Using data from Rapid Gender Assessment Surveys investigating the socioeconomic consequences of COVID-19 on women's and men's lives, this study assesses whether the pandemic threatens fragile gains ...on gender equality in paid and unpaid work. Evidence from eleven countries in Asia-Pacific indicates that the impact of the pandemic goes far beyond health consequences. With children out of school, intensified care needs of elderly and ill family members, and labor markets in turmoil, demands for unpaid domestic and care work have increased substantially. Results show that women are disproportionately shouldering the burden of unpaid care and domestic work triggered by the lockdowns, and they are losing their livelihoods faster than men. Worsening mental health also emerges as a critical area affecting women disproportionately. These findings inform emergency responses for a gender-sensitive recovery, and underscore the need to take radical, positive actions to redress long-standing inequalities in multiple areas of women's lives.
HIGHLIGHTS
UN Women's Rapid Gender Assessments (RGAs) gave early insights into COVID-19 impacts.
Asia-Pacific RGAs show that the crisis had dramatic socioeconomic impacts on women.
Women are more likely to experience loss in paid work hours than men.
Women and men are doing more unpaid domestic and care work, but women take on the larger share.
The emotional and mental health impact of the pandemic is disproportionately falling on women.
More gender-responsive surveys and quality administrative sources are needed.
Many Polyakov loop models can be written in a dual formulation which is free of sign problem even when a non-vanishing baryon chemical potential is introduced in the action. Here, results of ...numerical simulations of a dual representation of one such effective Polyakov loop model at finite baryon density are presented. We compute various local observables such as energy density, baryon density, quark condensate and describe in details the phase diagram of the model. The regions of the first order phase transition and the crossover, as well as the line of the second order phase transition, are established. We also compute several correlation functions of the Polyakov loops.
We report on the results of measuring the chromoelectric fields in a flux tube created by a static quark-antiquark pair in finite-temperature SU(3) gauge theory. Below the deconfinement temperature ...the field behavior is similar to the zero-temperature case. Above the deconfinement temperature the field shape remains the same, but the field values drop when the distance between the quark and antiquark increases, thus showing the disappearance of the confining potential.
A characteristic signature of quark confinement is the concentration of the chromoelectric field between a static quark–antiquark pair in a flux tube. However, the structure of this flux tube, and ...hence of the confining force, has not been completely understood. Here we perform new lattice measurements of field distributions on smeared Monte Carlo ensembles in SU(3) gauge theory. On the basis of these simulations we demonstrate that the confining force can be understood using the analogy with the basic principles of electromagnetism as elucidated by Maxwell. We derive a chromomagnetic Lorentz force density coupling the chromoelectric field to chromomagnetic currents and integrate this force density over the flux tube interior to obtain a Maxwell-like force that squeezes the flux tube in the transverse direction. We show that the strength of this transverse confining force is equal to the value of the string tension calculated numerically from the chromoelectric field on the midplane between the quarks, verifying the consistency of these two complementary pictures of confinement.
Abstract
We present the results of an all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves in the public LIGO O3 data. The search covers signal frequencies 20.0 Hz ≤
f
≤ 800.0 Hz and a spin-down range ...down to −2.6 × 10
−9
Hz s
−1
, motivated by detectability studies on synthetic populations of Galactic neutron stars. This search is the most sensitive all-sky search to date in this frequency/spin-down region. The initial search was performed using the first half of the public LIGO O3 data (O3a), utilizing graphical processing units provided in equal parts by the volunteers of the Einstein@Home computing project and by the ATLAS cluster. After a hierarchical follow-up in seven stages, 12 candidates remain. Six are discarded at the eighth stage, by using the remaining O3 LIGO data (O3b). The surviving six can be ascribed to continuous-wave fake signals present in the LIGO data for validation purposes. We recover these fake signals with very high accuracy with our last stage search, which coherently combines all O3 data. Based on our results, we set upper limits on the gravitational-wave amplitude
h
0
and translate these into upper limits on the neutron star ellipticity and on the
r
-mode amplitude. The most stringent upper limits are at 203 Hz, with
h
0
= 8.1 × 10
−26
at the 90% confidence level. Our results exclude isolated neutron stars rotating faster than 5 ms with ellipticities greater than
5
×
10
−
8
d
100
pc
within a distance
d
from Earth and
r
-mode amplitudes
α
≥
10
−
5
d
100
pc
for neutron stars spinning faster than 150 Hz.
