While neurofilament light chain (NfL) measurement in serum is a well-established marker of neuroaxonal damage in multiple sclerosis (MS), data on astroglial markers in serum are missing. In our ...study, glial fibrillary acid protein (GFAP) and NfL were measured in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and serum of MS patients and patients with other non-inflammatory neurological diseases (OND) using the Simoa technology. Clinical data like age, gender, expanded disability status scale (EDSS) and MRI findings were correlated to neurochemical markers. We included 80 MS patients: 42 relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS), 38 progressive MS (PMS), as well as 20 OND. Serum GFAP levels were higher in PMS compared to RRMS and OND (p < 0.001, p = 0.02 respectively). Serum GFAP levels correlated with disease severity in the whole MS group and PMS (Spearman-rho = 0.5, p < 0.001 in both groups). Serum GFAP correlated with serum NfL in PMS patients (Spearman-rho = 0.4, p = 0.01). Levels of serum GFAP were higher with increasing MRI-lesion count (p = 0.01). in summary, we report elevated levels of GFAP in the serum of MS patients. Since serum levels of GFAP correlate with the clinical severity scores and MRI lesion count, especially in PMS patients, it might be a suitable disease progression marker.
We compute the factorising second-order QCD corrections to the electroweak production of a Higgs boson through vector boson fusion. Our calculation is fully differential in the kinematics of the ...Higgs boson and of the final state jets, and uses the antenna subtraction method to handle infrared singular configurations in the different parton-level contributions. Our results allow us to reassess the impact of the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to electroweak Higgs-plus-three-jet production and of the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD corrections to electroweak Higgs-plus-two-jet production. The NNLO corrections are found to be limited in magnitude to around ±5% and are uniform in several of the kinematical variables, displaying a kinematical dependence only in the transverse momenta and rapidity separation of the two tagging jets.
A
bstract
We present the colourful antenna subtraction method, a reformulation of the antenna subtraction scheme for next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) calculations in QCD. The aim of this new ...approach is to achieve a general and process-independent construction of the subtraction infrastructure at NNLO. We rely on the predictability of the infrared singularity structure of one- and two-loop amplitudes in colour space to generate virtual subtraction terms and, subsequently, we define an automatable procedure to systematically infer the expression of the real subtraction terms, guided by the correspondence between unintegrated and integrated antenna functions. To demonstrate the applicability of the described approach, we compute the full colour NNLO correction to gluonic three-jet production
pp
(
gg
)
→ ggg
, in the gluons-only assumption.
The production of jets in charged-current deep-inelastic scattering (CC DIS) probes simultaneously the strong and the electroweak sectors of the Standard Model; its measurement provides important ...information on the quark flavour structure of the proton. We compute third-order (N3LO ) perturbative QCD corrections to this process, fully differential in the jet and lepton kinematics. We observe a substantial reduction in the theory uncertainty, to sub-percent level throughout the relevant kinematical range, thus enabling precision phenomenology with jet observables.
We present the first fully differential predictions for the production cross section of a Higgs boson via the gluon fusion mechanism at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order ( N3 LO ) in QCD ...perturbation theory. Differential distributions are shown for the two-photon final state produced by the decay of the Higgs boson for a realistic set of fiducial cuts. The N3 LO corrections exhibit complex features and are in part larger than the inclusive N3 LO corrections to the production cross section. Overall, we observe that the inclusion of the N3 LO QCD corrections significantly reduces the perturbative uncertainties and leads to a stabilization of the perturbative expansion.
A
bstract
We present the calculation of next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) corrections in perturbative QCD for the production of a Higgs boson decaying into a pair of bottom quarks in association ...with a leptonically decaying weak vector boson:
pp
→
V
H
+
X
→
ℓ
ℓ
¯
b
b
¯
+
X
.
