2,018 research outputs found
Phenomenological study of the atypical heavy flavor production observed at the Fermilab Tevatron
We address known discrepancies between the heavy flavor properties of jets
produced at the Tevatron collider and the prediction of conventional-QCD
simulations. In this study, we entertain the possibility that these effects are
real and due to new physics. We show that all anomalies can be simultaneously
fitted by postulating the additional pair production of light bottom squarks
with a 100% semileptonic branching fraction.Comment: 30 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables. Submitted to Phys. Rev.
Comment on "Evolution of a Quasi-Stationary State"
Approximately forty years ago it was realized that the time development of
decaying systems might not be precisely exponential. Rolf Winter (Phys. Rev.
{\bf 123}, 1503 (1961)) analyzed the simplest nontrivial system - a particle
tunneling out of a well formed by a wall and a delta-function. He calculated
the probability current just outside the well and found irregular oscillations
on a short time scale followed by an exponential decrease followed by more
oscillations and finally by a decrease as a power of the time. We have
reanalyzed this system, concentrating on the survival probability of the
particle in the well rather than the probability current, and find a different
short time behavior.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, RevTex
Properties of and Mesons at Finite Temperature and Density as Inferred from Experiment
The mass shift, width broadening, and spectral density for the and
mesons in a heat bath of nucleons and pions are calculated using a
general formula which relates the self-energy to the real and imaginary parts
of the forward scattering amplitude. We use experimental data to saturate the
scattering amplitude at low energies with resonances and include a background
Pomeron term, while at high energies a Regge parameterization is used. The real
part obtained directly is compared with the result of a dispersion integral
over the imaginary part. The peaks of the spectral densities are little shifted
from their vacuum positions, but the widths are considerably increased due to
collisional broadening. Where possible we compare with the UrQMD model and find
quite good agreement. At normal nuclear matter density and a temperature of 150
MeV the spectral density of the meson has a width of 345 MeV, while that
for the is in the range 90--150 MeV.Comment: 21 pages revtex + 9 postscript figure
Association between severe drought and HIV prevention and care behaviors in Lesotho: A population-based survey 2016â2017
Background
A previous analysis of the impact of drought in Africa on HIV demonstrated an 11% greater prevalence in HIV-endemic rural areas attributable to local rainfall shocks. The Lesotho Population-Based HIV Impact Assessment (LePHIA) was conducted after the severe drought of 2014â2016, allowing for reevaluation of this relationship in a setting of expanded antiretroviral coverage.
Methods and findings
LePHIA selected a nationally representative sample between November 2016 and May 2017. All adults aged 15â59 years in randomly selected households were invited to complete an interview and HIV testing, with one woman per household eligible to answer questions on their experience of sexual violence. Deviations in rainfall for May 2014âJune 2016 were estimated using precipitation data from Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station Data (CHIRPS), with drought defined as <15% of the average rainfall from 1981 to 2016. The association between drought and risk behaviors as well as HIV-related outcomes was assessed using logistic regression, incorporating complex survey weights. Analyses were stratified by age, sex, and geography (urban versus rural). All of Lesotho suffered from reduced rainfall, with regions receiving 1%â36% of their historical rainfall. Of the 12,887 interviewed participants, 93.5% (12,052) lived in areas that experienced drought, with the majority in rural areas (7,281 versus 4,771 in urban areas). Of the 835 adults living in areas without drought, 520 were in rural areas and 315 in urban. Among females 15â19 years old, living in a rural drought area was associated with early sexual debut (odds ratio [OR] 3.11, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.43â6.74, p = 0.004), and higher HIV prevalence (OR 2.77, 95% CI 1.19â6.47, p = 0.02). It was also associated with lower educational attainment in rural females ages 15â24 years (OR 0.44, 95% CI 0.25â0.78, p = 0.005). Multivariable analysis adjusting for household wealth and sexual behavior showed that experiencing drought increased the odds of HIV infection among females 15â24 years old (adjusted OR [aOR] 1.80, 95% CI 0.96â3.39, p = 0.07), although this was not statistically significant. Migration was associated with 2-fold higher odds of HIV infection in young people (aOR 2.06, 95% CI 1.25â3.40, p = 0.006). The study was limited by the extensiveness of the drought and the small number of participants in the comparison group.
Conclusions
Drought in Lesotho was associated with higher HIV prevalence in girls 15â19 years old in rural areas and with lower educational attainment and riskier sexual behavior in rural females 15â24 years old. Policy-makers may consider adopting potential mechanisms to mitigate the impact of income shock from natural disasters on populations vulnerable to HIV transmission
Shadowing, Binding and Off-Shell Effects in Nuclear Deep Inelastic Scattering
We present a unified description of nuclear deep inelastic scattering (DIS)
over the whole region of the Bjorken variable. Our approach is based on
a relativistically covariant formalism which uses analytical properties of
quark correlators. In the laboratory frame it naturally incorporates two
mechanisms of DIS: (I) scattering from quarks and antiquarks in the target and
(II) production of quark-antiquark pairs followed by interactions with the
target. We first calculate structure functions of the free nucleon and develop
a model for the quark spectral functions. We show that mechanism (II) is
responsible for the sea quark content of the nucleon while mechanism (I)
governs the valence part of the nucleon structure functions. We find that the
coherent interaction of pairs with nucleons in the nucleus leads to
shadowing at small and discuss this effect in detail. In the large
region DIS takes place mainly on a single nucleon. There we focus on the
derivation of the convolution model. We point out that the off-shell properties
of the bound nucleon structure function give rise to sizable nuclear effects.Comment: 29 pages (and 10 figures available as hard copies from Authors),
REVTE
The HERA-B Ring Imaging Cherenkov Counter
The HERA-B RICH uses a radiation path length of 2.8 m in C_4F_10 gas and a
large 24 square meters spherical mirror for imaging Cherenkov rings. The photon
detector consists of 2240 Hamamatsu multi-anode photomultipliers with about
27000 channels. A 2:1 reducing two-lens telescope in front of each PMT
increases the sensitive area at the expense of increased pixel size, resulting
in a contribution to the resolution which roughly matches that of dispersion.
