Search results for " asymmetry"
showing 3 items of 263 documents
Biological adaptation in light of the Lewontin–Williams (a)symmetry
2022
Neo-Darwinism characterises biological adaptation as a one-sided process, in which organisms adapt to their environment but not vice versa. This asymmetric relationship – here called Williams’ asymmetry – is called into question by Niche Construction Theory, which emphasises that organisms and their environments often mutually affect each other. Here we clarify that Williams’ asymmetry is specifically concerned with (quasi-) directed modifications towards phenotypes that increase individual fitness. This directedness – which drives the adaptive fit between organism and environment – entails far more than the mere presence of cause-effect relationships. We argue that difficulties with invoki…
Nuclear Dependence of the Transverse-Single-Spin Asymmetry for Forward Neutron Production in Polarized p+A Collisions at √sNN = 200 GeV
2018
During 2015, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) provided collisions of transversely polarized protons with Au and Al nuclei for the first time, enabling the exploration of transverse-single-spin asymmetries with heavy nuclei. Large single-spin asymmetries in very forward neutron production have been previously observed in transversely polarized p + p collisions at RHIC, and the existing theoretical framework that was successful in describing the single-spin asymmetry in p + p collisions predicts only a moderate atomic-mass-number ( A ) dependence. In contrast, the asymmetries observed at RHIC in p + A collisions showed a surprisingly strong A dependence in inclusive forward neutron …
Measurement of parity-violating spin asymmetries in W± production at midrapidity in longitudinally polarized p+p collisions
2016
We present midrapidity measurements from the PHENIX experiment of large parity-violating singlespin asymmetries of high transverse momentum electrons and positrons from W =Z decays, produced in longitudinally polarized p þ p collisions at center of mass energies of ffiffi s p ¼ 500 and 510 GeV. These asymmetries allow direct access to the antiquark polarized parton distribution functions due to the parityviolating nature of the W-boson coupling to quarks and antiquarks. The results presented are based on data collected in 2011, 2012, and 2013 with an integrated luminosity of 240 pb−1, which exceeds previous PHENIX published results by a factor of more than 27. These high Q2 data probe the p…