B Physics at D0

The Fermilab Tevatron (p pbar), operating at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV, is a rich source of B hadrons. The large acceptance in terms of rapidity and transverse momentum of the charged particle tracking system and the muon system make the upgraded Run II D0 detector an excellent tool for B physics. In this article, we report on selected physics results based on the first 250 pb^-1 of Run II data. This includes results on the X(3872) state, semileptonic B decays, B hadron lifetimes, flavour oscillations, and the rare decay B_s -> mu^+ mu^-.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the 39th Rencontres de Moriond on Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories, La Thuile, Aosta Valley, Italy, 21-28 Mar 200

Frequency-Dependent Selection at Rough Expanding Fronts

Microbial colonies are experimental model systems for studying the colonization of new territory by biological species through range expansion. We study a generalization of the two-species Eden model, which incorporates local frequency-dependent selection, in order to analyze how social interactions between two species influence surface roughness of growing microbial colonies. The model includes several classical scenarios from game theory. We then concentrate on an expanding public goods game, where either cooperators or defectors take over the front depending on the system parameters. We analyze in detail the critical behavior of the nonequilibrium phase transition between global cooperation and defection and thereby identify a new universality class of phase transitions dealing with absorbing states. At the transition, the number of boundaries separating sectors decays with a novel power law in time and their superdiffusive motion crosses over from Eden scaling to a nearly ballistic regime. In parallel, the width of the front initially obeys Eden roughening and, at later times, passes over to selective roughening.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure

The Crescent Rising over Nusantara. Discourses of Re-Islamization in Malaysia and Indonesia

This paper argues that the remote-controlled network theories about al-Qaedsa and Co. need to be questioned in order to understand the possible rist and dangers behind a resurgent Islam in the Muslim regions of Southeast Asia, mainly Indonesia and Malaysia. While terrorism experts maintain there exists an international threat that originates in the highlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the present paper holds the local governments responsible. Arguably they have driven Islam more and more towards radicalized discourses by being too restrictive towards diverging political opinions. Instead, as is shown in the case of Malaysia, there is a long tradition of political suppression from the British colonial era to Mahathir and Badawi that has resulted in a gradual radicalization of Islam. 1957-2007 mark 50 years of transformation-of-the-state-processes in which liberal Islam has often clashed with imaginations of a conservative sharia state. The outcome threatens the fabric of a hitherto liberal multi-ethnic, multi-cultural approach in Southeast Asia, all the more since Indonesia also started to pursue a conservative re-Islamization at a breathtaking pace

Decoding of Non-Binary LDPC Codes Using the Information Bottleneck Method

Recently, a novel lookup table based decoding method for binary low-density parity-check codes has attracted considerable attention. In this approach, mutual-information maximizing lookup tables replace the conventional operations of the variable nodes and the check nodes in message passing decoding. Moreover, the exchanged messages are represented by integers with very small bit width. A machine learning framework termed the information bottleneck method is used to design the corresponding lookup tables. In this paper, we extend this decoding principle from binary to non-binary codes. This is not a straightforward extension, but requires a more sophisticated lookup table design to cope with the arithmetic in higher order Galois fields. Provided bit error rate simulations show that our proposed scheme outperforms the log-max decoding algorithm and operates close to sum-product decoding.Comment: This paper has been presented at IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC'19) in Shangha