Medium Effects in DIS from Polarized Nuclear Targets

The behavior of the nucleon structure functions in lepton nuclei deep inelastic scattering, both polarized and unpolarized, due to nuclear structure effects is reanalyzed. The study is performed in two schemes: an x-rescaling approach, and one in which there is an increase of sea quark components in the in medium nucleon, related to the low energy N-N interaction. In view of a recent interesting experimental proposal to study the behavior of the proton spin structure functions in nuclei we proceed to compare these approaches in an effort to enlighten the possible phenomenological interest of such difficult experiment.Comment: 11 pages and 5 figure

Quark masses without Yukawa hierarchies

A model based on the local gauge group SU(3)_c x SU(3)_L x U(1)_X without particles with exotic electric charges is shown to be able to provide the quark mass spectrum and their mixing, by means of universal see-saw mechanisms, avoiding a hierarchy in the Yukawa coupling constants.Comment: 7 pages, 1 eps figure. Published in Europhysics Letter

Approximate solutions for the single soliton in a Skyrmion-type model with a dilaton scalar field

We consider the analytical properties of the single-soliton solution in a Skyrmion-type Lagrangian that incorporates the scaling properties of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) through the coupling of the chiral field to a scalar field interpreted as a bound state of gluons. The model was proposed in previous works to describe the Goldstone pions in a dense medium, being also useful for studying the properties of nuclear matter and the in-medium properties of mesons and nucleons. Guided by an asymptotic analysis of the Euler-Lagrange equations, we propose approximate analytical representations for the single soliton solution in terms of rational approximants exponentially localized. Following the Pad\'e method, we construct a sequence of approximants from the exact power series solutions near the origin. We find that the convergence of the approximate representations to the numerical solutions is considerably improved by taking the expansion coefficients as free parameters and then minimizing the mass of the Skyrmion using our ans\"atze for the fields. We also perform an analysis of convergence by computation of physical quantities showing that the proposed analytical representations are very useful useful for phenomenological calculations.Comment: 13 pages, 3 eps figures, version to be published in Phys.Rev.

Generalized Borel Transform Technique in Quantum Mechanics

We present the Generalized Borel Transform (GBT). This new approach allows one to obtain approximate solutions of Laplace/Mellin transform valid in both, perturbative and non perturbative regimes. We compare the results provided by the GBT for a solvable model of quantum mechanics with those provided by standard techniques, as the conventional Borel sum, or its modified versions. We found that our approach is very efficient for obtaining both the low and the high energy behavior of the model.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

Influence of diffractive interactions on cosmic ray air showers

A comparative study of commonly used hadronic collision simulation packages is presented. The characteristics of the products of hadron-nucleus collisions are analyzed from a general perspective, but focusing on their correlation with diffractive processes. One of the purposes of our work is to give quantitative estimations of the impact that different characteristics of the hadronic models have on air shower observables. Several sets of shower simulations using different settings for the parameters controlling the diffractive processes are used to analyze the correlations between diffractivity and shower observables. We find that the relative probability of diffractive processes during the shower development have a non negligible influence over the longitudinal profile as well as the distribution of muons at ground level. The implications on experimental data analysis are discussed

Effective Field Theory Program for Conformal Quantum Anomalies

The emergence of conformal states is established for any problem involving a domain of scales where the long-range, SO(2,1) conformally invariant interaction is applicable. Whenever a clear-cut separation of ultraviolet and infrared cutoffs is in place, this renormalization mechanism produces binding in the strong-coupling regime. A realization of this phenomenon, in the form of dipole-bound anions, is discussed.Comment: 15 pages. Expanded, with additional calculational details. To be published in Phys. Rev.

Hunting long-lived gluinos at the Pierre Auger Observatory

Eventual signals of split sypersymmetry in cosmic ray physics are analyzed in detail. The study focusses particularly on quasi-stable colorless R-hadrons originating through confinement of long-lived gluinos (with quarks, anti-quarks, and gluons) produced in pp collisions at astrophysical sources. Because of parton density requirements, the gluino has a momentum which is considerable smaller than the energy of the primary proton, and so production of heavy (mass ~ 500 GeV) R-hadrons requires powerful cosmic ray engines able to accelerate particles up to extreme energies, somewhat above 10^{13.6} GeV. Using a realistic Monte Carlo simulation with the AIRES engine, we study the main characteristics of the air showers triggered when one of these exotic hadrons impinges on a stationary nucleon of the Earth atmosphere. We show that R-hadron air showers present clear differences with respect to those initiated by standard particles. We use this shower characteristics to construct observables which may be used to distinguish long-lived gluinos at the Pierre Auger Observatory.Comment: 13 pages revtex, 9 eps figures. A ps version with high resolution figures is available at http://www.hep.physics.neu.edu/staff/doqui/rhadron_highres.p