Objective The success of assisted reproductive technology (ART) may be influenced by male and female lifestyle-related factors. The objective of this pilot study was to evaluate the feasibility of conducting a larger prospective cohort study, which will aim at determining the independent contribution of male and female lifestyle-related factors to ART success. The study was also designed to exa...

Finding the exact, quantum corrected metric on the hypermultiplet moduli space in Type II string compactifications on Calabi-Yau threefolds is an outstanding open problem. We address this issue by relating the quaternionic-Kähler metric on the hypermultiplet moduli space to the complex contact geometry on its twistor space. In this framework, Euclidean D-brane instantons are captured by contact...

W e quantify the observation by Kender and Freudenstein [6] that degenerate views occupy a significant fraction of the viewing sphere surrounding an object. This demonstrates that systems for recognition must explicitly account f o r the possibility of view degeneracy. W e show that view degeneracy cannot be detected f rom a single camera viewpoint. As a result, systems designed to recognize ob...

Over the past few years the understanding of the microscopic theory of black hole entropy has made important conceptual progress by recognizing that the degeneracies are encoded in partition functions which are determined by higher rank automorphic representations, in particular in the context of Siegel modular forms of genus two. In this brief review some of the elements of this framework are ...

As generalizations of the seniority model, four Hamiltonians are considered to investigate some of the physics associated with the pairing of parafermions of order p = 2. 2-particle and 4-particle states are explicitly constructed for HA ≡ −G A†A with A† ≡ 1 2 ∑ m>0 c † mc † −m and the distinct HC ≡ −G C†C with C† ≡ 1 2 ∑ m>0 c † −mc † m, and for the time-reversal invariant H(−) ≡ −G (A† − C†)(...

Precise definitions for different degrees of controllability for quantum systems are given, and necessary and sufficient conditions for each type of controllability are discussed. The results are applied to determine the degree of controllability for various atomic systems with degenerate energy levels and transition frequencies. Degrees of controllability for quantum systems and application to...

We show that in the worst case, Q(nd) sidedness queries are required to determine whether a set of n points in Rd is affinely degenerate, i .e . , whether it contains d + 1 points on a common hyperplane. This matches known upper bounds. We give a straightforward adversary argument, based on the explicit construction of a point set containing Q(nd) “collapsible” simplices, any one of which can b...

Before it becomes a sensitive probe of the Epoch of Reionization, the Dark Ages, and fundamental physics, 21 cm tomography must successfully contend with the issue of foreground contamination. Broadband foreground sources are expected to be roughly four orders of magnitude larger than any cosmological signals, so precise foreground models will be necessary. Such foreground models often contain ...

We present deep optical observations of the gravitational lens system CLASS B0218+357 from which we derive an estimate for the Hubble Constant (H0) Extensive radio observations using the VLA, MERLIN, the VLBA and VLBI have reduced the degeneracies between H0 and the mass model parameters in this lens to one involving only the position of the radioquiet lensing galaxy with respect to the lensed ...