423 research outputs found
Urea Uptake and Carbon Fixation by Marine Pelagic Bacteria and Archaea during the Arctic Summer and Winter Seasons
How Arctic climate change might translate into alterations of biogeochemical cycles of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) with respect to inorganic and organic N utilization is not well understood. This study combined N-15 uptake rate measurements for ammonium, nitrate, and urea with N-15-and C-13-based DNA stable-isotope probing (SIP). The objective was to identify active bacterial and archeal plankton and their role in N and C uptake during the Arctic summer and winter seasons. We hypothesized that bacteria and archaea would successfully compete for nitrate and urea during the Arctic winter but not during the summer, when phytoplankton dominate the uptake of these nitrogen sources. Samples were collected at a coastal station near Barrow, AK, during August and January. During both seasons, ammonium uptake rates were greater than those for nitrate or urea, and nitrate uptake rates remained lower than those for ammonium or urea. SIP experiments indicated a strong seasonal shift of bacterial and archaeal N utilization from ammonium during the summer to urea during the winter but did not support a similar seasonal pattern of nitrate utilization. Analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequences obtained from each SIP fraction implicated marine group I Crenarchaeota (MGIC) as well as Betaproteobacteria, Firmicutes, SAR11, and SAR324 in N uptake from urea during the winter. Similarly, C-13 SIP data suggested dark carbon fixation for MGIC, as well as for several proteobacterial lineages and the Firmicutes. These data are consistent with urea-fueled nitrification by polar archaea and bacteria, which may be advantageous under dark conditions
Four agendas for research and policy on emissions mitigation and well-being
The climate crisis requires nations to achieve human well-being with low national levels of carbon emissions. Countries vary from one another dramatically in how effectively they convert resources into well-being, and some nations with low levels of emissions have relatively high objective and subjective well-being. We identify urgent research and policy agendas for four groups of countries with either low or high emissions and well-being indicators. Least studied are those with low well-being and high emissions. Understanding social and political barriers to switching from high-carbon to lower-carbon modes of production and consumption, and ways to overcome them, will be fundamental
Discovery Potential for Low-Scale Gauge Mediation at Early LHC
Low-scale gauge-mediated supersymmetry(SUSY)-breaking (GMSB) models with
gravitino mass m_{3/2}<16 eV are attractive, since there are no flavor and
cosmological problems. In this paper, we thoroughly study the collider signal
in the case that the next-to-lightest SUSY particle is the bino or slepton and
investigate the discovery potential of the LHC. Our result is applicable to a
wider class of GMSB models other than the minimal GMSB models and we pay
particular attention to realistic experimental setups. We also apply our
analysis to the minimal GMSB models with a metastable SUSY-breaking vacuum and
we show, by requiring sufficient stability of the SUSY-breaking vacuum, these
models can be tested at an early stage of the LHC.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures.Texts in section 3.2.2 and 3.2.4 are revised.
Captions change
General Neutralino NLSPs at the Early LHC
Gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking (GMSB) is a theoretically
well-motivated framework with rich and varied collider phenomenology. In this
paper, we study the Tevatron limits and LHC discovery potential for a wide
class of GMSB scenarios in which the next-to-lightest superpartner (NLSP) is a
promptly-decaying neutralino. These scenarios give rise to signatures involving
hard photons, 's, 's, jets and/or higgses, plus missing energy. In order
to characterize these signatures, we define a small number of minimal spectra,
in the context of General Gauge Mediation, which are parameterized by the mass
of the NLSP and the gluino. Using these minimal spectra, we determine the most
promising discovery channels for general neutralino NLSPs. We find that the
2010 dataset can already cover new ground with strong production for all NLSP
types. With the upcoming 2011-2012 dataset, we find that the LHC will also have
sensitivity to direct electroweak production of neutralino NLSPs.Comment: 26 page
Lepton Jets in (Supersymmetric) Electroweak Processes
We consider some of the recent proposals in which weak-scale dark matter is
accompanied by a GeV scale dark sector that could produce spectacular
lepton-rich events at the LHC. Since much of the collider phenomenology is only
weakly model dependent it is possible to arrive at generic predictions for the
discovery potential of future experimental searches. We concentrate on the
production of dark states through bosons and electroweak-inos at the
Tevatron or LHC, which are the cleanest channels for probing the dark sector.
