Exoplanet Catalogues

One of the most exciting developments in the field of exoplanets has been the progression from 'stamp-collecting' to demography, from discovery to characterisation, from exoplanets to comparative exoplanetology. There is an exhilaration when a prediction is confirmed, a trend is observed, or a new population appears. This transition has been driven by the rise in the sheer number of known exoplanets, which has been rising exponentially for two decades (Mamajek 2016). However, the careful collection, scrutiny and organisation of these exoplanets is necessary for drawing robust, scientific conclusions that are sensitive to the biases and caveats that have gone into their discovery. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss and demonstrate important considerations to keep in mind when examining or constructing a catalogue of exoplanets. First, we introduce the value of exoplanetary catalogues. There are a handful of large, online databases that aggregate the available exoplanet literature and render it digestible and navigable - an ever more complex task with the growing number and diversity of exoplanet discoveries. We compare and contrast three of the most up-to-date general catalogues, including the data and tools that are available. We then describe exoplanet catalogues that were constructed to address specific science questions or exoplanet discovery space. Although we do not attempt to list or summarise all the published lists of exoplanets in the literature in this chapter, we explore the case study of the NASA Kepler mission planet catalogues in some detail. Finally, we lay out some of the best practices to adopt when constructing or utilising an exoplanet catalogue.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures. Invited review chapter, to appear in "Handbook of Exoplanets", edited by H.J. Deeg and J.A. Belmonte, section editor N. Batalh

Things change: Women’s and men’s marital disruption dynamics in Italy during a time of social transformations, 1970-2003

We study women’s and men’s marital disruption in Italy between 1970 and 2003. By applying an event-history analysis to the 2003 Italian variant of the Generations and Gender Survey we found that the spread of marital disruption started among middle-highly educated women. Then in recent years it appears that less educated women have also been able to dissolve their unhappy unions. Overall we can see the beginning of a reversed educational gradient from positive to negative. In contrast the trend in men’s marital disruption risk appears as a change over time common to all educational groups, although with persisting educational differentials.determinants, educational differences, event history analysis, gender difference, Italy, marital disruption

Comment on Higgs Inflation and Naturalness

We rebut the recent claim (arXiv:0912.5463) that Einstein-frame scattering in the Higgs inflation model is unitary above the cut-off energy Lambda ~ Mp/xi. We show explicitly how unitarity problems arise in both the Einstein and Jordan frames of the theory. In a covariant gauge they arise from non-minimal Higgs self-couplings, which cannot be removed by field redefinitions because the target space is not flat. In unitary gauge, where there is only a single scalar which can be redefined to achieve canonical kinetic terms, the unitarity problems arise through non-minimal Higgs-gauge couplings.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure V3: Journal Versio

Collective Quartics from Simple Groups

This article classifies Little Higgs models that have collective quartic couplings. There are two classes of collective quartics: Special Cosets and Special Quartics. After taking into account dangerous singlets, the smallest Special Coset models are SU(5)/SO(5) and SU(6)/Sp(6). The smallest Special Quartic model is SU(5)/SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) and has not previously been considered as a candidate Little Higgs model.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figure

Muon to electron conversion in the Littlest Higgs model with T-parity

Little Higgs models provide a natural explanation of the little hierarchy between the electroweak scale and a few TeV scale, where new physics is expected. Under the same inspiring naturalness arguments, this work completes a previous study on lepton flavor-changing processes in the Littlest Higgs model with T-parity exploring the channel that will eventually turn out to be the most sensitive, \mu-e conversion in nuclei. All one-loop contributions are carefully taken into account, results for the most relevant nuclei are provided and a discussion of the influence of the quark mixing is included. The results for the Ti nucleus are in good agreement with earlier work by Blanke et al., where a degenerate mirror quark sector was assumed. The conclusion is that, although this particular model reduces the tension with electroweak precision tests, if the restrictions on the parameter space derived from lepton flavor violation are taken seriously, the degree of fine tuning necessary to meet these constraints also disfavors this model.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables; discussion improved, results unchanged, one reference added, version to appear in JHE

The effect of ultrasound pretreatment on some selected physicochemical properties of black cumin (Nigella Sativa)

