopole wall and we calculate the semi-classical tunneling rate for the decay of these monopoles. The monopole decay consequently triggers the decay of the false vacuum. As the monopole mass is increased, we find an enhanced rate of decay of the false vacuum relative to the celebrated homogeneous tunneling rate due to Coleman [1].Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure