The role of hyperfine mixing in b→cb\to c semileptonic and electromagnetic decays of doubly-heavy baryons

We analyze the effects of hyperfine mixing in $b\to c\,$ semileptonic and electromagnetic decays of doubly heavy baryons.Comment: Talk given at the Chiral 10 Conferenc

The effect of hyperfine mixing in electromagnetic and semileptonic decays of doubly heavy baryons

We consider the role played by hyperfine mixing in electromagnetic and semileptonic decays of doubly heavy baryons, which give rise to large corrections to the decay widths in both cases.Comment: Talk given in Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum IX, Madrid September 201

On the limits of engine analysis for cheating detection in chess

The integrity of online games has important economic consequences for both the gaming industry and players of all levels, from professionals to amateurs. Where there is a high likelihood of cheating, there is a loss of trust and players will be reluctant to participate — particularly if this is likely to cost them money. Chess is a game that has been established online for around 25 years and is played over the Internet commercially. In that environment, where players are not physically present “over the board” (OTB), chess is one of the most easily exploitable games by those who wish to cheat, because of the widespread availability of very strong chess-playing programs. Allegations of cheating even in OTB games have increased significantly in recent years, and even led to recent changes in the laws of the game that potentially impinge upon players’ privacy. In this work, we examine some of the difficulties inherent in identifying the covert use of chess-playing programs purely from an analysis of the moves of a game. Our approach is to deeply examine a large collection of games where there is confidence that cheating has not taken place, and analyse those that could be easily misclassified. We conclude that there is a serious risk of finding numerous “false positives” and that, in general, it is unsafe to use just the moves of a single game as prima facie evidence of cheating. We also demonstrate that it is impossible to compute definitive values of the figures currently employed to measure similarity to a chess-engine for a particular game, as values inevitably vary at different depths and, even under identical conditions, when multi-threading evaluation is used

On the Presence of Thermal SZ Induced Signal in the First Year WMAP Temperature Maps

Using available optical and X-ray catalogues of clusters and superclusters of galaxies, we build templates of tSZ emission as they should be detected by the WMAP experiment. We compute the cross-correlation of our templates with WMAP temperature maps, and interpret our results separately for clusters and for superclusters of galaxies. For clusters of galaxies, we claim 2-5 $\sigma$ detections in our templates built from BCS Ebeling et al. (1998), NORAS (Boehringer et al. 2000) and de Grandi et al. (1999) catalogues. In these templates, the typical cluster temperature decrements in WMAP maps are around 15-35 $\mu$K in the RJ range (no beam deconvolution applied). Several tests probing the possible influence of foregrounds in our analyses demonstrate that our results are robust against galactic contamination. On supercluster scales, we detect a diffuse component in the V & W WMAP bands which cannot be generated by superclusters in our catalogues (Einasto et al. 1994, 1997), and which is not present in the clean map of Tegmark, de Oliveira-Costa & Hamilton (2003). Using this clean map, our analyses yield, for Einasto's supercluster catalogues, the following upper limit for the comptonization parameter associated to supercluster scales: y_{SC} < 2.18 \time s 10^{-8} at the 95% confidence limit.Comment: MNRAS accepted. New section and minor changes include

Strong one-pion decay of Σc\Sigma_c, Σc∗\Sigma_c^* and Ξc∗\Xi_c^*

Working in the framework of a nonrelativistic quark model we evaluate the widths for the strong one-pion decays $\Sigma_c\to\Lambda_c \pi$, $\Sigma_c^*\to\Lambda_c \pi$ and $\Xi_c^{*}\to\Xi_c \pi$. We take advantage of the constraints imposed by heavy quark symmetry to solve the three-body problem by means of a simple variational ansatz. We use partial conservation of the axial current hypothesis to get the strong vertices from weak axial current matrix elements. Our results are in good agreement with experimental data.Comment: 3 latex pages. Contribution to the Proceedings of the Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum VII Conference (QCHS7) Ponta Delgada (PT) Sept 2-7, 200