Radiocarbon Dating Caribou Antler and Bone : Are They Different?

Old archaeological radiocarbon dating lore has it that caribou antler and bone give different dating results, and that for some fundamental reason antler is unreliable as a dating material. We tested this idea by measuring radiocarbon concentrations in the bone and antler of two caribou (one recent, one ancient) for which the antler was still attached to the cranium. No significant differences were found. Thus, it seems that this old myth is groundless.Selon de vieux dires, la radiodatation archéologique des bois et des os du renne donnerait des résultats différents et, pour une raison fondamentale, les bois ne représenteraient pas un matériau fiable pour la radiodatation. On a testé cette idée en mesurant les concentrations de radiocarbone dans les os et les bois de deux rennes (l'un mort récemment, l'autre il y a longtemps), où les bois étaient encore rattachés au crâne. On n'a pas trouvé de différence notable, ce qui semblerait signifier que l'ancien mythe est sans fondement

PUREX new substation ATR

This document is the acceptance test report (ATR) for the New PUREX Main and Minisubstations. It covers the factory and vendor acceptance and commissioning test reports. Reports are presented for the Main 5 kV substation building, the building fire system, switchgear, and vacuum breaker; the minisubstation control building and switch gear; commissioning test; electrical system and loads inspection; electrical utilities transformer and cable; and relay setting changes based on operational experience

Brane World Susy Breaking from String/M Theory

String and M-theory realizations of brane world supersymmetry breaking scenarios are considered in which visible sector Standard Model fields are confined on a brane, with hidden sector supersymmetry breaking isolated on a distant brane. In calculable examples with an internal manifold of any volume the Kahler potential generically contains brane--brane non-derivative contact interactions coupling the visible and hidden sectors and is not of the no-scale sequestered form. This leads to non-universal scalar masses and without additional assumptions about flavor symmetries may in general induce dangerous sflavor violation even though the Standard Model and supersymmetry branes are physically separated. Deviations from the sequestered form are dictated by bulk supersymmetry and can in most cases be understood as arising from exchange of bulk supergravity fields between branes or warping of the internal geometry. Unacceptable visible sector tree-level tachyons arise in many models but may be avoided in certain classes of compactifications. Anomaly mediated and gaugino mediated contributions to scalar masses are sub-dominant except in special circumstances such as a flat or AdS pure five--dimensional bulk geometry without bulk vector multiplets.Comment: Latex, 83 pages, references adde

A Composite Little Higgs Model

We describe a natural UV complete theory with a composite little Higgs. Below a TeV we have the minimal Standard Model with a light Higgs, and an extra neutral scalar. At the TeV scale there are additional scalars, gauge bosons, and vector-like charge 2/3 quarks, whose couplings to the Higgs greatly reduce the UV sensitivity of the Higgs potential. Stabilization of the Higgs mass squared parameter, without finetuning, occurs due to a softly broken shift symmetry--the Higgs is a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson. Above the 10 TeV scale the theory has new strongly coupled interactions. A perturbatively renormalizable UV completion, with softly broken supersymmetry at 10 TeV is explicitly worked out. Our theory contains new particles which are odd under an exact "dark matter parity", (-1)^{(2S+3B+L)}. We argue that such a parity is likely to be a feature of many theories of new TeV scale physics. The lightest parity odd particle, or "LPOP", is most likely a neutral fermion, and may make a good dark matter candidate, with similar experimental signatures to the neutralino of the MSSM. We give a general effective field theory analysis of the calculation of corrections to precision electroweak observables.Comment: 28 page

Can multi-TeV (top and other) squarks be natural in gauge mediation?

