Incidence of bruising and dark firm dry beef in cattle carcasses in a commercial abattoir in Zimbabwe: an animal welfare concern

A reseach paper on the beef industry in Zimbabwe.The incidence of carcass bruising and occurrence of dark, firm, dry (DFD) beef in slaughter cattle were investigated from a survey of 9585 cattle delivered to a commercial abattoir. The objectives of the study were to evaluate the extent of occurrence of carcass bruising and DFD in slaughter cattle as these have a major impact on economic returns to the beef producer. In addition, these data can be used as indicators of either good or poor welfare of the animals prior to slaughter. In this study, the overall incidence of bruising was 29.6 percent while that of DFD was 27.4 percent. There were differences between the incidences of both bruising and DFD (p<0.001) in carcasses from bulls, steers and cows. Overall, bulls had the greatest carcass damage and steers the lowest. In addition, bruising increased (r = 0.97; p<0.05) and the incidence of DFD also increased (r = 0.94; p<0.05) with increasing transit distance. Linear regression analysis showed that a sixty kilometer increase in transit distance resulted in a seven percent increment in bruising (equation: y = 6.9 + 7.1 x; R2 = 0.96; p = 0.0047). However, there was no association between bruising and DFD. Among different carcass weights, there was considerable variation in frequency of occurrence of DFD (p<0.001), with the proportion of carcasses showing DFD decreasing as carcass weight increased. The results indicate substantial compromised animal welfare and major economic loss to the entire livestock industry. Further, the results suggest that transit distance appears to contribute substantially to causes of bruising and DFD in slaughter cattle in Zimbabwe

Heavy Quark Production in the ACOT Scheme Beyond NLO

We analyze the properties of the ACOT scheme for heavy quark production and make use of the MS-Bar massless results at NNLO and N3LO for the structure functions F2 and FL in neutral current deep-inelastic scattering to estimate the higher order corrections. The dominant heavy quark mass effects at higher orders can be taken into account using the massless Wilson coefficients together with an appropriate slow-rescaling prescription implementing the phase space constraints. Combining the exact ACOT scheme at NLO with these expressions should provide a good approximation to the full calculation in the ACOT scheme at NNLO and N3LO.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Presented at DIS12, March 2012, Bonn, German

Update on nCTEQ PDFs: nuclear PDF uncertainties and LHC applications

We present updated nCTEQ nuclear parton distribution functions with errors including pion production data from RHIC. We compare them with the results of other groups and present selected LHC applications.Comment: Presented at DIS2014, 28 April - 2 May 2014, Warsaw, Poland. PoS(DIS2014)04

CTEQ nuclear parton distribution functions

We show for the first time preliminary results of nuclear parton distribution function analysis of charged lepton DIS and Drell-Yan data within the CTEQ framework including error PDFs. We compare our error estimates to estimates of different nPDF groups.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in the proceedings of XXI International Workshop on Deep-Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects, Marseilles, Franc

A Hybrid Scheme for Heavy Flavors: Merging the FFNS and VFNS

We introduce a Hybrid Variable Flavor Number Scheme for heavy flavors, denoted H-VFNS, which incorporates the advantages of both the traditional Variable Flavor Number Scheme (VFNS) as well as the Fixed Flavor Number Scheme (FFNS). By including an explicit $N_F$-dependence in both the Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs) and the strong coupling constant $\alpha_S$, we generate coexisting sets of PDFs and $\alpha_S$ for $N_F=\{3,4,5,6\}$ at any scale $\mu$, that are related analytically by the $\overline{\text{MS}}$ matching conditions. The H-VFNS resums the heavy quark contributions and provides the freedom to choose the optimal $N_F$ for each particular data set. Thus, we can fit selected HERA data in a FFNS framework, while retaining the benefits of the VFNS to analyze LHC data at high scales. We illustrate how such a fit can be implemented for the case of both HERA and LHC data.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, updated to match journa

nCTEQ15 - Global analysis of nuclear parton distributions with uncertainties in the CTEQ framework

We present the new nCTEQ15 set of nuclear parton distribution functions with uncertainties. This fit extends the CTEQ proton PDFs to include the nuclear dependence using data on nuclei all the way up to 208^Pb. The uncertainties are determined using the Hessian method with an optimal rescaling of the eigenvectors to accurately represent the uncertainties for the chosen tolerance criteria. In addition to the Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS) and Drell-Yan (DY) processes, we also include inclusive pion production data from RHIC to help constrain the nuclear gluon PDF. Furthermore, we investigate the correlation of the data sets with specific nPDF flavor components, and asses the impact of individual experiments. We also provide comparisons of the nCTEQ15 set with recent fits from other groups.Comment: 35 page

Strange Quark PDFs and Implications for Drell-Yan Boson Production at the LHC

Global analyses of Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs) have provided incisive constraints on the up and down quark components of the proton, but constraining the other flavor degrees of freedom is more challenging. Higher-order theory predictions and new data sets have contributed to recent improvements. Despite these efforts, the strange quark PDF has a sizable uncertainty, particularly in the small x region. We examine the constraints from experiment and theory, and investigate the impact of this uncertainty on LHC observables. In particular, we study W/Z production to see how the s-quark uncertainty propagates to these observables, and examine the extent to which precise measurements at the LHC can provide additional information on the proton flavor structure.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, added reference

A Review of the Intrinsic Heavy Quark Content of the Nucleon

We present a review of the state of the art of our understanding of the intrinsic charm and bottom content of the nucleon. We discuss theoretical calculations, constraints from global analyses, and collider observables sensitive to the intrinsic heavy quark distributions. A particular emphasis is put on the potential of a high energy and high luminosity fixed target experiment using the LHC beams (AFTER@LHC) to search for intrinsic charm