Soft-collinear effective theory and heavy-to-light currents beyond leading power

An important unresolved question in strong interaction physics concerns the parameterization of power-suppressed long-distance effects to hard processes that do not admit an operator product expansion (OPE). Recently Bauer et al.\ have developed an effective field theory framework that allows one to formulate the problem of soft-collinear factorization in terms of fields and operators. We extend the formulation of soft-collinear effective theory, previously worked out to leading order, to second order in a power series in the inverse of the hard scale. We give the effective Lagrangian and the expansion of ``currents'' that produce collinear particles in heavy quark decay. This is the first step towards a theory of power corrections to hard processes where the OPE cannot be used. We apply this framework to heavy-to-light meson transition form factors at large recoil energy.Comment: 46 pages, LaTeX; v2: two references added, eq. (52) correcte

Pseudoscalar Meson Mixing in Effective Field Theory

We show that for any effective field theory of colorless meson fields, the mixing schemes of particle states and decay constants are not only related but also determined exclusively by the kinetic and mass Lagrangian densities. In the general case, these are bilinear in terms of the intrinsic fields and involve non-diagonal kinetic and mass matrices. By applying three consecutive steps this Lagrangian can be reduced into the standard quadratic form in terms of the physical fields. These steps are : (i) the diagonalization of the kinetic matrix, (ii) rescaling of the fields, and (iii) the diagonalization of the mass matrix. In case, where the dimensions of the non-diagonal kinetic and mass sub-matrices are respectively, $k\times k$ and $n\times n$, this procedure leads to mixing schemes which involve $[k(k-1)/2] + [n(n-1)/2]$ angles and $k$ field rescaling parameters. This observation holds true irrespective with the type of particle interactions presumed. The commonly used mixing schemes, correspond to a proper choice of the kinetic and mass matrices, and are derived as special cases. In particular, $\eta$-$\eta '$ mixing, requires one angle, if and only if, the kinetic term with the intrinsic fields has a quadratic form.Comment: REVTeX, 6 page

Consistent SDNs through Network State Fuzzing

The conventional wisdom is that a software-defined network (SDN) operates under the premise that the logically centralized control plane has an accurate representation of the actual data plane state. Nevertheless, bugs, misconfigurations, faults or attacks can introduce inconsistencies that undermine correct operation. Previous work in this area, however, lacks a holistic methodology to tackle this problem and thus, addresses only certain parts of the problem. Yet, the consistency of the overall system is only as good as its least consistent part. Motivated by an analogy of network consistency checking with program testing, we propose to add active probe-based network state fuzzing to our consistency check repertoire. Hereby, our system, PAZZ, combines production traffic with active probes to continuously test if the actual forwarding path and decision elements (on the data plane) correspond to the expected ones (on the control plane). Our insight is that active traffic covers the inconsistency cases beyond the ones identified by passive traffic. PAZZ prototype was built and evaluated on topologies of varying scale and complexity. Our results show that PAZZ requires minimal network resources to detect persistent data plane faults through fuzzing and localize them quickly

Semileptonic decays of pseudoscalar mesons to scalar "f_0" meson

The transition form factors of (D_s -> f_0 l nu), (D -> f_0 l nu) and (B_u -> f_0 l nu) decays are calculated in 3-point QCD sum rule method, assuming that "f_0" is a quark-antiquark state with a mixture of strange and light quarks. The branching ratios of these decays are calculated in terms of the mixing angle.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, LaTeX formatte

Exclusive channels in semi-inclusive production of pions and kaons

We investigate the role of exclusive channels in semi-inclusive electroproduction of pions and kaons. Using the QCD factorization theorem for hard exclusive processes we evaluate the cross sections for exclusive pseudoscalar and vector meson production in terms of generalized parton distributions and meson distribution amplitudes. We investigate the uncertainties arising from the modeling of the nonperturbative input quantities. Combining these results with available experimental data, we compare the cross sections for exclusive channels to that obtained from quark fragmentation in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering. We find that rho^0 production is the only exclusive channel with significant contributions to semi-inclusive pion production at large z and moderate Q^2. The corresponding contribution to kaon production from the decay of exclusively produced phi and K^* is rather small.Comment: 33 pages, 18 figure