17,839 research outputs found
Quark masses in QCD: a progress report
Recent progress on QCD sum rule determinations of the light and heavy quark
masses is reported. In the light quark sector a major breakthrough has been
made recently in connection with the historical systematic uncertainties due to
a lack of experimental information on the pseudoscalar resonance spectral
functions. It is now possible to suppress this contribution to the 1% level by
using suitable integration kernels in Finite Energy QCD sum rules. This allows
to determine the up-, down-, and strange-quark masses with an unprecedented
precision of some 8-10%. Further reduction of this uncertainty will be possible
with improved accuracy in the strong coupling, now the main source of error. In
the heavy quark sector, the availability of experimental data in the vector
channel, and the use of suitable multipurpose integration kernels allows to
increase the accuracy of the charm- and bottom-quarks masses to the 1% level.Comment: Invited review paper to be published in Modern Physics Letters
Corrections to the Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner relation and chiral couplings and
Next to leading order corrections to the
Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner relation (GMOR) are obtained using weighted QCD Finite
Energy Sum Rules (FESR) involving the pseudoscalar current correlator. Two
types of integration kernels in the FESR are used to suppress the contribution
of the kaon radial excitations to the hadronic spectral function, one with
local and the other with global constraints. The result for the pseudoscalar
current correlator at zero momentum is , leading to the chiral corrections to GMOR: . The resulting uncertainties are mostly due to variations in the upper
limit of integration in the FESR, within the stability regions, and to a much
lesser extent due to the uncertainties in the strong coupling and the strange
quark mass. Higher order quark mass corrections, vacuum condensates, and the
hadronic resonance sector play a negligible role in this determination. These
results confirm an independent determination from chiral perturbation theory
giving also very large corrections, i.e. roughly an order of magnitude larger
than the corresponding corrections in chiral . Combining
these results with our previous determination of the corrections to GMOR in
chiral , , we are able to determine two low
energy constants of chiral perturbation theory, i.e. , and , both at the
scale of the -meson mass.Comment: Revised version with minor correction
Collective Action Frames and Policy Windows: The Case of the Project to Export Liquefied Natural Gas from Bolivia to California
How and why can a political mobilisation prevent what appears to be an economically rational and beneficial government investment? The present paper explores the ways in which both public policy and contentious politics theories can be potentially bridged to answer this question. It suggests ways in which concepts used by public policy theorists such as 'policy windows' (Kingdon, 1984) or 'advocacy coalitions' (Sabatier, 1999) may be useful to understand the emergence of political opportunities or the construction of collective action frames. The case study to be used is the project to export liquefied gas from Bolivia to California, which was promoted by the administration of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2002 and was cancelled after civil society groups not only mobilise to resist it, but to demand the resignation of the president.
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