We consider the corrections to both the production and decay sub-processes, retaining a fully differential description of the final state including off-shell propagators of the Higgs and vector boson. The calculation is carried out using the antenna subtraction formalism and is implemented in the NNLOjet framework. Clustering and identification of b-jets is performed with the flavour-k
t
algorithm and results for fiducial cross sections and distributions are presented for the LHC at
s
= 13 TeV. We assess the residual theory uncertainty by varying the production and decay scales independently and provide scale uncertainty bands in our results, yielding percent-level accurate predictions for observables in this Higgs production mode computed at NNLO. Confronting a na¨ıve perturbative expansion of the cross section against the customary re-scaling procedure to a fixed branching ratio reveals that starting from NNLO, the latter could be inadequate in estimating missing higher-order effects through scale variations.
A
bstract
The angular distributions of lepton pairs in the Drell-Yan process can provide rich information on the underlying QCD production mechanisms. These dynamics can be parameterised in terms of ...a set of frame dependent angular coefficients,
A
i=0,…,7
, which depend on the invariant mass, transverse momentum, and rapidity of the lepton pair. Motivated by recent measurements of these coefficients by ATLAS and CMS, and in particular by the apparent violation of the Lam-Tung relation
A
0
−
A
2
= 0, we perform a precision study of the angular coefficients at
O
α
s
3
in perturbative QCD. We make predic-tions relevant for pp collisions at
s
=
8
TeV, and perform comparisons with the available ATLAS and CMS data as well as providing predictions for a prospective measurement at LHCb. To expose the violation of the Lam-Tung relationship we propose a new observable Δ
LT
= 1 −
A
2
/A
0
that is more sensitive to the dynamics in the region where
A
0
and
A
2
are both small. We find that the
O
α
s
3
corrections have an important impact on the
p
T,Z
distributions for several of the angular coefficients, and are essential to provide an adequate description of the data. The compatibility of the available ATLAS and CMS data is reassessed by performing a partial
χ
2
test with respect to the central theoretical prediction which shows that
χ
2
/N
data
is significantly reduced by going from
O
α
s
2
to
O
α
s
3
.
A
bstract
We present calculations of Higgs boson production via gluon-gluon fusion in association with one or two additional jets at next-to-leading order in QCD. The calculation of
H
+jet is exact ...in the treatment of the top-quark mass, whereas for the
H
+2 jets calculation the two-loop virtual amplitudes are approximated via a reweighting with leading-order mass effects, while keeping all top-quark mass effects in the real radiation contributions. For
H
+jet production, this study extends a previous calculation, revealing an error in the previous results. For total and differential cross sections, we present new results and compare the QCD corrections with the infinite top-mass limit, for which we find a strikingly good agreement if all amplitudes are rescaled by the leading-order mass dependence.
We compute the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD corrections to event shape distributions and their mean values in deep inelastic lepton–nucleon scattering. The magnitude and shape of the ...corrections varies considerably between different variables. The corrections reduce the renormalization and factorization scale uncertainty of the predictions. Using a dispersive model to describe non-perturbative power corrections, we compare the NNLO QCD predictions with data from the H1 and ZEUS experiments. The newly derived corrections improve the theory description of the distributions and of their mean values.
Abstract
The emergence of new rapid prototyping techniques such as melt electrowriting and their application in the development of medical devices, enables new geometries for surgical meshes that ...were previously limited by current conventional manufacturing methods. The change in geometry allows a direct impact on the mechanical behavior of surgical meshes using identical polymers. The adaptation of the mechanical properties of surgical meshes, based on sinusoidal auxetic design with varying amplitude and number of waves per total fiber length, aims to improve biocompatibility by mimicking and matching the mechanical properties of vaginal soft tissue, which is not provided by current polypropylene nondegradable meshes. The auxetic design of the meshes can supply dimensionally stable pores under tensile load, which is a limitation of the current meshes. The mechanical properties can be controlled with mesh deformations up to 100%, Young's modulus ranging from 50 to 400 N/mm
2
and a variable toe region. The printed meshes show an effective porosity of over 70% and are lightweight or ultra‐lightweight. By combining matching mechanical properties with good porosity and weight, 3D printed sinusoidal meshes, made of biodegradable Poly‐ε‐caprolactone, show promising results to improve surgical meshes for use in pelvic organ prolapse repair.
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