Direct collider signatures of large extra dimensions

The realization of low (TeV) scale strings usually requires the existence of large (TeV) extra dimensions where gauge bosons live. The direct production of Kaluza-Klein excitations of the photon and Z-boson at present and future colliders is studied in this work. At the LEPII, NLC and Tevatron colliders, these Kaluza-Klein modes lead to deviations from the standard model cross-sections, which provide lower bounds on their mass. At the LHC the corresponding resonances can be produced and decay on-shell, triggering a characteristic pattern in the distribution of the dilepton invariant mass.Comment: 14 pages, LateX, 5 figure

Production of Kaluza-Klein States at Future Colliders

Perturbative breaking of supersymmetry in four-dimensional string theories predict in general the existence of new large dimensions at the TeV scale. Such large dimensions lie in a domain of energies accessible to particle accelerators. Their main signature is the production of Kaluza-Klein excitations which can be detected at future colliders. We study this possibility for hadron colliders (TEVATRON, LHC) and $e^+ e^-$ colliders (LEP-200, NLC-500).Comment: 13 pages, LATEX, 4 postscript figures appended at the end, CPTH-A293.0294 and IEM-FT-84/9

Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order Higgs Production at Hadron Colliders

The Higgs boson production cross section at pp and p\bar{p} colliders is calculated in QCD at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO). We find that the perturbative expansion of the production cross section is well behaved and that scale dependence is reduced relative to the NLO result. These findings give us confidence in the reliability of the prediction. We also report an error in the NNLO correction to Drell-Yan production.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, minor change

Attitudes toward and experiences of gender issues among physician teachers: A survey study conducted at a university teaching hospital in Sweden

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Gender issues are important to address during medical education, however research about the implementation of gender in medical curricula reports that there are obstacles. The aim of this study was to explore physician teachers' attitudes to gender issues.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>As part of a questionnaire, physician teachers at Umeå University in Sweden were given open-ended questions about explanations for and asked to write examples why they found gender important or not. The 1 469 comments from the 243 respondents (78 women, 165 men) were analyzed by way of content analysis. The proportion of comments made by men and women in each category was compared.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We found three themes in our analysis: Understandings of gender, problems connected with gender and approaches to gender. Gender was associated with differences between women and men regarding behaviour and disease, as well as with inequality of life conditions. Problems connected with gender included: delicate situations involving investigations of intimate body parts or sexual attraction, different expectations on male and female physicians and students, and difficulty fully understanding the experience of people of the opposite sex. The three approaches to gender that appeared in the comments were: 1) avoidance, implying that the importance of gender in professional relationships was recognized but minimized by comparing gender with aspects, such as personality and neutrality; 2) simplification, implying that gender related problems were easy to address, or already solved; and 3) awareness, implying that the respondent was interested in gender issues or had some insights in research about gender. Only a few individuals described gender as an area of competence and knowledge. There were comments from men and women in all categories, but there were differences in the relative weight for some categories. For example, recognizing gender inequities was more pronounced in the comments from women and avoidance more common in comments from men.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The surveyed physician teachers gave many examples of gender-related problems in medical work and education, but comments describing gender as an area of competence and knowledge were few. Approaches to gender characterized by avoidance and simplification suggest that faculty development programs on gender need to address and reflect on attitudes as well as knowledge.</p

