A Supersymmetric Stueckelberg U(1) Extension of the MSSM

A Stueckelberg extension of the MSSM with only one abelian vector and one chiral superfield as an alternative to an abelian extension with Higgs scalars is presented. The bosonic sector contains a new gauge boson Z' which is a sharp resonance, and a new CP-even scalar, which combines with the MSSM Higgs bosons to produce three neutral CP-even massive states. The neutral fermionic sector has two additional fermions which mix with the four MSSM neutralinos to produce an extended 6x6 neutralino mass matrix. For the case when the LSP is composed mostly of the Stueckelberg fermions, the LSP of the MSSM will be unstable, which leads to exotic decays of sparticles with many leptons in final states. Prospects for supersymmetry searches and for dark matter are discussed.Comment: 10 page

Estimating the carbon dynamics of South Korean forests from 1954 to 2012

Forests play an important role in the global carbon (C) cycle, and the South Korean forests also contribute to this global C cycle. While the South Korean forest ecosystem was almost completely destroyed by exploitation and the Korean War, it has successfully recovered because of national-scale reforestation programs since 1973. There have been several studies on the estimation of C stocks and balances over the past decades in the South Korean forests. However, a retrospective long-term study that includes biomass and dead organic matter C and validates dead organic matter C is still lacking. Accordingly, we estimated the C stocks and their changes of both biomass and dead organic matter C during the 1954-2012 period using a process-based model, the Korean Forest Soil Carbon model, and the 5th South Korean national forest inventory (NFI) report. Validation processes were also conducted based on the 5th NFI and statistical data. Simulation results showed that the biomass C stocks increased from 36.4 to 440.4 Tg C at a rate of 7.0 Tg C yrg-1 during the period 1954-2012. The dead organic matter C stocks increased from 386.0 to 463.1 Tg C at a rate of 1.3 Tg C yrg-1 during the same period. The estimates of biomass and dead organic matter C stocks agreed well with observed C stock data. The annual net biome production (NBP) during the period 1954-2012 was 141.3 g C mg-2 yrg-1, which increased from ??'8.8 g C mg-2 yrg-1 in 1955 to 436.6 g C mg-2 yrg-1 in 2012. Because of the small forested area, the South Korean forests had a comparatively lower contribution to the annual C sequestration by global forests. In contrast, because of the extensive reforestation programs, the NBP of South Korean forests was much higher than those of other countries. Our results could provide the forest C dynamics in South Korean forests before and after the onset of reforestation programs.Korea Forest Service (S111314L100120, S111114L030100) and Korea Ministry of Environment (C314-00131-0408-0).Scopu

The Magnetic Field of the Solar Corona from Pulsar Observations

We present a novel experiment with the capacity to independently measure both the electron density and the magnetic field of the solar corona. We achieve this through measurement of the excess Faraday rotation due to propagation of the polarised emission from a number of pulsars through the magnetic field of the solar corona. This method yields independent measures of the integrated electron density, via dispersion of the pulsed signal and the magnetic field, via the amount of Faraday rotation. In principle this allows the determination of the integrated magnetic field through the solar corona along many lines of sight without any assumptions regarding the electron density distribution. We present a detection of an increase in the rotation measure of the pulsar J1801$-$2304 of approximately 160 \rad at an elongation of 0.95$^\circ$ from the centre of the solar disk. This corresponds to a lower limit of the magnetic field strength along this line of sight of $> 393\mu\mathrm{G}$. The lack of precision in the integrated electron density measurement restricts this result to a limit, but application of coronal plasma models can further constrain this to approximately 20mG, along a path passing 2.5 solar radii from the solar limb. Which is consistent with predictions obtained using extensions to the Source Surface models published by Wilcox Solar ObservatoryComment: 16 pages, 4 figures (1 colour): Submitted to Solar Physic

Anomalous Dynamics of Forced Translocation

We consider the passage of long polymers of length N through a hole in a membrane. If the process is slow, it is in principle possible to focus on the dynamics of the number of monomers s on one side of the membrane, assuming that the two segments are in equilibrium. The dynamics of s(t) in such a limit would be diffusive, with a mean translocation time scaling as N^2 in the absence of a force, and proportional to N when a force is applied. We demonstrate that the assumption of equilibrium must break down for sufficiently long polymers (more easily when forced), and provide lower bounds for the translocation time by comparison to unimpeded motion of the polymer. These lower bounds exceed the time scales calculated on the basis of equilibrium, and point to anomalous (sub-diffusive) character of translocation dynamics. This is explicitly verified by numerical simulations of the unforced translocation of a self-avoiding polymer. Forced translocation times are shown to strongly depend on the method by which the force is applied. In particular, pulling the polymer by the end leads to much longer times than when a chemical potential difference is applied across the membrane. The bounds in these cases grow as N^2 and N^{1+\nu}, respectively, where \nu is the exponent that relates the scaling of the radius of gyration to N. Our simulations demonstrate that the actual translocation times scale in the same manner as the bounds, although influenced by strong finite size effects which persist even for the longest polymers that we considered (N=512).Comment: 13 pages, RevTeX4, 16 eps figure

