Phenomenology of the Flavor-Asymmetry in the Light-Quark Sea of the Nucleon

A phenomenological ansatz for the flavor-asymmetry of the light sea distributions of the nucleon, based on the Pauli exclusion principle, is proposed. This ansatz is compatible with the measured flavor-asymmetry of the unpolarized sea distributions, $\bar{d}>\bar{u}$, of the nucleon. A prediction for the corresponding polarized flavor-asymmetry is presented and shown to agree with predictions of (chiral quark--soliton) models which successfully reproduced the flavor-asymmetry of the unpolarized sea.Comment: 5 pages, LaTeX, 2 figures, uses epsfi

Leading logarithm calculation of the e^+ e^- -> e^+ \nu_e \bar{u} d cross section

We analytically evaluate in the leading logarithm approximation the differential cross section for e^+ e^- -> e^+ \nu_e \bar{u} d. We compare our order \alpha^4 \alpha_s^0 leading-log result to the order \alpha^4 \alpha_s^0 exact result obtained from the GRC4F Monte Carlo program. Finally we use the Gluck, Reya, Schienbien distribution of partons in a virtual photon, which incorporates both evolution and nonperturbative strong interaction contributions, to obtain better estimates of the differential cross section.Comment: 10 pages including 9 figure

Longitudinally Polarized Photoproduction of Inclusive Hadrons Beyond the Leading Order

We present a complete next-to-leading order QCD calculation for single-inclusive large-pT hadron production in longitudinally polarized lepton-nucleon collisions, consistently including ``direct'' and ``resolved'' photon contributions. This process could be studied experimentally at a future polarized lepton-proton collider like eRHIC at BNL. We examine the sensitivity of such measurements to the so far completely unknown parton content of circularly polarized photons.Comment: 15 pages, 7 eps figure

Polarized Parton Distribution in Neutrino Induced Heavy Flavor Production

In order to examine polarized strange quark distribution, semi-inclusive D/\Dbar production in neutrino deep inelastic scattering is studied including ${\cal O}(\alpha_s)$ corrections. Cross section and spin asymmetry are calculated by using various parametrizations of polarized parton distribution functions. It is found that \Dbar production is promising to directly extract the polarized strange sea.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures. Talk given at the NuFact02 workshop, London, UK, July 1-6, 200

Impact of Neutron Decay Experiments on non-Standard Model Physics

This paper gives a brief overview of the present and expected future limits on physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) from neutron beta decay, which is described by two parameters only within the SM. Since more than two observables are accessible, the problem is over-determined. Thus, precise measurements of correlations in neutron decay can be used to study the SM as well to search for evidence of possible extensions to it. Of particular interest in this context are the search for right-handed currents or for scalar and tensor interactions. Precision measurements of neutron decay observables address important open questions of particle physics and cosmology, and are generally complementary to direct searches for new physics beyond the SM in high-energy physics. Free neutron decay is therefore a very active field, with a number of new measurements underway worldwide. We present the impact of recent developments.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures; Proceedings of the 5th International BEYOND 2010 Conference, Cape Town, South Africa (2010), World Scientific, accepted for publication; Corrected typo

Spin Asymmetries in Squark and Gluino Production at Polarized Hadron Colliders

We study the production cross sections for squarks and gluinos in collision of longitudinally polarized hadrons. The corresponding polarized partonic cross sections are computed in leading order supersymmetric QCD. The resulting asymmetries are evaluated for the polarized proton collider RHIC, as well as for hypothetical polarized options of the Tevatron and the LHC. These asymmetries turn out to be sizable over a wide range of supersymmetric particle masses, thus potentially opening a window to detailed sparticle spectroscopy at future polarized hadron colliders.Comment: 25 pages, LaTeX, typos correcte

Heavy Quark Initiated Contributions to Deep Inelastic Structure Functions

We present O(alpha_s^1) corrections to deep inelastic scattering amplitudes on massive quarks obtained within the scheme of Aivazis, Collins, Olness and Tung (ACOT). After identifying the correct subtraction term the convergence of these contributions towards the analogous coefficient functions for massless quarks, obtained within the modified minimal subtraction scheme (MSbar), is demonstrated. Furthermore, the quantitative relevance of the contributions to neutral current (NC) and charged current (CC) structure functions is investigated for several choices of the factorization scale.Comment: 29 pages, 6 figures; uses epsfig.sty, amssymb.sty, axodraw.sty; minor changes for publication in Phys. Rev.

Recent Longitudinal Spin Asymmetry Measurements for Inclusive Jet Production at STAR

We present measurements of the longitudinal spin asymmetry, $A_{LL}$, for the inclusive jet signal at STAR. The data presented here are mid-rapidity jets in the transverse momentum range of $5<pT<35$ GeV/c and come from polarized proton-proton collisions at center of mass energies of $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV. We compare our measured $A_{LL}$ values to predictions derived from various parameterizations of the polarized gluon distribution function. The results are shown to provide significant constraints for allowable gluon parameterizations within the measurement's kinematic Bjorken-x range of $0.03<x<0.3$.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figures, to appear in PANIC 2008 Proceedings, Nuclear Physics A special issu

Dynamical parton distributions of the nucleon and very small-x physics

Utilizing recent DIS measurements (F_{2,L}) and data on dilepton and high-E_{T} jet production we determine the dynamical parton distributions of the nucleon generated radiatively from valence-like positive input distributions at optimally chosen low resolution scales. These are compared with `standard' distributions generated from positive input distributions at some fixed and higher resolution scale. It is shown that up to the next to leading order NLO(\bar{MS}, DIS) of perturbative QCD considered in this paper, the uncertainties of the dynamical distributions are, as expected, smaller than those of their standard counterparts. This holds true in particular in the presently unexplored extremely small-x region relevant for evaluating ultrahigh energy cross sections in astrophysical applications. It is noted that our new dynamical distributions are compatible, within the presently determined uncertainties, with previously determined dynamical parton distributions.Comment: 21 pages, 2 tables, 16 figures, v2: added Ref.[60], replaced Fig.

The Lamb shift contribution of very light millicharged particles

The leading order vacuum polarization contribution of very light millicharged fermions and scalar (spin-0) particles with charge \epsilon e and mass \mu to the Lamb shift of the hydrogen atom is shown to imply universal, i.e. \mu-independent, upper bounds on \epsilon: \epsilon \lsim 10^{-4} for \mu \lsim 1 keV in the case of fermions, and for scalars this bound is increased by a factor of 2. This is in contrast to expectations based on the commonly used approximation to the Uehling potential relevant only for conventionally large fermion (and scalar) masses.Comment: 10 pages including 3 figures, version to appear in Physical Review D (Rapid Communications