The Supersymmetric Leptophilic Higgs Model

In the leptophilic model, one Higgs doublet couples to quarks and another couples to leptons. We study the supersymmetric version of this model, concentrating on the tightly constrained Higgs sector, which has four doublets. Constraints from perturbativity, unitarity, and LEP bounds are considered. It is found that the lightest Higgs, h, can have a mass well below 114 GeV, and for masses below 100 GeV will have a substantially enhanced branching ratio into tau pairs. For this region of parameter space, traditional production mechanisms (Higgs-strahlung, W fusion and gluon fusion) are suppressed, but it may be produced in the decay of heavier particles. The second lightest Higgs has a mass of approximately 110 GeV for virtually all of parameter space, with Standard Model couplings, and thus an increase of a few GeV in the current lower bound on the Standard Model Higgs mass would rule out the model. The two heavier Higgs are both gauge-phobic, one decays almost entirely into b pairs and can be produced via gluon fusion while the other decays almost entirely into tau pairs but can't be easily produced.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure

A Supersymmetric Model with Dirac Neutrino Masses

New models have recently been proposed in which a second Higgs doublet couples only to the lepton doublets and right-handed neutrinos, yielding Dirac neutrino masses. The vacuum value of this second "nu-Higgs" doublet is made very small by means of a very softly-broken $Z_2$ or U(1) symmetry. The latter is technically natural and avoids fine-tuning and very light scalars. We consider a supersymmetric version of this model, in which two additional doublets are added to the MSSM. If kinematically allowed, the decay of the heavy MSSM scalar into charged nu-Higgs scalars will yield dilepton events which can be separated from the W-pair background. In addition, the nu-Higgsinos can lead to very dramatic tetralepton, pentalepton and hexalepton events which have negligible background and can be detected at the LHC and the Tevatron.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 6 tables; PRD versio

Lattice study of the Coleman--Weinberg mass in the SU(2)-Higgs model

Radiative symmetry breaking is a well known phenomenon in perturbation theory. We study the problem in a non-perturbative framework, i.e. lattice simulations. The example of the bosonic sector of the SU(2)-Higgs model is considered. We determine the minimal scalar mass which turns out to be higher than the mass value given by 1-loop continuum perturbation theory.Comment: Contribution to ICHEP-02, Amsterdam, 24-31 July 2002, 2 pages, 1 figur

Ethnobotanical evaluation of some plant resources in Northern part of Pakistan

An ethnobotanical study on the medicinal and economic plants of Malam Jabba valley, District Swat was conducted with the aims of documenting the inventory of medicinal plants, examinining the current status of the medicinal plants trade and investigating the linkages in the market chain starting from collectors to consumers. The survey reported 50 species of plants belonging to 33 families as ethnobotanically important. These species are used as drugs for treating diseases in traditional system of medicine. The detailed local uses, recipe preparation along with their local names and diseases treated were recorded for each species. Market survey revealed that the structure of medicinal plant trade is complex and heterogeneous, involving many players. The collectors are often not aware of the high market prices and medicinal values, and most of the collected material is sold to local middlemen at a very low price. There was an increase of 3 to 5 folds in prices from collectors to the national market. Training in sustainable harvesting and post harvesting of wild medicinal plant resource, trade monitoring, equitable sharing of benefits of wild resources, improved control on harvesting and trade for the conservation of resources, enhancement of cultivation efforts, future research into trade in wild harvested plants, community participation in natural resource management and value addition in the herbal products to maximize the benefits are recommended

Combined analysis of microbial metagenomic and metatranscriptomic sequencing data to assess in situ physiological conditions in the premature infant gut.

Microbes alter their transcriptomic profiles in response to the environment. The physiological conditions experienced by a microbial community can thus be inferred using meta-transcriptomic sequencing by comparing transcription levels of specifically chosen genes. However, this analysis requires accurate reference genomes to identify the specific genes from which RNA reads originate. In addition, such an analysis should avoid biases in transcript counts related to differences in organism abundance. In this study we describe an approach to address these difficulties. Sample-specific meta-genomic assembled genomes (MAGs) were used as reference genomes to accurately identify the origin of RNA reads, and transcript ratios of genes with opposite transcription responses were compared to eliminate biases related to differences in organismal abundance, an approach hereafter named the "diametric ratio" method. We used this approach to probe the environmental conditions experienced by Escherichia spp. in the gut of 4 premature infants, 2 of whom developed necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), a severe inflammatory intestinal disease. We analyzed twenty fecal samples taken from four premature infants (4-6 time points from each infant), and found significantly higher diametric ratios of genes associated with low oxygen levels in samples of infants later diagnosed with NEC than in samples without NEC. We also show this method can be used for examining other physiological conditions, such as exposure to nitric oxide and osmotic pressure. These study results should be treated with caution, due to the presence of confounding factors that might also distinguish between NEC and control infants. Nevertheless, together with benchmarking analyses, we show here that the diametric ratio approach can be applied for evaluating the physiological conditions experienced by microbes in situ. Results from similar studies can be further applied for designing diagnostic methods to detect NEC in its early developmental stages

