Effective Field Theory for Nuclear Physics

I summarize the motivation for the effective field theory approach to nuclear physics, and highlight some of its recent accomplishments. The results are compared with those computed in potential models.Comment: Talk delivered at Baryons '98, Bonn, Sept. 22, 1998. 15 pages, 9 figure

Dark Matter Generation and Split Supersymmetry

We analyze a simple Split Supersymmetry scenario where fermion masses come from anomaly mediation, yielding m_s ~ 1000 TeV, m_{3/2} ~ 100 TeV, and m_f ~ 1 TeV. We consider non-thermal dark matter production in the presence of moduli, and we find that the decay chains of moduli to LSPs and moduli to gravitinos to LSPs generate dark matter more efficiently than perturbative freeze-out, allowing for a light, LHC visible spectrum. These decaying moduli can also weaken cosmological constraints on the axion decay constant. With squark masses of order 1000 TeV, LHC gluinos will decay millimeters from their primary vertices, resulting in a striking experimental signature, and the suppression of Flavor Changing Neutral Currents is almost sufficient to allow arbitrary mixing in squark mass matrices.Comment: V1: 14 p, 1 fig; V2: 19 p, 1 fig, significant additions, references added V3: Matching JHE

Teaching Stats for Data Science

“Data science” is a useful catchword for methods and concepts original to the field of statistics, but typically being applied to large, multivariate, observational records. Such datasets call for techniques not often part of an introduction to statistics: modeling, consideration of covariates, sophisticated visualization, and causal reasoning. This article re-imagines introductory statistics as an introduction to data science and proposes a sequence of 10 blocks that together compose a suitable course for extracting information from contemporary data. Recent extensions to the mosaic packages for R together with tools from the “tidyverse” provide a concise and readable notation for wrangling, visualization, model-building, and model interpretation: the fundamental computational tasks of data science

Weight enumerators of Reed-Muller codes from cubic curves and their duals

Let $\mathbb{F}_q$ be a finite field of characteristic not equal to $2$ or $3$. We compute the weight enumerators of some projective and affine Reed-Muller codes of order $3$ over $\mathbb{F}_q$. These weight enumerators answer enumerative questions about plane cubic curves. We apply the MacWilliams theorem to give formulas for coefficients of the weight enumerator of the duals of these codes. We see how traces of Hecke operators acting on spaces of cusp forms for $\operatorname{SL}_2(\mathbb{Z})$ play a role in these formulas.Comment: 19 pages. To appear in "Arithmetic, Geometry, Cryptography, and Coding Theory" (Y. Aubry, E. W. Howe, C. Ritzenthaler, eds.), Contemp. Math., 201