We investigate whether multi-TeV (1-3 TeV) squarks can be natural in models of gauge mediated SUSY breaking. The idea is that for some boundary condition of the scalar (Higgs and stop) masses, the Higgs (mass)$^2$, evaluated at the renormalization scale $\sim O(100)$ GeV, is not very sensitive to (boundary values of) the scalar masses (this has been called ``focussing'' in recent literature). Then, the stop masses can be multi-TeV without leading to fine-tuning in electroweak symmetry breaking. {\em Minimal} gauge mediation does {\em not} lead to this focussing (for all values of $\tan \beta$ and the messenger scale): the (boundary value of) the Higgs mass is too small compared to the stop masses. Also, in minimal gauge mediation, the gaugino masses are of the same order as the scalar masses so that multi-TeV scalars implies multi-TeV gauginos (especially gluino) leading to fine-tuning. We discuss ideas to {\em increase} the Higgs mass relative to the stop masses (so that focussing can be achieved) and also to {\em suppress} gaugino masses relative to scalar masses (or to modify the gaugino mass relations) in {\em non-minimal} models of gauge mediation -- then multi-TeV (top and other) squarks can be natural. Specific models of gauge mediation which incorporate these ideas and thus have squarks (and in some cases, the gluino) heavier than a TeV without resulting in fine-tuning are also studied and their collider signals are contrasted with those of other models which have multi-TeV squarks.Comment: LaTeX, 29 pages, 9 eps figures. Replacing an earlier version. In version 3, some references and a minor comment have been added and typos have been correcte

Virus shapes and buckling transitions in spherical shells

We show that the icosahedral packings of protein capsomeres proposed by Caspar and Klug for spherical viruses become unstable to faceting for sufficiently large virus size, in analogy with the buckling instability of disclinations in two-dimensional crystals. Our model, based on the nonlinear physics of thin elastic shells, produces excellent one parameter fits in real space to the full three-dimensional shape of large spherical viruses. The faceted shape depends only on the dimensionless Foppl-von Karman number \gamma=YR^2/\kappa, where Y is the two-dimensional Young's modulus of the protein shell, \kappa is its bending rigidity and R is the mean virus radius. The shape can be parameterized more quantitatively in terms of a spherical harmonic expansion. We also investigate elastic shell theory for extremely large \gamma, 10^3 < \gamma < 10^8, and find results applicable to icosahedral shapes of large vesicles studied with freeze fracture and electron microscopy.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figure

A "Littlest Higgs" Model with Custodial SU(2) Symmetry

In this note, a ``littlest higgs'' model is presented which has an approximate custodial SU(2) symmetry. The model is based on the coset space $SO(9)/(SO(5)\times SO(4))$. The light pseudo-goldstone bosons of the theory include a {\it single} higgs doublet below a TeV and a set of three $SU(2)_W$ triplets and an electroweak singlet in the TeV range. All of these scalars obtain approximately custodial SU(2) preserving vacuum expectation values. This model addresses a defect in the earlier $SO(5)\times SU(2)\times U(1)$ moose model, with the only extra complication being an extended top sector. Some of the precision electroweak observables are computed and do not deviate appreciably from Standard Model predictions. In an S-T oblique analysis, the dominant non-Standard Model contributions are the extended top sector and higgs doublet contributions. In conclusion, a wide range of higgs masses is allowed in a large region of parameter space consistent with naturalness, where large higgs masses requires some mild custodial SU(2) violation from the extended top sector.Comment: 22 pages + 8 figures; JHEP style, added references and extra discussion on size of T contributions, as well as some other minor clarifications. Version to appear in JHE

The Intermediate Higgs

Two paradigms for the origin of electroweak superconductivity are a weakly coupled scalar condensate, and a strongly coupled fermion condensate. The former suffers from a finetuning problem unless there are cancelations to radiative corrections, while the latter presents potential discrepancies with precision electroweak physics. Here we present a framework for electroweak symmetry breaking which interpolates between these two paradigms, and mitigates their faults. As in Little Higgs theories, the Higgs is a pseudo-Nambu Goldstone boson, potentially composite. The cutoff sensitivity of the one loop top quark contribution to the effective potential is canceled by contributions from additional vector-like quarks, and the cutoff can naturally be higher than in the minimal Standard Model. Unlike the Little Higgs models, the cutoff sensitivity from one loop gauge contributions is not canceled. However, such gauge contributions are naturally small as long as the cutoff is below 6 TeV. Precision electroweak corrections are suppressed relative to those of Technicolor or generic Little Higgs theories. In some versions of the intermediate scenario, the Higgs mass is computable in terms of the masses of these additional fermions and the Nambu-Goldstone Boson decay constant. In addition to the Higgs, new scalar and pseudoscalar particles are typically present at the weak scale