An extensive experimental study of near-threshold pion production in diproton reactions is underway at the ANKE-COSY spectrometer (Jülich). The programme is aimed at isolating the four-nucleon-pion contact interaction term appearing in the χPT expansions of these processes. This will establish links between pion production and other low energy phenomena within the χPT approach. The first step i...

Polarisation measurements on the Cosmological Microwave Background (CMB) will be very difficult as the expected polarisation is not expected to exceed 10% of the signal. Therefore, noises of all origins must be searched for and carefully extracted. Low frequency drifts are expected to arise from mechanic, thermal and electronic origin. If not suitably treated they induce stripes on sky maps suc...

The theoretical status of the 'proton spin' effect is reviewed. The conventional QCD parton model analysis of polarised DIS is compared with a complementary approach, the composite operator propagator-vertex (CPV) method, each of which provides its own insight into the origin of the observed suppression in the first moment of g p 1. The current status of both experiment and non-perturbative cal...

We prove that polarised manifolds that admit a constant scalar curvature Kähler (cscK) metric satisfy a condition we call slope semistability. That is, we define the slope µ for a projective manifold and for each of its subschemes, and show that if X is cscK then µ(Z) ≤ µ(X) for all subschemes Z. This gives many examples of manifolds with Kähler classes which do not admit cscK metrics, such as ...

This paper describes the development of notch filters and dichroic beam-splitters, the latter to be a visible 2-channel WDM Multiplexer/Demultiplexer (MUX/DEMUX). Both discrete devices are intended to be used on very short-haul links based on Poly-Methyl-Methacrylate (PMMA) Polymer Optical Fibres (POFs). The filters were built from commercially available multilayer dielectric stack and also fro...

production in polarised p–p scattering as a probe of the proton spin structure Abstract We present the results of a detailed study of the large transverse momentum Drell-Yan process, pp → (γ * , Z *)X → l + l − X at collider energies, with either one or both protons polarised, allowing the study of single-and double-spin asymmetries respectively. We show how these asymmetries obtained from angu...

Photoproduction spin sum-rules offer a new window on the spin structure of the nucleon that complements the information we can learn from polarised deep inelastic scattering experiments. We review the theory and present status of the Drell-Hearn-Gerasimov sum-rule in QCD, emphasising the possible relation between the present " discrepancy " in this sum-rule and the nucleon's strangeness magneti...