We properly take into account the effects of dark radiation and dark cascades
on the formation of lepton jets. Finally, we present a concrete definition of a
lepton jet and suggest several approaches for inclusive experimental searches.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figures, published version, added section 3.3 expanding
on lepton jet's morpholog
Revealing the footprints of squark gluino production through Higgs search experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at 7 TeV and 14 TeV
The invariant mass distribution of the di-photons from the decay of the
lighter scalar Higgs boson(h) to be carefully measured by dedicated h search
experiments at the LHC may be distorted by the di-photons associated with the
squark-gluino events with much larger cross sections in Gauge Mediated
Supersymmetry Breaking (GMSB) models. This distortion if observed by the
experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at 7 TeV or 14 TeV, would disfavour
not only the standard model but various two Higgs doublet models with
comparable h - masses and couplings but without a sector consisting of new
heavy particles decaying into photons. The minimal GMSB (mGMSB) model
constrained by the mass bound on h from LEP and that on the lightest neutralino
from the Tevatron, produce negligible effects. But in the currently popular
general GMSB(GGMSB) models the tail of the above distribution may show
statistically significant excess of events even in the early stages of the LHC
experiments with integrated luminosity insufficient for the discovery of h. We
illustrate the above points by introducing several benchmark points in various
GMSB models - minimal as well as non-minimal. The same conclusion follows from
a detailed parameter scan in a simplified GGMSB model recently employed by the
CMS collaboration to interpret their searches in the di-photon + \etslash
channel. Other observables like the effective mass distribution of the
di-photon + X events may also reveal the presence of new heavy particles beyond
the Higgs sector. The contamination of the h mass peak and simple remedies are
also discussed.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures, title and organization of the paper is changed,
detailed parameter scan in a simplified GGMSB model is added, conclusions and
old numerical results remain unchange
Aberrant signaling in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia: biological and therapeutic implications
T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) is a biologically heterogeneous disease with respect to phenotype, gene expression profile and activation of particular intracellular signaling pathways. Despite very significant improvements, current therapeutic regimens still fail to cure a portion of the patients and frequently implicate the use of aggressive protocols with long-term side effects. In this review, we focused on how deregulation of critical signaling pathways, in particular Notch, PI3K/Akt, MAPK, Jak/STAT and TGF-beta, may contribute to T-ALL. Identifying the alterations that affect intracellular pathways that regulate cell cycle and apoptosis is essential to understanding the biology of this malignancy, to define more effective markers for the correct stratification of patients into appropriate therapeutic regimens and to identify novel targets for the development of specific, less detrimental therapies for T-ALL
Gluino Decay as a Probe of High Scale Supersymmetry Breaking
A supersymmetric standard model with heavier scalar supersymmetric particles
has many attractive features. If the scalar mass scale is O(10 - 10^4) TeV, the
standard model like Higgs boson with mass around 125 GeV, which is strongly
favored by the LHC experiment, can be realized. However, in this scenario the
scalar particles are too heavy to be produced at the LHC. In addition, if the
scalar mass is much less than O(10^4) TeV, the lifetime of the gluino is too
short to be measured. Therefore, it is hard to probe the scalar particles at a
collider. However, a detailed study of the gluino decay reveals that two body
decay of the gluino carries important information on the scalar scale. In this
paper, we propose a test of this scenario by measuring the decay pattern of the
gluino at the LHC.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures; version published in JHE
Excess Higgs Production in Neutralino Decays
The ATLAS and CMS experiments have recently claimed discovery of a Higgs
boson-like particle at ~5 sigma confidence and are beginning to test the
Standard Model predictions for its production and decay. In a variety of
supersymmetric models, a neutralino NLSP can decay dominantly to the Higgs and
the LSP. In natural SUSY models, a light third generation squark decaying
through this chain can lead to large excess Higgs production while evading
existing BSM searches. Such models can be observed at the 8 TeV LHC in channels
exploiting the rare diphoton decays of the Higgs produced in the cascade decay.
Identifying a diphoton resonance in association with missing energy, a lepton,
or b-tagged jets is a promising search strategy for discovery of these models,
and would immediately signal new physics involving production of a Higgs boson.
We also discuss the possibility that excess Higgs production in these SUSY
decays can be responsible for enhancements of up to 50% over the SM prediction
for the observed rate in the existing inclusive diphoton searches, a scenario
which would likely by the end of the 8 TeV run be accompanied by excesses in
the diphoton + lepton/MET and SUSY multi-lepton/b searches and a potential
discovery in a diphoton + 2b search.Comment: 42 pages, 19 figure
The Status of GMSB After 1/fb at the LHC
We thoroughly investigate the current status of supersymmetry in light of the
latest searches at the LHC, using General Gauge Mediation (GGM) as a
well-motivated signature generator that leads to many different simplified
models. We consider all possible promptly-decaying NLSPs in GGM, and by
carefully reinterpreting the existing LHC searches, we derive limits on both
colored and electroweak SUSY production. Overall, the coverage of GGM parameter
space is quite good, but much discovery potential still remains even at 7 TeV.
We identify several regions of parameter space where the current searches are
the weakest, typically in models with electroweak production, third generation
sfermions or squeezed spectra, and we suggest how ATLAS and CMS might modify
their search strategies given the understanding of GMSB at 1/fb. In particular,
we propose the use of leptonic to suppress backgrounds.
Because we express our results in terms of simplified models, they have broader
applicability beyond the GGM framework, and give a global view of the current
LHC reach. Our results on 3rd generation squark NLSPs in particular can be
viewed as setting direct limits on naturalness.Comment: 44 pages, refs added, typos fixed, improved MC statistics in fig 1
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