Hadrophilic Z':a bridge from LEP1, SLC and CDF to LEP2 anomalies

In order to explain possible departures from the Standard Model predictions for $b\bar b$ and $c\bar c$ production at $Z$ peak, we propose the existence of a $Z'$ vector boson with enhanced couplings to quarks. We first show that this proposal is perfectly consistent with the full set of LEP1/SLC results. In particular, $Z-Z'$ mixing effects naturally explain the fact that $\Gamma_b$ and $\Gamma_c$ deviate from the SM in opposite directions. We then show that there is a predicted range for enhanced $Z'q\bar q$ couplings which explains, for a precise and interesting range of $Z'$ masses, the excess of dijet events seen at CDF. A $Z'$ with such couplings and mass would produce clean observable effects in $b\bar b$ and in total hadronic production at LEP2.Comment: 24 pages , 5 Postscript figures, Acknowledgement

TOP-INDUCED ELECTROWEAK BREAKING IN THE MINIMAL SUPERSYMMETRIC STANDARD MODEL

Severe constraints on parameters of the minimal supersymmetric standard model follow from a dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism dominated by top and stop loops. In particular, the lightest Higgs boson mass is expected to be smaller than 100 GeV.Comment: 10 pages, Latex, 6 Postcript Figure

HERA prospects on Compositeness and New Vector Bosons

The absence of deviations from the Standard Model for the differential cross section ${d\sigma}/{dQ^2}$ at HERA is used to set limits on electron quark compositeness scale and on new vector bosons, especially the hadrophilic one recently introduced as a possible explanation for LEP/SLC and CDF anomalies.Comment: Latex file, 7 pages and 1 ps fig, few comments on others experiments are added, results are unchanged. To appear in Phys. Let.

Modeling of premixing-prevaporizing fuel-air mixing passages

The development of a computer program for the analytical prediction of the distribution of liquid and vapor fuel in the premixing-prevaporizing passage by the direct injection method is described. The technical approach adopted for this program is to separate the problem into three parts each with its own computer code. These three parts are: calculation of the two-dimensional or axisymmetric air flow; calculation of the three-dimensional fuel droplet evaporation; and calculation of the fuel vapor diffusion. This method of approach is justified because premixing passages operate at lean equivalence ratios. Hence, a weak interaction assumption can be made wherein the airflow can affect the fuel droplet behavior but the fuel droplet behavior does not affect the airflow

Detecting time-fragmented cache attacks against AES using Performance Monitoring Counters

Cache timing attacks use shared caches in multi-core processors as side channels to extract information from victim processes. These attacks are particularly dangerous in cloud infrastructures, in which the deployed countermeasures cause collateral effects in terms of performance loss and increase in energy consumption. We propose to monitor the victim process using an independent monitoring (detector) process, that continuously measures selected Performance Monitoring Counters (PMC) to detect the presence of an attack. Ad-hoc countermeasures can be applied only when such a risky situation arises. In our case, the victim process is the AES encryption algorithm and the attack is performed by means of random encryption requests. We demonstrate that PMCs are a feasible tool to detect the attack and that sampling PMCs at high frequencies is worse than sampling at lower frequencies in terms of detection capabilities, particularly when the attack is fragmented in time to try to be hidden from detection

Analytical modeling of operating characteristics of premixing-prevaporizing fuel-air mixing passages. Volume 2: User's manual

A user's manual describing the operation of three computer codes (ADD code, PTRAK code, and VAPDIF code) is presented. The general features of the computer codes, the input/output formats, run streams, and sample input cases are described

PerfWeb: How to Violate Web Privacy with Hardware Performance Events

The browser history reveals highly sensitive information about users, such as financial status, health conditions, or political views. Private browsing modes and anonymity networks are consequently important tools to preserve the privacy not only of regular users but in particular of whistleblowers and dissidents. Yet, in this work we show how a malicious application can infer opened websites from Google Chrome in Incognito mode and from Tor Browser by exploiting hardware performance events (HPEs). In particular, we analyze the browsers' microarchitectural footprint with the help of advanced Machine Learning techniques: k-th Nearest Neighbors, Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines, and in contrast to previous literature also Convolutional Neural Networks. We profile 40 different websites, 30 of the top Alexa sites and 10 whistleblowing portals, on two machines featuring an Intel and an ARM processor. By monitoring retired instructions, cache accesses, and bus cycles for at most 5 seconds, we manage to classify the selected websites with a success rate of up to 86.3%. The results show that hardware performance events can clearly undermine the privacy of web users. We therefore propose mitigation strategies that impede our attacks and still allow legitimate use of HPEs

Improved version of the eikonal model for absorbing spherical particles

We present a new expression of the scattering amplitude, valid for spherical absorbing objects, which leads to an improved version of the eikonal method outside the diffraction region. Limitations of this method are discussed and numerical results are presented and compared successfully with the Mie theory.Comment: 7 pages, postscript figures available on cpt.univ-mrs.fr, to appear in J. Mod. Optic