Pair production of neutralinos via gluon-gluon collisions

The production of a neutralino pair via gluon-gluon fusion is studied in the minimal supersymmetric model(MSSM) at proton-proton colliders. The numerical analysis of their production rates are carried out in the mSUGRA scenario. The results show that this cross section may reach about 80 femto barn for $\tilde{\chi}^{0}_{1}\tilde{\chi}^{0}_{2}$ pair production and 23 femto barn for $\tilde{\chi}^{0}_{2}\tilde{\chi}^{0}_{2}$ pair production with suitable input parameters at the future LHC collider. It shows that this loop mediated process can be competitive with the quark-antiquark annihilation process at the LHC.Comment: LaTex file, l4 pages, 5 EPS figure

Pair Production of the Lightest Chargino via Gluon-Gluon Collisions

The production of the lightest chargino pair from gluon-gluon fusion is studied in the minimal supersymmetric model(MSSM) at proton-proton colliders. We find that with the chosen parameters, the production rate of the subprocess can be over 2.7 femto barn when the chargino is higgsino-like, and the corresponding total cross section in proton-proton collider can reach 56 femto barn at the LHC in the CP-conserving MSSM. It shows that this loop mediated subprocess can be competitive with the standard Drell-Yan subprocess in proton-proton colliders, especially at the LHC. Furthermore, our calculation shows it would be possible to extract information about some CP-violating phase parameters, if we collected enough chargino pair events.Comment: 39 pages, LaTex, 8 figure

Isolating a light Higgs boson from the di-photon background at the LHC

We compute the QCD corrections to the gluon fusion subprocess gg to gamma gamma, which forms an important component of the background to the search for a light Higgs boson at the LHC. We study the dependence of the improved pp to gamma gamma X background calculation on the factorization and renormalization scales, on various choices for photon isolation cuts, and on the rapidities of the photons. We also investigate ways to enhance the statistical significance of the Higgs signal in the di-photon channel.Comment: Additional reference included, 17 pages, 16 figure files, revte

Electroweak Radiative Corrections to Associated WH and ZH Production at Hadron Colliders

Higgs-boson production in association with W or Z bosons, p pbar -> WH/ZH + X, is the most promising discovery channel for a light Standard Model Higgs particle at the Fermilab Tevatron. We present the calculation of the electroweak O(alpha) corrections to these processes. The corrections decrease the theoretical prediction by up to 5-10%, depending in detail on the Higgs-boson mass and the input-parameter scheme. We update the cross-section prediction for associated WH and ZH production at the Tevatron and at the LHC, including the next-to-leading order electroweak and QCD corrections, and study the theoretical uncertainties induced by factorization and renormalization scale dependences and by the parton distribution functions.Comment: 32 pages, LaTeX, 21 figures. Uses axodraw.sty and feynarts.sty. Added reference

Unitary Standard Model from Spontaneous Dimensional Reduction and Weak Boson Scattering at the LHC

Spontaneous dimensional reduction (SDR) is a striking phenomenon predicted by a number of quantum gravity approaches which all indicate that the spacetime dimensions get reduced at high energies. In this work, we formulate an effective theory of electroweak interactions based upon the standard model, incorporating the spontaneous reduction of space-dimensions at TeV scale. The electroweak gauge symmetry is nonlinearly realized with or without a Higgs boson. We demonstrate that the SDR ensures good high energy behavior and predicts unitary weak boson scattering. For a light Higgs boson of mass 125GeV, the TeV-scale SDR gives a natural solution to the hierarchy problem. Such a light Higgs boson can have induced anomalous gauge couplings from the TeV-scale SDR. We find that the corresponding WW scattering cross sections become unitary at TeV scale, but exhibit different behaviors from that of the 4d standard model. These can be discriminated by the WW scattering experiments at the LHC.Comment: 38pp, Eur.Phys.J.(in Press); extended discussions for testing non-SM Higgs boson(125GeV) via WW scattering; minor clarifications added; references added; a concise companion is given in the short PLB letter arXiv:1301.457

Competing orders in a magnetic field: spin and charge order in the cuprate superconductors

We describe two-dimensional quantum spin fluctuations in a superconducting Abrikosov flux lattice induced by a magnetic field applied to a doped Mott insulator. Complete numerical solutions of a self-consistent large N theory provide detailed information on the phase diagram and on the spatial structure of the dynamic spin spectrum. Our results apply to phases with and without long-range spin density wave order and to the magnetic quantum critical point separating these phases. We discuss the relationship of our results to a number of recent neutron scattering measurements on the cuprate superconductors in the presence of an applied field. We compute the pinning of static charge order by the vortex cores in the `spin gap' phase where the spin order remains dynamically fluctuating, and argue that these results apply to recent scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) measurements. We show that with a single typical set of values for the coupling constants, our model describes the field dependence of the elastic neutron scattering intensities, the absence of satellite Bragg peaks associated with the vortex lattice in existing neutron scattering observations, and the spatial extent of charge order in STM observations. We mention implications of our theory for NMR experiments. We also present a theoretical discussion of more exotic states that can be built out of the spin and charge order parameters, including spin nematics and phases with `exciton fractionalization'.Comment: 36 pages, 33 figures; for a popular introduction, see http://onsager.physics.yale.edu/superflow.html; (v2) Added reference to new work of Chen and Ting; (v3) reorganized presentation for improved clarity, and added new appendix on microscopic origin; (v4) final published version with minor change