3,553 research outputs found
Understanding patterns and drivers of Alaskan fire-regime variability across spatial and temporal scales
Boreal forest and tundra ecosystems are globally important because the mobilization of large carbon stocks, and changes in energy balance could act as positive feedbacks to ongoing climate warming. In Alaska, wildfire is a key driver of ecosystem structure and function, and therefore fire strongly determines the feedbacks between high-latitude ecosystems and the larger Earth system. The paleoecological record from Alaska reveals the sensitivity of fire regimes to climatic and vegetation change over centennial to millennial time scales, highlighting increased burning with warming and/or increased landscape flammability associated with large-scale vegetation changes. This thesis focuses on two studies aimed at advancing our understanding of the history and spatiotemporal patterns of fire in Alaskan ecosystems over Holocene time scales (i.e., the past 10,000 years). In Chapter 1, I developed seven lake-sediment records of fire history spanning the past 465 years from CE 1550 to 2015. In Chapter 2 I synthesized 27 published sediment-charcoal records from four Alaskan ecoregions to evaluate variability and synchrony in fire activity over the past 10,000 years. In both chapters, fire history was inferred from interpretations of macroscopic charcoal records from lake sediments. Biomass burning varied over centennial and millennial time scales within each of the four Alaskan ecoregions. Both biomass burning and fire frequency increased significantly with the expansion of black spruce, c. 4-6 thousand years ago. Biomass burning also increased during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) in some regions, but results do not indicate prolonged periods of synchronous fire activity among regions. Upper limits to fire synchrony suggest fire-vegetation interaction may provide a negative feedbacks to increased burning. Increases in biomass burning with non-varying fire return intervals suggests an increase in fire severity during warm periods. Over the last century, our records also reveal significant increases in biomass burning. This research highlights the sensitivity of fire activity to broad-scale environmental change, including climate warming or major shifts in vegetation flammability. The lack of prolonged synchrony and apparent tradeoffs between tree recruitment and biomass burning indicate important vegetation feedbacks that may confer resilience of boreal forests to increased warming and fire activity
Reply to: ''Improved Determination of the CKM Angle alpha from B -> pipi decays''
In reply to hep-ph/0701204 we demonstrate why the arguments made therein do
not address the criticism exposed in hep-ph/0607246 on the fundamental
shortcomings of the Bayesian approach when it comes to the extraction of
parameters of Nature from experimental data. As for the isospin analysis and
the CKM angle alpha it is shown that the use of uniform priors for the observed
quantities in the Explicit Solution parametrization is equivalent to a
frequentist construction resulting from a change of variables, and thus relies
neither on prior PDFs nor on Bayes' theorem. This procedure provides in this
particular case results that are similar to the Confidence Level approach, but
the treatment of mirror solutions remains incorrect and it is far from being
general. In a second part it is shown that important differences subsist
between the Bayesian and frequentist approaches, when following the proposal of
hep-ph/0701204 and inserting additional information on the hadronic amplitudes
beyond isospin invariance. In particular the frequentist result preserves the
exact degeneracy that is expected from the remaining symmetries of the problem
while the Bayesian procedure does not. Moreover, in the Bayesian approach
reducing inference to the 68% or 95% credible interval is a misconception of
the meaning of the posterior PDF, which in turn implies that the significant
dependence of the latter to the chosen parametrization cannot be viewed as a
minor effect, contrary to the claim in hep-ph/0701204.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure. Fig. 1 corrected (wrong file
The global electroweak fit at NNLO and prospects for the LHC and ILC
For a long time, global fits of the electroweak sector of the Standard Model
(SM) have been used to exploit measurements of electroweak precision
observables at lepton colliders (LEP, SLC), together with measurements at
hadron colliders (Tevatron, LHC), and accurate theoretical predictions at
multi-loop level, to constrain free parameters of the SM, such as the Higgs and
top masses. Today, all fundamental SM parameters entering these fits are
experimentally determined, including information on the Higgs couplings, and
the global fits are used as powerful tools to assess the validity of the theory
and to constrain scenarios for new physics. Future measurements at the Large
Hadron Collider (LHC) and the International Linear Collider (ILC) promise to
improve the experimental precision of key observables used in the fits. This
paper presents updated electroweak fit results using newest NNLO theoretical
predictions, and prospects for the LHC and ILC. The impact of experimental and
theoretical uncertainties is analysed in detail. We compare constraints from
the electroweak fit on the Higgs couplings with direct LHC measurements, and
examine present and future prospects of these constraints using a model with
modified couplings of the Higgs boson to fermions and bosons.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figure
A configuration system for the ATLAS trigger
The ATLAS detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider will be exposed to
proton-proton collisions from beams crossing at 40 MHz that have to be reduced
to the few 100 Hz allowed by the storage systems. A three-level trigger system
has been designed to achieve this goal. We describe the configuration system
under construction for the ATLAS trigger chain. It provides the trigger system
with all the parameters required for decision taking and to record its history.
