We present the achievements of the last years of the experimental and theoretical groups working on hadronic cross section measurements at the low-energy e + e − colliders in Beijing, Frascati, Ithaca, Novosibirsk, Stanford and Tsukuba and on τ decays. We sketch the prospects in these fields for the years to come. We emphasise the status and the precision of the Monte Carlo generators used to analyse the hadronic cross section measurements obtained as well with energy scans as with radiative return, to determine luminosities and τ decays. The radiative corrections fully or approximately implemented in the various codes and the contribution of the vacuum polarisation are discussed.

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We develop and test a “slip-based” method to estimate the maximum available tire-road friction during braking. The method is based on the hypothesis that the low-slip, low-μ parts of the slip curve used during normal driving can indicate the maximum tire-road friction coefficient, μmax. We find support for this hypothesis in the literature and through experiments. The friction estimation algorithm uses data from short braking maneuvers with peak accelerations of 3.9 m/s2 to classify the road surface as either dry μmax≈1 or lubricated μmax≈0.6. Significant measurement noise makes it difficult to detect the subtle effect being measured, leading to a misclassification rate of 20%.

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Background: The therapeutic efficacy of non-surgical treatment strategies in Achilles tendinopathy (AT) has not been well clarified. Time-consuming and costly combinations of treatment for pain, physiotherapy and biomechanical procedures are often applied. Objective: To analyse the efficacy of single therapeutic regimens commonly used over a short period of 4 weeks. Methods: 31 male runners (mileage .32 km/week) with unilateral, untreated AT completed 4 weeks of either physiotherapy (10 treatments: deep-friction, pulsed ultrasound, ice, sensory motor training; (P)), wearing custom fit semirigid insoles (I) or remained without treatment (control group C). Before and after treatment, all patients underwent a treadmill test and a plantar flexion strength exercise. Subjective pain (Pain Disability Index, Pain Experience Scale), as well as strength performance capacity (peak torque), was analysed (mean, 95% CI, repeated measures analysis of variance, a = 0.05). Results: Pain was reduced to ,50% of the baseline value after physiotherapy or after wearing insoles (p,0.05). Individual pain reduction was .50% (25%) in 89% (100%) of subjects in I and 55% (73%) in P. Higher eccentric plantar flexion peak torques after treatment were observed in I and P. Conclusions: Most patients with AT experience a reduction in pain after only 4 weeks of differentiated, nonsurgical treatment consisting of physiotherapy or semirigid insoles.

PACS 29.40.Wk, 42.88.+h, 61.80.x, 81.05.UwThe radiation hardness of silicon charged particle sensors is compared with single crystal and polycrystalline diamond sensors, both experimentally and theoretically. It is shown that for Si-and C-sensors, the NIEL hypothesis, which states that the signal loss is proportional to the Non-Ionizing Energy Loss, is a good approximation to the present data. At incident proton and neutron energies well above 0.1 GeV the radiation damage is dominated by the inelastic cross section, while at non-relativistic energies the elastic cross section prevails. The smaller inelastic nucleon-Carbon cross section and the light nuclear fragments imply that at high energies diamond is an order of magnitude more radiation hard than silicon, while at energies below 0.1 GeV the difference becomes significantly smaller.

We use gauge-gravity duality to study the stability of zero-temperature, finite baryon density states of N = 4 supersymmetric SU (N c ) Yang-Mills theory coupled to a single massive fundamental-representation N = 2 hypermultiplet in the large-N c and largecoupling limits. In particular, we study the spectrum of mesons. The dual description is a probe D7-brane in anti-de Sitter space with a particular configuration of worldvolume fields. The meson spectrum is dual to the spectrum of fluctuations of worldvolume fields about that configuration. We use a combination of analytical and numerical techniques to compute the spectrum, including a special numerical technique designed to deal with singular points in the fluctuations' equations of motion. Despite circumstantial evidence that the system might be unstable, such as a finite entropy density at zero temperature and the existence of instabilities in similar theories, we find no evidence of any instabilities, at least for the ranges of frequency and momenta that we consider. We discover a pole on the imaginary frequency axis in a scalar meson two-point function, similar to the diffusive mode in the two-point function of a conserved charge.2 If we leave the probe limit, and allow the D7-brane to back-react on the fields of supergravity, then we might expect to find an extremal black hole, which on general grounds we expect to have a finite entropy and near-horizon AdS2 region. The features we see for the probe D7-brane may simply be the probe-limit remnants of those for the extremal black hole.3 Fermionic fields also live on the D7-brane worldvolume [44,45], but on general grounds we do not expect them to become unstable, as explained for example in ref.[16], so we omit them from our analysis.