We present our predictions for the inclusive production of two heavy quark–antiquark pairs, separated by a large rapidity interval, in the collision of (quasi-)real photons at the energies of LEP2 ...and of some future electron–positron colliders. We include in our calculation the full resummation of leading logarithms in the center-of-mass energy and a partial resummation of the next-to-leading logarithms, within the Balitsky–Fadin–Kuraev–Lipatov (BFKL) approach.
Detection of SARS-CoV-2 in sewage has been employed by several researchers as an alternative early warning indicator of virus spreading in communities, covering both symptomatic and asymptomatic ...cases. A factor that can seriously mislead the quantitative measurement of viral copies in sewage is the adsorption of virus fragments onto the highly porous solids suspended in wastewater, making them inaccessible. This depends not only on the available amount of suspended solids, but also on the amount of other dissolved chemicals which may influence the capacity of adsorption. On this account, the present work develops a mathematical framework, at various degrees of spatial complexity, of a physicochemical model that rationalizes the quantitative measurements of total virus fragments in sewage as regards the adsorption of virus onto suspended solids and the effect of dissolved chemicals on it. The city of Thessaloniki in Greece is employed as a convenient case study to determine the values of model variables. The present data indicate the ratio of the specific absorption (UV254/DOC) over the dissolved oxygen (DO) as the parameter with the highest correlation with viral copies. This implies a strong effect on viral inaccessibility in sewage caused (i) by the presence of humic-like substances and (ii) by virus decay due to oxidation and metabolic activity of bacteria. The present results suggest days where many fold corrections in the measurement of viral copies should be applied. As a result, although the detected RNA load in June 2020 is similar to that in April 2020, virus shedding in the city is about 5 times lower in June than in April, in line with the very low SARS-CoV-2 incidence and hospital admissions for COVID-19 in Thessaloniki in June.
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•Towards a modeling tool for reliable sewage epidemiology•Effect of sewage chemical and biological quality on quantitation of SARS-CoV-2•Rationalization of viral copies number (VCN) by accounting adsorption on solids•VCN is affected by flow rate, suspended solids, and type/amount of organic matter•Estimated low virus shedding rate agrees with calm clinical conditions in the city
We perform a sub-threshold follow-up search for continuous nearly monochromatic gravitational waves from the central compact objects associated with the supernova remnants (SNRs) Vela Jr., Cassiopeia ...A, and SNR G347.3−0.5. Across the three targets, we investigate the most promising 10,000 combinations of gravitational-wave frequency and frequency derivative values, based on the results from an Einstein@Home search of the LIGO O1 observing run data, dedicated to these objects. The selection threshold is set so that a signal could be confirmed using the newly released O2 run LIGO data. In order to achieve best sensitivity we perform two separate follow-up searches, on two distinct stretches of the O2 data. Only one candidate survives the first O2 follow-up investigation, associated with the central compact object in SNR G347.3−0.5, but it is not conclusively confirmed. In order to assess a possible astrophysical origin we use archival X-ray observations and search for amplitude modulations of a pulsed signal at the putative rotation frequency of the neutron star and its harmonics. This is the first extensive electromagnetic follow-up of a continuous gravitational-wave candidate performed to date. No significant associated signal is identified. New X-ray observations contemporaneous with the LIGO O3 run will enable a more sensitive search for an electromagnetic counterpart. A focused gravitational-wave search in O3 data based on the parameters provided here should be easily able to shed light on the nature of this outlier. Noise investigations on the LIGO instruments could also reveal the presence of a coherent contamination.
The production of forward jets separated by a large rapidity gap at LHC, the so-called Mueller–Navelet jets, is a fundamental testfield for perturbative QCD in the high-energy limit. Several analyses ...have already provided us with evidence about the compatibility of theoretical predictions, based on collinear factorization and BFKL resummation of energy logarithms in the next-to-leading approximation, with the CMS experimental data at 7 TeV of center-of-mass energy. However, the question if the same data can be described also by fixed-order perturbative approaches has not yet been fully answered. In this paper we provide numerical evidence that the mere use of partially asymmetric cuts in the transverse momenta of the detected jets allows for a clear separation between BFKL-resummed and fixed-order predictions in some observables related with the Mueller–Navelet jet production process.
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