Several anomalies appear to be present in the large-angle cosmic microwave background anisotropy maps of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, including the alignment of large-scale multipoles. Models in which isotropy is spontaneously broken (e.g., by a scalar field) have been proposed as explanations for these anomalies, as have models in which a preferred direction is imposed during infl...

The electroweak phase structure and baryon number violation for large Higgs mass. The classical transitions between topologically distinct vacua in a SU (2)–Higgs model, using a Higgs field of mass approximately 120 GeV, is examined to probe the crossover region between the symmetric and broken phase. For the volumes used, this crossover is approximately 10 GeV wide.

Realizing and manipulating parity-time ($\mathcal{PT}$) symmetry in multidimensional systems are highly desirable for the exploration of nontrivial physics discovery exotic phenomena non-Hermitian systems. Finding that still have all-real spectra even if their Hamiltonians possess only partial $\mathcal{PT}$ has also attracted tremendous attention recent years. Here, we report experimental obse...

An optical fiber has been developed with a maneuverable mini-probe tip that sparges O(2) gas and photodetaches pheophorbide (sensitizer) molecules. Singlet oxygen is produced at the probe tip surface which reacts with an alkene spacer group releasing sensitizer upon fragmentation of a dioxetane intermediate. Optimal sensitizer photorelease occurred when the probe tip was loaded with 60 nmol sen...

We study the fermionic sector of a probe D8-brane in the supergravity background made of D4-branes compactified on a circle with supersymmetry broken explicitly by the boundary conditions. At low energies the dual field theory is effectively four-dimensional and has proved surprisingly successful in recovering qualitative and quantitative properties of QCD. We investigate fluctuations of the fe...

The increased frequency of sudden cardiac death after earthquakes and bombings has long proposed that emotional distress plays a role in acute coronary syndromes and arrhythmias. Since the 1960s, several controlled, prospective, epidemiological studies have reported emotional distress as a major risk factor for the onset and worsening of coronary heart disease (CHD) [1]. The Interheart study, a...

This is a draft of a chapter for a book, Modification, in preparation for the Cambridge University Press series Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics. The full manuscript is also available as a single document on my website, as are some additional chapters. The book is something between a textbook for people who already have a basic background in semantics and a survey of work in the area. For...

We investigate some properties of a recent supergravity solution of Pilch and Warner, which is dual to the N = 4 gauge theory softly broken to N = 2. We verify that a D3-brane probe has the expected moduli space and its effective action can be brought to N = 2 form. The kinetic term for the probe vanishes on an enhançon locus, as in earlier work on large-N N = 2 theories, though for the Pilch-W...