Decays of the MSSM Higgs Bosons with Explicit CP Violation

We study Higgs boson decays in the minimal supersymmetric standard model where the tree-level CP invariance of the Higgs potential is explicitly broken by loop effects of soft CP-violating Yukawa interactions related to scalar quarks of the third generation. The scalar-pseudoscalar mixing among two neutral CP-even Higgs bosons and one CP-odd Higgs boson due to explicit CP violation modifies their tree-level couplings to fermions, to the W^\pm and Z bosons and to Higgs bosons themselves significantly. We analyze the phenomenological impact of explicit CP violation on the branching ratios of the neutral Higgs boson decays in detail and discuss how to directly confirm the existence of explicit CP violation through \tau^+ \tau^- and t \bar{t} spin correlations in the decays of the neutral Higgs bosons into a tau-lepton pair and a top-quark pair.Comment: 28 pages, 10 figures, some references added and correcte

Further evidence to change the medical classification system of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association

A number of researchers have long questioned systems used for classifying athletes with disabilities. Wheelchair basketball players have gained much attention from researchers. Despite this, no change to the NWBA classification system has been made since it was first adopted in 1984. This study investigated the NWBA classification system. At two summer basketball camps, 46 players were tested to assess player sprint performance and stratification under the NWBA medical classification system. The group consisted of Class 1, 2, and 3 players. Electronic timing gates were used to collect 20 meter sprint-times. Results indicate that Class 1 players were significantly slower compared to Class 2 and 3 players (p < .05) with no difference between Class 2 and 3. The results of this study support a change to this system

SARS-CoV-2 Infections in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Populations in Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, from April 2020 to January 2022

The global pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has highlighted the disparity between developed and developing countries for infectious disease surveillance and the sequencing of pathogen genomes. The majority of SARS-CoV-2 sequences published are from Europe, North America, and Asia. Between April 2020 and January 2022, 795 SARS-CoV-2-positive nares swabs from individuals in the U.S. Navy installation Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, were collected, sequenced, and analyzed. In this study, we described the results of genomic sequencing and analysis for 589 samples, the first published viral sequences for Djibouti, including 196 cases of vaccine breakthrough infections. This study contributes to the knowledge base of circulating SARS-CoV-2 lineages in the under-sampled country of Djibouti, where only 716 total genome sequences are available at time of publication. Our analysis resulted in the detection of circulating variants of concern, mutations of interest in lineages in which those mutations are not common, and emerging spike mutations

Precise Higgs mass calculations in (non-)minimal supersymmetry at both high and low scales

We present FlexibleEFTHiggs, a method for calculating the SM-like Higgs pole mass in SUSY (and even non-SUSY) models, which combines an effective field theory approach with a diagrammatic calculation. It thus achieves an all order resummation of leading logarithms together with the inclusion of all non-logarithmic 1-loop contributions. We implement this method into FlexibleSUSY and study its properties in the MSSM, NMSSM, E6SSM and MRSSM. In the MSSM, it correctly interpolates between the known results of effective field theory calculations in the literature for a high SUSY scale and fixed-order calculations in the full theory for a sub-TeV SUSY scale. We compare our MSSM results to those from public codes and identify the origin of the most significant deviations between the DR-bar programs. We then perform a similar comparison in the remaining three non-minimal models. For all four models we estimate the theoretical uncertainty of FlexibleEFTHiggs and the fixed-order DR-bar programs thereby finding that the former becomes more precise than the latter for a SUSY scale above a few TeV. Even for sub-TeV SUSY scales, FlexibleEFTHiggs maintains the uncertainty estimate around 2-3 GeV, remaining a competitive alternative to existing fixed-order computations.Comment: 51 pages, corrected eq. (27), made minor corrections to some plots and tex