The counter was completed in January of 1999, and its performance has been
steady and reliable over the years it has been in operation. The design
performance of the RICH was fully reached: the average number of detected
photons in the RICH for a beta=1 particle was found to be 33 with a single hit
resolution of 0.7 mrad and 1 mrad in the fine and coarse granularity regions,
respectively.Comment: 29 pages, 23 figure
Optimization of R(e+e-) and "Freezing" of the QCD Couplant at Low Energies
The new result for the third-order QCD corrections to R_{e^+e^-}, unlike the
old, incorrect result, is nicely compatible with the
principle-of-minimal-sensitivity optimization method. Moreover, it leads to
infrared fixed-point behaviour: the optimized couplant, alpha_s/pi, for R(e+e-)
does not diverge at low energies, but "freezes" to a value 0.26 below about 300
MeV. This provides some direct theoretical evidence, purely from perturbation
theory, for the "freezing" of the couplant -- an idea that has long been a
popular and successful phenomenological hypothesis. We use the "smearing"
method of Poggio, Quinn, and Weinberg to compare the resulting theoretical
prediction for R(e+e-) with experimental data down to the lowest energies, and
find excellent agreement.Comment: 27 pages, LaTeX, 8 uuencoded figures, DE-FG05-92ER40717-
Search for narrow resonances below the Upsilon mesons
We have investigated the invariant mass spectrum of dimuons collected by the
CDF experiment during the 1992-1995 run of the Fermilab Tevatron collider to
improve the limit on the existence of narrow resonances set by the experiments
at the SPEAR e+e- collider. In the mass range 6.3-9.0 GeV/c^2, we derive 90%
upper credible limits to the ratio of the production cross section times muonic
branching fraction of possible narrow resonances to that of the Y(1S) meson. In
this mass range, the average limit varies from 1.7 to 0.5%. This limit is much
worse at the mass of 7.2 GeV/c^2 due to an excess of 250+-61 events with a
width consistent with the detector resolution.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures. This version has some typos fixed in the text
and bibliography. A reference was added in bibliography. Submitted to Phys.
Rev. D With this last submission we provide the version accepted for
publication in Phys.Rev.
Recommended from our members
Measurement of B(B-->X_s {\gamma}), the B-->X_s {\gamma} photon energy spectrum, and the direct CP asymmetry in B-->X_{s+d} {\gamma} decays
The photon spectrum in B --> X_s {\gamma} decay, where X_s is any strange
hadronic state, is studied using a data sample of (382.8\pm 4.2) \times 10^6
e^+ e^- --> \Upsilon(4S) --> BBbar events collected by the BABAR experiment at
the PEP-II collider. The spectrum is used to measure the branching fraction B(B
--> X_s \gamma) = (3.21 \pm 0.15 \pm 0.29 \pm 0.08)\times 10^{-4} and the
first, second, and third moments = 2.267 \pm 0.019 \pm 0.032 \pm
0.003 GeV,, )^2> = 0.0484 \pm 0.0053 \pm 0.0077 \pm
0.0005 GeV^2, and )^3> = -0.0048 \pm 0.0011 \pm 0.0011
\pm 0.0004 GeV^3, for the range E_\gamma > 1.8 GeV, where E_{\gamma} is the
photon energy in the B-meson rest frame. Results are also presented for
narrower E_{\gamma} ranges. In addition, the direct CP asymmetry A_{CP}(B -->
X_{s+d} \gamma) is measured to be 0.057 \pm 0.063. The spectrum itself is also
unfolded to the B-meson rest frame; that is the frame in which theoretical
predictions for its shape are made.Comment: 37 pages, 19 postscript figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. D. No
analysis or results have changed from previous version. Some changes to
improve clarity based on interactions with Phys. Rev. D referees, including
one new Figure (Fig. 13), and some minor wording/punctuation/spelling
mistakes fixe
Measurement of ISR-FSR interference in the processes e+ e- --> mu+ mu- gamma and e+ e- --> pi+ pi- gamma
Charge asymmetry in processes e+ e- --> mu+ mu- gamma and e+ e- --> pi+ pi-
gamma is measured using 232 fb-1 of data collected with the BABAR detector at
center-of-mass energies near 10.58 GeV. An observable is introduced and shown
to be very robust against detector asymmetries while keeping a large
sensitivity to the physical charge asymmetry that results from the interference
between initial and final state radiation. The asymmetry is determined as
afunction of the invariant mass of the final-state tracks from production
threshold to a few GeV/c2. It is compared to the expectation from QED for e+ e-
--> mu+ mu- gamma and from theoretical models for e+ e- --> pi+ pi- gamma. A
clear interference pattern is observed in e+ e- --> pi+ pi- gamma, particularly
in the vicinity of the f_2(1270) resonance. The inferred rate of lowest order
FSR production is consistent with the QED expectation for e+ e- --> mu+ mu-
gamma, and is negligibly small for e+ e- --> pi+ pi- gamma.Comment: 32 pages,29 figures, to be submitted to Phys. Rev.
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