Heavy quarkonium: progress, puzzles, and opportunities

A golden age for heavy quarkonium physics dawned a decade ago, initiated by the confluence of exciting advances in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and an explosion of related experimental activity. The early years of this period were chronicled in the Quarkonium Working Group (QWG) CERN Yellow Report (YR) in 2004, which presented a comprehensive review of the status of the field at that time and provided specific recommendations for further progress. However, the broad spectrum of subsequent breakthroughs, surprises, and continuing puzzles could only be partially anticipated. Since the release of the YR, the BESII program concluded only to give birth to BESIII; the $B$-factories and CLEO-c flourished; quarkonium production and polarization measurements at HERA and the Tevatron matured; and heavy-ion collisions at RHIC have opened a window on the deconfinement regime. All these experiments leave legacies of quality, precision, and unsolved mysteries for quarkonium physics, and therefore beg for continuing investigations. The plethora of newly-found quarkonium-like states unleashed a flood of theoretical investigations into new forms of matter such as quark-gluon hybrids, mesonic molecules, and tetraquarks. Measurements of the spectroscopy, decays, production, and in-medium behavior of c\bar{c}, b\bar{b}, and b\bar{c} bound states have been shown to validate some theoretical approaches to QCD and highlight lack of quantitative success for others. The intriguing details of quarkonium suppression in heavy-ion collisions that have emerged from RHIC have elevated the importance of separating hot- and cold-nuclear-matter effects in quark-gluon plasma studies. This review systematically addresses all these matters and concludes by prioritizing directions for ongoing and future efforts.Comment: 182 pages, 112 figures. Editors: N. Brambilla, S. Eidelman, B. K. Heltsley, R. Vogt. Section Coordinators: G. T. Bodwin, E. Eichten, A. D. Frawley, A. B. Meyer, R. E. Mitchell, V. Papadimitriou, P. Petreczky, A. A. Petrov, P. Robbe, A. Vair

Distribution of bacterial and archaeal ether lipids in soils and surface sediments of Tibetan lakes: Implications for GDGT-based proxies in saline high mountain lakes

Bacterial and archaeal lipids, such as glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (GDGTs) and dialkyl glycerol diethers, are increasingly used as proxies for specific environmental parameters, such as air temperature and soil pH in lacustrine environments. Little is known, however, about the distribution and applicability of bacterial and archaeal lipids on the Tibetan Plateau. We investigated nine different watersheds across the plateau by way of sediments from lakes and rivers, as well as the surrounding soils. Our transect study included a salinity gradient and focused on saline lakes, which are rarely examined. We analyzed archaeal isoprenoid (i) and bacterial branched (b) GDGTs, as well as archaeol to trace their sources and environmental factors, influencing their distributions. We could show that iGDGTs were produced in situ and bGDGTs were primarily soil-derived although we could not exclude in situ production of bGDGTs in the lakes. The most important environmental variables correlating with GDGT distributions were temperature and salinity. Bacterial GDGT distributions correlated mainly with salinity, while archaeal lipid distributions correlated with temperature. Based on the correlation of methylation (MBT) and cyclisation (CBT) indices of bGDGTs with pH and mean annual air temperature (MAAT), we established local calibrations for the Tibetan lakes. TEX86 could also be applied to reconstruct temperature, which was strongly biased towards measured summer lake water temperature, indicating enhanced production of iGDGTs in the summer months. Existing proxies show, therefore, potential for palaeoclimate reconstruction on the Tibetan Plateau if local calibrations are applied