Gender differences in Parkinson's disease: A clinical perspective

Available data indicate that there are gender differences in many features of Parkinson's disease (PD). Precise identification of the gender differences is important to tailor treatment, predict outcomes, and meet other individual and social needs in women and men with PD. The aim of this study was to review the available clinical data on gender differences in PD. Original articles and meta‐analyses published between 1990 and 2016 systematically exploring gender differences in PD were reviewed. There is slight male preponderance in incidence and prevalence of PD. PD starts earlier in men. Women tend to be more prone to develop tremor‐dominant PD but are less rigid than men. Motor improvement after deep brain stimulation is equal in both sexes, but women tend to show better improvement in activities of daily living. Furthermore, women with PD show better results on tests for general cognitive abilities, outperform men in verbal cognitive tasks, show more pain symptoms, and score higher on depression scales. It seems, however, that the differences in cognition, mood, and pain perception are not disease specific as similar gender differences can be found in healthy subjects and in other neurological conditions. Despite PD being the most frequently studied movement disorder, studies investigating gender differences in PD are still scarce with most of the studies being cross‐sectional. Good‐quality, prospective, longitudinal studies analyzing gender differences in PD and comparing them to matched healthy controls are needed in order to properly address the issues of gender differences in PD

QCD and Yukawa corrections to single-top-quark production via q qbar -> t bbar

We calculate the O(alpha_s) and O(alpha_W m_t^2/M_W^2) corrections to the production of a single top quark via the weak process q qbar -> t bbar at the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN Large Hadron Collider. An accurate calculation of the cross section is necessary in order to extract |V_tb| from experiment.Comment: LaTeX, 13 pages, replaced with version to appear in Phys. Rev.

The light-cone gauge and the calculation of the two-loop splitting functions

We present calculations of next-to-leading order QCD splitting functions, employing the light-cone gauge method of Curci, Furmanski, and Petronzio (CFP). In contrast to the `principal-value' prescription used in the original CFP paper for dealing with the poles of the light-cone gauge gluon propagator, we adopt the Mandelstam-Leibbrandt prescription which is known to have a solid field-theoretical foundation. We find that indeed the calculation using this prescription is conceptionally clear and avoids the somewhat dubious manipulations of the spurious poles required when the principal-value method is applied. We reproduce the well-known results for the flavour non-singlet splitting function and the N_C^2 part of the gluon-to-gluon singlet splitting function, which are the most complicated ones, and which provide an exhaustive test of the ML prescription. We also discuss in some detail the x=1 endpoint contributions to the splitting functions.Comment: 41 Pages, LaTeX, 8 figures and tables as eps file

One-loop corrections to the Drell--Yan process in SANC (II). The neutral current case

Radiative corrections to the neutral current Drell--Yan-like processes are considered. Complete one-loop electroweak corrections are calculated within the SANC system. Theoretical uncertainties are discussed. Numerical results are presented for typical conditions of LHC experiments.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, 3 table

High-precision QCD at hadron colliders: electroweak gauge boson rapidity distributions at NNLO

We compute the rapidity distributions of W and Z bosons produced at the Tevatron and the LHC through next-to-next-to leading order in QCD. Our results demonstrate remarkable stability with respect to variations of the factorization and renormalization scales for all values of rapidity accessible in current and future experiments. These processes are therefore ``gold-plated'': current theoretical knowledge yields QCD predictions accurate to better than one percent. These results strengthen the proposal to use W and Z production to determine parton-parton luminosities and constrain parton distribution functions at the LHC. For example, LHC data should easily be able to distinguish the central parton distribution fit obtained by MRST from that obtained by Alekhin.Comment: 47 pages, 17 figures. Minor typos, 1 reference correcte

Correction Factors for Reactions involving Quark-Antiquark Annihilation or Production

In reactions with $q \bar q$ production or $q\bar q$ annihilation, initial- and final-state interactions give rise to large corrections to the lowest-order cross sections. We evaluate the correction factor first for low relative kinetic energies by studying the distortion of the relative wave function. We then follow the procedure of Schwinger to interpolate this result with the well-known perturbative QCD vertex correction factors at high energies, to obtain an explicit semi-empirical correction factor applicable to the whole range of energies. The correction factor predicts an enhancement for $q\bar q$ in color-singlet states and a suppression for color-octet states, the effect increasing as the relative velocity decreases. Consequences on dilepton production in the quark-gluon plasma, the Drell-Yan process, and heavy quark production processes are discussed.Comment: 25 pages (REVTeX), includes 2 uuencoded compressed postscript figure