We provide the results from a spectral analysis of nuclear decay data displaying annually varying periodic fluctuations. The analyzed data were obtained from three distinct data sets: 32 Si and 36 Cl decays reported by an experiment performed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), 56 Mn decay reported by the Children's Nutrition Research Center (CNRC), but also performed at BNL, and 226 Ra decay reported by an experiment performed at the Physikalisch-Technische-Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Germany. All three data sets exhibit the same primary frequency mode consisting of an annual period. Additional spectral comparisons of the data to local ambient temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, Earth-Sun distance, and their reciprocals were performed. No common phases were found between the factors investigated and those exhibited by the nuclear decay data. This suggests that either a combination of factors was responsible, or that, if it was a single factor, its effects on the decay rate experiments are not a direct synchronous modulation. We conclude that the annual periodicity in these data sets is a real effect, but that further study involving additional carefully controlled experiments will be needed to establish its origin.

An adiabatic approximation is used to derive the binding potential between two heavy-light mesons in quenched SU(2)-colour lattice QCD. Analysis of the meson-meson system shows that the potential is attractive at short-and medium-range. The numerical data is consistent with the Yukawa model of pion exchange.

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We present the results from a series of lattice simulations of the charmonium system using a highly improved NRQCD action, both in the quenched approximation and with n f ϭ2 light dynamical quarks. The spectra show some evidence for quenching effects of roughly 10% in the S and P hyperfine spin splittingsprobably too small to account for the severe underestimates in these quantities seen in previous quenched charmonium simulations. We also find estimates for the magnitude of other systematic effects-in particular, the choice of the tadpole factor can alter spin splittings at the 10-20 % level, and O(␣ s ) radiative corrections may be as large as 40% for charmonium. We conclude that quenching is just one of a collection of important effects that require attention in precision heavy-quark simulations.

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