The same system configures the event reconstruction, Monte Carlo simulation and
data analysis, and provides tools for accessing and manipulating the
configuration data in all contexts.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, contribution to the Conference on Computing in
High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP06), 13.-17. Feb 2006, Mumbai, Indi
Can the Renormalization Group Improved Effective Potential be used to estimate the Higgs Mass in the Conformal Limit of the Standard Model?
We consider the effective potential in the standard model with a single
Higgs doublet in the limit that the only mass scale present is
radiatively generated. Using a technique that has been shown to determine
completely in terms of the renormalization group (RG) functions when using the
Coleman-Weinberg (CW) renormalization scheme, we first sum leading-log (LL)
contributions to using the one loop RG functions, associated with five
couplings (the top quark Yukawa coupling , the quartic coupling of the Higgs
field , the SU(3) gauge coupling , and the couplings
and ). We then employ the two loop RG functions with the three couplings
, , to sum the next-to-leading-log (NLL) contributions to and
then the three to five loop RG functions with one coupling to sum all the
contributions to . In order to compute these sums, it is
necessary to convert those RG functions that have been originally computed
explicitly in the minimal subtraction (MS) scheme to their form in the CW
scheme. The Higgs mass can then be determined from the effective potential: the
result is decreases to at
order and at order. No reasonable
estimate of can be made at orders or . This is taken
to be an indication that this mechanism for spontaneous symmetry breaking is in
fact viable, though one in which there is slow convergence towards the actual
value of . The mass is argued to be an upper bound on
.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures. Updated version contains new discussion,
references, figures, and corrects errors in reference
A population-based approach to background discrimination in particle physics
Background properties in experimental particle physics are typically
estimated using control samples corresponding to large numbers of events. This
can provide precise knowledge of average background distributions, but
typically does not consider the effect of fluctuations in a data set of
interest. A novel approach based on mixture model decomposition is presented as
a way to estimate the effect of fluctuations on the shapes of probability
distributions in a given data set, with a view to improving on the knowledge of
background distributions obtained from control samples. Events are treated as
heterogeneous populations comprising particles originating from different
processes, and individual particles are mapped to a process of interest on a
probabilistic basis. The proposed approach makes it possible to extract from
the data information about the effect of fluctuations that would otherwise be
lost using traditional methods based on high-statistics control samples. A
feasibility study on Monte Carlo is presented, together with a comparison with
existing techniques. Finally, the prospects for the development of tools for
intensive offline analysis of individual events at the Large Hadron Collider
are discussed.Comment: Updated according to the version published in J. Phys.: Conf. Ser.
Minor changes have been made to the text with respect to the published
article with a view to improving readabilit
Searching for physics beyond the Standard Model through the dipole interaction
The magnetic dipole interaction played a central role in the development of
QED, and continued in that role for the Standard Model. The muon anomalous
magnetic moment has served as a benchmark for models of new physics, and the
present experimental value is larger than the standard-model value by more than
three standard deviations. The electric dipole moment (EDM) violates parity
({}) and time-reversal ({}) symmetries, and in the context of the
theorem, the combination of charge conjugation and parity (). Since a new
source of {} violation outside of that observed in the and meson
systems is needed to help explain the baryon asymmetry of the universe,
searches for EDMs are being carried out worldwide on a number of systems. The
standard-model value of the EDM is immeasurably small, so any evidence for an
EDM would signify the observation of new physics. Unique opportunities exist
for EDM searches using polarized proton, deuteron or muon beams in storage
rings. This talk will provide an overview of the theory of dipole moments, and
the relevant experiments. The connection to the transition dipole moment that
could produce lepton flavor violating interactions such as is also mentioned.Comment: Invited Plenary talk at the 19th International Spin Physics
Symposium, Juelic
Averages of b-hadron Properties at the End of 2005
This article reports world averages for measurements on b-hadron properties
obtained by the Heavy Flavor Averaging Group (HFAG) using the available results
as of at the end of 2005. In the averaging, the input parameters used in the
various analyses are adjusted (rescaled) to common values, and all known
correlations are taken into account. The averages include lifetimes, neutral
meson mixing parameters, parameters of semileptonic decays, branching fractions
of B meson decays to final states with open charm, charmonium and no charm, and
measurements related to CP asymmetries
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