Straits and seaways: controls, processes and implications in modern and ancient systems

Straits and seaways are connections between basins, key areas for exchange and transfer of water, heat, biota and sediments, and they can influence regional and global climate. A better understanding of strait/seaway dynamics, their evolution and preserved deposits is, therefore, fundamental to reconstructing the palaeoecology, palaeogeography and stratigraphy of interconnected basins. Straits and seaways are also important for understanding climate dynamics in Earth's past, and for safely exploiting energy resources (fossil and renewable). This volume aims at improving the knowledge on this topic, and at providing a comprehensive collection of state-of-the-art works bringing together complementary disciplines. Even though studies on modern and ancient straits and seaways exist, they are not necessarily conceived towards a better geological understanding of these features as depositional systems in their own right. In this introduction, we emphasize the geological importance of straits and seaways, summarizing the content and key findings of the contributions on this topic. The articles included in this volume explore four main research themes related to straits and seaways: (1) occurrence and classification; (2) morphological features, facies and stratigraphic variability, sedimentary processes and dynamics; (3) tectonic and climatic controls, their feedback with climate changes; and (4) palaeogeographical reconstructions and preservation of associated deposits

CP Violation and Family Mixing in the Effective Electroweak Lagrangian

We construct the most general effective Lagrangian of the matter sector of the Standard Model, including mixing and CP violating terms. The Lagrangian contains the effective operators that give the leading contribution in theories where the physics beyond the Standard Model shows at a scale $\Lambda >>M_{W}$. We perform the diagonalization and passage to the physical basis in full generality. We determine the contribution to the different observables and discuss the possible new sources of CP violation, the idea being to be able to gain some knowledge about new physics beyond the Standard Model from general considerations, without having to compute model by model. The values of the coefficients of the effective Lagrangian in some theories, including the Standard Model, are presented and we try to draw some general conclusions about the general pattern exhibited by physics beyond the Standard Model in what concerns CP violation. In the process we have had to deal with two theoretical problems which are very interesting in their own: the renormalization of the CKM matrix elements and the wave function renormalization in the on-shell scheme when mixing is present.Comment: A misplaced sentence was correcte

The renormalization of the effective Lagrangian with spontaneous symmetry breaking: the SU(2) case

We study the renormalization of the nonlinear effective SU(2) Lagrangian up to $O(p^4)$ with spontaneous symmetry breaking. The Stueckelberg transformation, the background field gauge, the Schwinger proper time and heat kernel method, and the covariant short distance expansion technology, guarantee the gauge covariance and incooperate the Ward indentities in our calculations. The renormalization group equations of the effective couplings are derived and analyzed. We find that the difference between the results gotten from the direct method and the renormalization group equation method can be quite large when the Higgs scalar is far below its decoupling limit.Comment: ReVTeX, 12 figures, 22 pages, some bugs are kicked off from programs, numerical analysis is renew

Exploring alternative symmetry breaking mechanisms at the LHC with 7, 8 and 10 TeV total energy

In view of the annnouncement that in 2012 the LHC will run at 8 TeV, we study the possibility of detecting signals of alternative mechanisms of ElectroWeak Symmetry Breaking, described phenomenologically by unitarized models, at energies lower than 14 TeV. A complete calculation with six fermions in the final state is performed using the PHANTOM event generator. Our results indicate that at 8 TeV some of the scenarios with TeV scale resonances are likely to be identified while models with no resonances or with very heavy ones will be inaccessible, unless the available luminosity will be much higher than expected

Effective Theory of a Dynamically Broken Electroweak Standard Model at NLO

We consider the Standard Model as an effective theory at the weak scale $v$ of a generic new strong interaction that dynamically breaks electroweak symmetry at the energy scale $\Lambda\sim$ (few) TeV. Assuming only the minimal field content with the Standard Model fermions and gauge bosons, but without a light Higgs particle, we construct the complete Lagrangian through next-to-leading order, that is, including terms of order $v^2/\Lambda^2$. The systematics behind this expansion is clarified. Although similar to chiral perturbation theory, it is not governed by the dimension of operators alone, but depends in an essential way on the loop expansion. Power-counting formulas are derived that indicate the classes of operators required at the next-to-leading order. The complete set of operators at leading and next-to-leading order is then listed, based on the restrictions implied by the Standard-Model gauge symmetries. We recover the well-known operators discussed in the literature in connection with the electroweak chiral Lagrangian and in similar contexts, but we collect a complete and systematic list of all terms through order $v^2/\Lambda^2$. This includes some operators not discussed in explicit terms before. We also show that a few of the previously considered operators can be eliminated via the equations of motion. As another important result we confirm the known list of dimension-6 operators in the Standard Model with an elementary Higgs doublet, essentially as a special case of our scenario.Comment: 35 pages, 1 figure; references adde