Charged Leptons With Nanosecond Lifetimes

Some extensions of the standard model contain additional leptons which are vectorlike under weak isospin. A class of models is considered in which these leptons do not appreciably mix with the known leptons. In such models, the heavy charged lepton and the heavy neutrino are degenerate in mass, and the degeneracy is broken by radiative corrections. The mass splitting is calculated and found to be very weakly dependent on the lepton mass, varying from 250 to 330 MeV as the mass varies from 100 to 800 GeV. This result is {\it not} affected significantly by inclusion in a supersymmetric model in spite of the additional loops involving the superpartners. As a result, this fairly general class of models has a charged lepton whose lifetime varies in the narrow range from 0.5 to 2.0 nanoseconds, and which decays into neutrals plus a very low energy electron or muon.Comment: 7 pages, revtex, 3 figures available upon reques

Production, Collection and Utilization of Very Long-Lived Heavy Charged Leptons

If a fourth generation of leptons exists, both the neutrino and its charged partner must be heavier than 45 GeV. We suppose that the neutrino is the heavier of the two, and that a global or discrete symmetry prohibits intergenerational mixing. In that case, non-renormalizable Planck scale interactions will induce a very small mixing; dimension five interactions will lead to a lifetime for the heavy charged lepton of $O(1-100)$ years. Production of such particles is discussed, and it is shown that a few thousands can be produced and collected at a linear collider. The possible uses of these heavy leptons is also briefly discussed.Comment: 9 pages Late

Induced antiferromagnetism and large magnetoresistances in RuSr2(Nd,Y,Ce)2Cu2O10-d ruthenocuprates

RuSr2(Nd,Y,Ce)2Cu2O10-d ruthenocuprates have been studied by neutron diffraction, magnetotransport and magnetisation measurements and the electronic phase diagram is reported. Separate Ru and Cu spin ordering transitions are observed, with spontaneous Cu antiferromagnetic order for low hole doping levels p, and a distinct, induced-antiferromagnetic Cu spin phase in the 0.02 < p < 0.06 pseudogap region. This ordering gives rise to large negative magnetoresistances which vary systematically with p in the RuSr2Nd1.8-xY0.2CexCu2O10-d series. A collapse of the magnetoresistance (MR) and magnetisation in the pre-superconducting region may signify the onset of superconducting fluctuations.Comment: 22 pages, 11 figure

First-Principles Calculation of Born Effective Charges and Spontaneous Polarization of Ferroelectric Bismuth Titanate

In this study, we present the results of our first-principles calculations of the band structure, density of states and the Born effective charge tensors for the ferroelectric (ground state B1a1) and paraelectric (I4/mmm) phases of bismuth titanate. The calculations are done using the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) as well as the local density approximation (LDA) of the density functional theory. In contrast to the literature, our calculations on B1a1 structure using GGA and LDA yield smaller indirect band gaps as compared to the direct band gaps, in agreement with the experimental data. The density of states shows considerable hybridization among Ti 3d, Bi 6p and O 2p states indicating covalent nature of the bonds leading to the ferroelectric instability. The Born effective charge tensors of the constituent ions for the ground state (B1a1) and paraelectric (I4/mmm) structures were calculated using the Berry phase method. This is followed by the calculation of the spontaneous polarization for the ferroelectric B1a1 phase using the Born effective charge tensors of the individual ions. The calculated value for the spontaneous polarization of ferroelectric bismuth titanate using different Born effective charges was found to be in the range of 55+/-13 $\mu$C/cm2 in comparison to the reported experimental value of (50+/-10 $\mu$C/cm2) for single crystals. The origin of ferroelectricity is attributed to the relatively large displacements of those oxygen ions in the TiO6 octahedra that lie along the a-axis of the bismuth titanate crystal.Comment: 36 pages, 5 figure