Comments on claimed risk from metastable black holes

In a recent note, arXiv:0808.1415, it was argued that a hypothetical metastable black hole scenario could pose collider risk not excluded by our previous study. We comment on inconsistency of this proposed scenario.Comment: 3 pages; comment on arXiv:0808.141

Multi-Photon Amplitudes for Next-to-Leading Order QCD

We present the tree-level amplitudes involving one, two and three photons that are required for next-to-leading order QCD calculations of production rates of three final-state particles. We also present the required one-loop amplitudes in terms of previously published results.Comment: LaTeX, 22 page

Four Statements about the Fourth Generation

This summary of the Workshop "Beyond the 3-generation SM in the LHC era" presents a brief discussion of the following four statements about the fourth generation: 1) It is not excluded by EW precision data; 2) It addresses some of the currently open questions; 3) It can accommodate emerging possible hints of new physics; 4) LHC has the potential to discover or fully exclude it.Comment: Summary of the "Beyond the 3-generation SM in the LHC era" Workshop, CERN, September 4-5, 2008; 7 pages. V2: updated bibliography and minor typos fixed. To appear in PMC Physics

The heavy quark search at the LHC

We explore further the discovery potential for heavy quarks at the LHC, with emphasis on the $t'$ and $b'$ of a sequential fourth family associated with electroweak symmetry breaking. We consider QCD multijets, $t\bar{t}+\rm{jets}$, $W+\rm{jets}$ and single $t$ backgrounds using event generation based on improved matrix elements and low sensitivity to the modeling of initial state radiation. We exploit a jet mass technique for the identification of hadronically decaying $W$'s and $t$'s, to be used in the reconstruction of the $t'$ or $b'$ mass. This along with other aspects of event selection can reduce backgrounds to very manageable levels. It even allows a search for both $t'$ and $b'$ in the absence of $b$-tagging, of interest for the early running of the LHC. A heavy quark mass of order 600 GeV is motivated by the connection to electroweak symmetry breaking, but our analysis is relevant for any new heavy quarks with weak decay modes.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Statistics and UV-IR Mixing with Twisted Poincare Invariance

We elaborate on the role of quantum statistics in twisted Poincare invariant theories. It is shown that, in order to have twisted Poincare group as the symmetry of a quantum theory, statistics must be twisted. It is also confirmed that the removal of UV-IR mixing (in the absence of gauge fields) in such theories is a natural consequence.Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX; typos correcte

Cosmological lepton asymmetry with a nonzero mixing angle \theta_{13}

While the baryon asymmetry of the Universe is nowadays well measured by cosmological observations, the bounds on the lepton asymmetry in the form of neutrinos are still significantly weaker. We place limits on the relic neutrino asymmetries using some of the latest cosmological data, taking into account the effect of flavor oscillations. We present our results for two different values of the neutrino mixing angle \theta_{13}, and show that for large \theta_{13} the limits on the total neutrino asymmetry become more stringent, diluting even large initial flavor asymmetries. In particular, we find that the present bounds are still dominated by the limits coming from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, while the limits on the total neutrino mass from cosmological data are essentially independent of \theta_{13}. Finally, we perform a forecast for COrE, taken as an example of a future CMB experiment, and find that it could improve the limits on the total lepton asymmetry approximately by up to a factor 6.6.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables. v2: updated COrE specifications. v3: matches Phys. Rev. D accepted versio

Independent measurement of the top quark mass and the light- and bottom-jet energy scales at hadron colliders

A method for the simultaneous determination of the energy scales for b-quark jets and light jets, the jet energy resolution, and the top quark mass at hadron colliders is presented. The method exploits the unique kinematics of events with top-antitop pair production, where one of the top quarks involves a leptonic and one a hadronic W boson decay. The paper shows a feasibility study of how this simultaneous measurement can be performed at the upcoming LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Evolution and nucleosynthesis of primordial low mass stars

We discuss in detail the evolutionary properties of low mass stars M< 1 M(Solar) having metallicity lower than Z=10^(-6) from the pre- main sequence up to (almost) the end of the Asymptotic Giant Branch phase. We also discuss the possibility that the large [C,N/Fe] observed on the surface of the most Iron poor star presently known, HE0107-5240, may be attributed to the autopollution induced by the penetration of the He convective shell into the H rich mantle during the He core flash of a low mass, very low metallicity star. On the basis of a quite detailed analysis, we conclude that the autopollution scenario cannot be responsible for the observed chemical composition of HE0107-5240