Background In the present study, the effects of ultrasound pretreatment parameters including irradiation time and power on the quantity of the extracted phenolic compounds quantity as well as on some selected physicochemical properties of the extracted oils including oil extraction efficiency, acidity and peroxide values, color, and refractive index of the extracted oil of black cumin seeds with the use of cold press have been studied. Methods For each parameter, three different levels (30, 60, and 90 W) for the ultrasound power and (30, 45, and 60 min) and for the ultrasound irradiation time were studied. Each experiment was performed in three replications. Results The achieved results revealed that, with enhancements in the applied ultrasound power, the oil extraction efficiency, acidity value, total phenolic content, peroxide value, and color parameters increased significantly (P 0.05). Conclusions In summary, it could be mentioned that the application of ultrasound pretreatment in the oil extraction might improve the oil extraction efficiency, the extracted oil’s quality, and the extracted phenolic compounds content.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

T-parity, its problems and their solution

We point out a basic difficulty in the construction of little-Higgs models with T-parity which is overlooked by large part of the present literature. Almost all models proposed so far fail to achieve their goal: they either suffer from sizable electroweak corrections or from a breakdown of collective breaking. We provide a model building recipe to bypass the above problem and apply it to build the simplest T-invariant extension of the Littlest Higgs. Our model predicts additional T-odd pseudo-Goldstone bosons with weak scale masses.Comment: 25 pages, 2 appendice

Radiative Electroweak Symmetry Breaking in a Little Higgs Model

We present a new Little Higgs model, motivated by the deconstruction of a five-dimensional gauge-Higgs model. The approximate global symmetry is $SO(5)_0\times SO(5)_1$, breaking to $SO(5)$, with a gauged subgroup of $[SU(2)_{0L}\times U(1)_{0R}]\times O(4)_1$, breaking to $SU(2)_L \times U(1)_Y$. Radiative corrections produce an additional small vacuum misalignment, breaking the electroweak symmetry down to $U(1)_{EM}$. Novel features of this model are: the only un-eaten pseudo-Goldstone boson in the effective theory is the Higgs boson; the model contains a custodial symmetry, which ensures that $\hat{T}=0$ at tree-level; and the potential for the Higgs boson is generated entirely through one-loop radiative corrections. A small negative mass-squared in the Higgs potential is obtained by a cancellation between the contribution of two heavy partners of the top quark, which is readily achieved over much of the parameter space. We can then obtain both a vacuum expectation value of $v=246$ GeV and a light Higgs boson mass, which is strongly correlated with the masses of the two heavy top quark partners. For a scale of the global symmetry breaking of $f=1$ TeV and using a single cutoff for the fermion loops, the Higgs boson mass satisfies 120 GeV $\lesssim M_H\lesssim150$ GeV over much of the range of parameter space. For $f$ raised to 10 TeV, these values increase by about 40 GeV. Effects at the ultraviolet cutoff scale may also raise the predicted values of the Higgs boson mass, but the model still favors $M_H\lesssim 200$ GeV.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures, JHEP style. Version accepted for publication in JHEP. Includes additional discussion of sensitivity to UV effects and fine-tuning, revised Fig. 9, added appendix and additional references

Electroweak Symmetry Breaking in the DSSM

We study the theoretical and phenomenological consequences of modifying the Kahler potential of the MSSM two Higgs doublet sector. Such modifications naturally arise when the Higgs sector mixes with a quasi-hidden conformal sector, as in some F-theory GUT models. In the Delta-deformed Supersymmetric Standard Model (DSSM), the Higgs fields are operators with non-trivial scaling dimension 1 < Delta < 2. The Kahler metric is singular at the origin of field space due to the presence of quasi-hidden sector states which get their mass from the Higgs vevs. The presence of these extra states leads to the fact that even as Delta approaches 1, the DSSM does not reduce to the MSSM. In particular, the Higgs can naturally be heavier than the W- and Z-bosons. Perturbative gauge coupling unification, a large top quark Yukawa, and consistency with precision electroweak can all be maintained for Delta close to unity. Moreover, such values of Delta can naturally be obtained in string-motivated constructions. The quasi-hidden sector generically contains states charged under SU(5)_GUT as well as gauge singlets, leading to a rich, albeit model-dependent, collider phenomenology.Comment: v3: 40 pages, 3 figures, references added, typos correcte

Top Partner Discovery in the T→tZT\to tZ channel at the LHC

In this paper we study the discovery potential of the LHC run II for heavy vector-like top quarks in the decay channel to a top and a $Z$ boson. Despite the usually smaller branching ratio compared to charged-current decays, this channel is rather clean and allows for a complete mass reconstruction of the heavy top. The latter is achieved in the leptonic decay channel of the $Z$ boson and in the fully hadronic top channel using boosted jet and jet substructure techniques. To be as model-independent as possible, a simplified model approach with only two free parameters has been applied. The results are presented in terms of parameter space regions for $3\sigma$ evidence or $5\sigma$ discovery for such new states in that channel.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures, version 2 updated to JHEP 01 (2015) 08