How adopters’ and foster carers’ perceptions of ‘family’ affect communicative openness in post-adoption contact interactions

This article explores the constructions of communicative openness following adoption. Data from three waves of interviews with six adoptive mothers and four foster carers were collected, transcribed verbatim and analysed in keeping with a social constructivist grounded theory methodology. The results show that the way ‘family’ is constructed can both facilitate and impede communicative openness. Those who hold a fluid, child-centred concept of family, are willing to construct it as different and can accept the ebb and flow of family membership intuitively and view such openness as a natural part of caring for children. Those with a more traditional, nuclear construction of family may associate adoption with fear, a sense of biological related competition and the need to control the controllable, all of which act as barriers to communicative openness. The study demonstrates that communicative openness is person and context sensitive and emphasises the need to think creatively and flexibly about the very nature of family.

General freeze-in and freeze-out

We use the framework of relativistic and non-relativistic conformal field theories (CFT) to derive general results relevant for the production of weakly coupled and strongly coupled dark sectors through thermal interactions. Our result reproduce trivially known formulas for 2 → n processes and extend to general m → n processes as well as interacting dark sectors. As concrete examples we consider freeze-in of a relativistic CFT coupled to the SM with contact interactions and derive Sommerfeld enhancement of non-relativistic cross-sections from the theory of fermions at unitarity.

CORRELATION OF COVID-19 IN THE ONLINE PURCHASING PROCESS

The paper establishes the central point for researching factors that influence buying decisions in the online purchasing process. The benefits of e-commerce for both buyers and sellers place it as the default method of shopping in the near future. Through empirical research, e-commerce growth is being established as rapidly rising through recent years, which has been accelerated by specific factors introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Data shows that e-commerce is dependent on several different factors during normal circumstances, which also include the level of development of the country as one of the main precursors. The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced greatly the importance of these established factors for online purchasing, rendering many of them obsolete. The paper structures the research to outline the most relevant factors influencing online purchasing decisions pre-pandemic and during pandemic times, and to draw relevant conclusions and recommendations for future practical implementations of e-commerce models. Research shows that new factors need to be introduce in these types of abnormal times, as the nature of the pandemic made non-contact interactions the norm in the past year. By introducing the six stages of pandemic behavior, online retailers can better understand the factors influencing online purchasing process in pandemic times. Finally, specific recommendations can be made to improve the e-commerce acceptance both at industry and company levels.

New physics in rare B decays after Moriond 2021

The anomalies in rare B decays endure. We present results of an updated global analysis that takes into account the latest experimental input – in particular the recent results on $$R_K$$ R K and BR$$(B_s \rightarrow \mu ^+\mu ^-)$$ ( B s → μ + μ - ) – and that qualitatively improves the treatment of theory uncertainties. Fit results are presented for the Wilson coefficients of four-fermion contact interactions. We find that muon specific Wilson coefficients $$C_9 \simeq -0.73$$ C 9 ≃ - 0.73 or $$C_9 = -C_{10} \simeq -0.39$$ C 9 = - C 10 ≃ - 0.39 continue to give an excellent description of the data. If only theoretically clean observables are considered, muon specific $$C_{10} \simeq 0.60$$ C 10 ≃ 0.60 or $$C_9=-C_{10} \simeq -0.35$$ C 9 = - C 10 ≃ - 0.35 improve over the Standard Model by $$\sqrt{\Delta \chi ^2} \simeq 4.7\sigma $$ Δ χ 2 ≃ 4.7 σ and $$\sqrt{\Delta \chi ^2} \simeq 4.6\sigma $$ Δ χ 2 ≃ 4.6 σ , respectively. In various new physics scenarios we provide predictions for lepton flavor universality observables and CP asymmetries that can be tested with more data. We update our previous combination of ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb data on BR$$(B_s \rightarrow \mu ^+\mu ^-)$$ ( B s → μ + μ - ) and BR$$(B^0\rightarrow \mu ^+\mu ^-)$$ ( B 0 → μ + μ - ) taking into account the full two-dimensional non-Gaussian experimental likelihoods.

Investigation on the Robustness of Rotor/Stator Contact Interactions with Respect to Small Mistuning

In this work, the impact of small mistuning on rotor/stator contact interactions is investigated. First, a detailed study of a rotor/stator interaction between the first bending modes and the second engine order is presented in the tuned case. Then, a numerical investigation on the effect of mistuning on the studied rotor/stator contact interaction is carried out. In particular, a stochastic analysis is performed to evaluate the robustness of the interaction with respect to the mistuning level. Simulations are conducted using a reduced order model (ROM) of an industrial bladed disk that combines both physical degrees of freedom (along blades tip for contact treatment) and modal coordinates. Mistuning is introduced in the tuned ROM by means of a modified version of the component mode mistuning method that allows to keep physical degrees of freedom within the reduced basis. Nonlinear amplification factors, i.e. the amplification factors in the context of contact nonlinearities, are compared with their linear counterparts, the latter are computed using a linear forcing on each blade using a two nodal diameters traveling wave excitation on the mistuned and the tuned bladed disk. The comparison between the linear and nonlinear amplification factor for each sample highlights that no correlation exists between a mistuning pattern leading to high amplifications in a linear context or when contact nonlinearities are taken into account. Therefore, dedicated analyses on the effect of mistuning should be undertaken with contact nonlinearities considerations at the design stage especially if intentional mistuning is considered.

Contact interactions and top-philic scalar dark matter

We investigate the phenomenology of a scalar top-philic dark matter candidate when adding a dimension-five contact interaction term, as motivated by possible underlying extensions of the Standard Model such as composite Higgs models. We show that the presence of contact interactions can have a major impact on the dark matter relic density as well as on its direct and indirect detection prospects, while the collider phenomenology of the model is unaffected. This underlines the complementarity of collider and cosmological constraints on dark matter models.

Pair-correlation ansatz for the ground state of interacting bosons in an arbitrary one-dimensional potential

We derive and describe a very accurate variational scheme for the ground state of the system of a few ultra-cold bosons confined in one-dimensional traps of arbitrary shapes. It is based on assumption that all inter-particle correlations have two-body nature. By construction, the proposed ansatz is exact in the noninteracting limit, exactly encodes boundary conditions forced by contact interactions, and gives full control on accuracy in the limit of infinite repulsions. We show its efficiency in a whole range of intermediate interactions for different external potentials. Our results manifest that for generic non-parabolic potentials mutual correlations forced by interactions cannot be captured by distance-dependent functions.