The MEV project: design and testing of a new high-resolution telescope for Muography of Etna Volcano

The MEV project aims at developing a muon telescope expressly designed for the muography of Etna Volcano. In particular, one of the active craters in the summit area of the volcano would be a suitable target for this experiment. A muon tracking telescope with high imaging resolution was built and tested during 2017. The telescope is a tracker based on extruded scintillating bars with WLS fibres and featuring an innovative read-out architecture. It is composed of three XY planes with a sensitive area of \SI{1}{m^2}; the angular resolution does not exceeds \SI{0.4}{\milli\steradian} and the total angular aperture is about $\pm$\SI{45}{\degree}. A special effort concerned the design of mechanics and electronics in order to meet the requirements of a detector capable to work in a hostile environment such as the top of a tall volcano, at a far distance from any facility. The test phase started in January 2017 and ended successfully at the end of July 2017. An extinct volcanic crater (the Monti Rossi, in the village of Nicolosi, about 15km from Catania) is the target of the measurement. The detector acquired data for about 120 days and the preliminary results are reported in this work

Evidence for Bosonic Electroweak Corrections in the Standard Model

We present strong indirect evidence for the contribution of bosonic electroweak corrections in the Standard Model. Although important conceptually, these corrections give subleading contributions in current high energy experiments, and it was previously thought that they are difficult to detect. We also discuss the separate contribution of the Higgs boson.Comment: 9 pages (LaTeX + 3 PS figures, needs psfig

Bosonic Quartic Couplings at LHC

We analyze the potential of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to study anomalous quartic vector-boson interactions Z Z gamma gamma, Z Z Z gamma, W+ W- gamma gamma, and W+ W- Z gamma through the weak boson fusion processes q q -> q q gamma gamma and q q -> q q gamma Z(-> l+ l-) with l = electron or muon. After a careful study of the backgrounds and how to extract them from the data, we show that the process p p -> j j gamma l+ l- is potentially the most sensitive to deviations from the Standard Model, improving the sensitivity to anomalous couplings by up to a factor 10^4 (10^2) with respect to the present direct (indirect) limits.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, revised versio

Cytokine Storm in COVID-19: Immunopathogenesis and Therapy

A cytokine storm is a hyperinflammatory state secondary to the excessive production of cytokines by a deregulated immune system. It manifests clinically as an influenza-like syndrome, which can be complicated by multi-organ failure and coagulopathy, leading, in the most severe cases, even to death. The term cytokine storm was first used in 1993 to describe the graft-versus-host disease following allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. It was then reused to define the adverse syndromes secondary to the administration of immunostimulating agents, such as anti-CD28 antibodies or bioengineered immune cells, i.e., CAR T-cell therapy. Currently, the concept of cytokine storm has been better elucidated and extended to the pathogenesis of many other conditions, such as sepsis, autoinflammatory disease, primary and secondary hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, and multicentric Castleman disease. Moreover, cytokine storm has recently emerged as a key aspect in the novel Coronavirus disease 2019, as affected patients show high levels of several key pro-inflammatory cytokines, such as IL-1, IL-2, IL-6, TNF-α, IFN-γ, IP-10, GM-CSF, MCP-1, and IL-10, some of which also correlate with disease severity. Therefore, since the onset of the pandemic, numerous agents have been tested in the effort to mitigate the cytokine storm in COVID-19 patients, some of which are effective in reducing mortality, especially in critically ill patients, and are now becoming standards of care, such as glucocorticoids or some cytokine inhibitors. However, the challenge is still far from being met, and other therapeutic strategies are being tested in the hope that we can eventually overcome the disease