Phenomenological Consequences of Soft Leptogenesis

Soft supersymmetry breaking terms involving heavy singlet sneutrinos can be the dominant source of leptogenesis. The relevant range of parameters is different from standard leptogenesis: a lighter Majorana mass, M < 10^9 GeV (allowing a solution of the gravitino problem), and smaller Yukawa couplings, Y_N < 10^{-4}. We investigate whether the various couplings of the singlet sneutrinos, which are constrained by the requirement of successful `soft leptogenesis', can have observable phenomenological consequences. Specifically, we calculate the contributions of the relevant soft supersymmetric breaking terms to the electric dipole moments of the charged leptons and to lepton flavor violating decays. Our result is that these contributions are small.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure; v2: an additional contribution is considered (modifying: fig. 1, eq. 10-13, 22) and a reference added. Conclusions unchange

On Anisotropy of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic-Rays

We briefly summarize our study on anisotropy of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic-Rays (UHECRs), in which we define a statistics that measures the correlation between UHECRs and Large Scale Structure (LSS). We also comment here on recently published paper by Koers and Tinyakov that compared our statistics to improved KS statistics.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, proceedings of PANIC 2008. v2: version match publication in Nuclear Physics

A Machine Vision System for Evaluation of Planter Seed Spatial Distribution

Rosana G. Moreira, Editor-in-Chief; Texas A&M UniversityThis is a Technical Paper from International Commission of Agricultural Engineering (CIGR, Commission Internationale du Genie Rural) E-Journal Volume 4 (2002): V. Alchanatis, Y. Kashti, and R. Brikman. A Machine Vision System for Evaluation of Planter Seed Spatial Distribution

Leptogenesis from Supersymmetry Breaking

We show that soft supersymmetry breaking terms involving the heavy sneutrinos can lead to sneutrino-antisneutrino mixing and to new sources of CP violation, which are present even if a single generation is considered. These terms are naturally present in supersymmetric versions of leptogenesis scenarios, and they induce indirect CP violation in the decays of the heavy sneutrinos, eventually generating a baryon asymmetry. This new contribution can be comparable to or even dominate over the asymmetry produced in traditional leptogenesis scenarios.Comment: 4 pages; An improved discussion of the relevant numerical range of the soft breaking terms (in agreement with hep-ph/0308031

DeepCut: Unsupervised Segmentation using Graph Neural Networks Clustering

Image segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision. Data annotation for training supervised methods can be labor-intensive, motivating unsupervised methods. Current approaches often rely on extracting deep features from pre-trained networks to construct a graph, and classical clustering methods like k-means and normalized-cuts are then applied as a post-processing step. However, this approach reduces the high-dimensional information encoded in the features to pair-wise scalar affinities. To address this limitation, this study introduces a lightweight Graph Neural Network (GNN) to replace classical clustering methods while optimizing for the same clustering objective function. Unlike existing methods, our GNN takes both the pair-wise affinities between local image features and the raw features as input. This direct connection between the raw features and the clustering objective enables us to implicitly perform classification of the clusters between different graphs, resulting in part semantic segmentation without the need for additional post-processing steps. We demonstrate how classical clustering objectives can be formulated as self-supervised loss functions for training an image segmentation GNN. Furthermore, we employ the Correlation-Clustering (CC) objective to perform clustering without defining the number of clusters, allowing for k-less clustering. We apply the proposed method for object localization, segmentation, and semantic part segmentation tasks, surpassing state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks

New Ways to Soft Leptogenesis

Soft supersymmetry breaking terms involving heavy singlet sneutrinos provide new sources of lepton number violation and of CP violation. In addition to the CP violation in mixing, investigated previously, we find that `soft leptogenesis' can be generated by CP violation in decay and in the interference of mixing and decay. These additional ways to leptogenesis can be significant for a singlet neutrino Majorana mass that is not much larger than the supersymmetry breaking scale, $M < 100 m_{SUSY}$. In contrast to CP violation in mixing, for some of these new contributions the sneutrino oscillation rate can be much faster than the decay rate, so that the bilinear scalar term need not be smaller than its natural scale.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure

Probing Cosmic Accelerators Using VHE Gamma Rays and UHE cosmic rays

The $\gamma$-ray emission observed in several classes of Galactic and extragalactic astrophysical sources appears to be linked to accreting black holes and rotational powered neutron stars. These systems are prodigious cosmic accelerators, and are also potential sources of the UHE cosmic rays detected by several experiments and VHE neutrinos. We review a recent progress in our understanding of these objects, and demonstrate how recent and future observations can be employed to probe the conditions in the sources.Comment: Proc. PANIC08 (invited

Neutrinos from Decaying Muons, Pions, Kaons and Neutrons in Gamma Ray Bursts

In the internal shock model of gamma ray bursts ultrahigh energy muons, pions, neutrons and kaons are likely to be produced in the interactions of shock accelerated relativistic protons with low energy photons (KeV-MeV). These particles subsequently decay to high energy neutrinos/antineutrinos and other secondaries. In the high internal magnetic fields of gamma ray bursts, the ultrahigh energy charged particles ($\mu^+$, $\pi^+$, $K^+$) lose energy significantly due to synchrotron radiations before decaying into secondary high energy neutrinos and antineutrinos. The relativistic neutrons decay to high energy antineutrinos, protons and electrons. We have calculated the total neutrino flux (neutrino and antineutrino) considering the decay channels of ultrahigh energy muons, pions, neutrons and kaons. We have shown that the total neutrino flux generated in neutron decay can be higher than that produced in $\mu^+$ and $\pi^+$ decay. The charged kaons being heavier than pions, lose energy slowly and their secondary total neutrino flux is more than that from muons and pions at very high energy. Our detailed calculations on secondary particle production in $p\gamma$ interactions give the total neutrino fluxes and their flavour ratios expected on earth. Depending on the values of the parameters (luminosity, Lorentz factor, variability time, spectral indices and break energy in the photon spectrum) of a gamma ray burst the contributions to the total neutrino flux from the decay of different particles (muon, pion, neutron and kaon) may vary and they would also be reflected on the neutrino flavour ratios.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, version accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physic

Centaurus A as a point source of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays

We probe the possibility that Centaurus A (Cen A) is a point source of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) observed by PAO, through the statistical analysis of the arrival direction distribution. For this purpose, we set up the Cen A dominance model for the UHECR sources, in which Cen A contributes the fraction $f_{\rm C}$ of the whole UHECR with energy above $5.5\times10^{19}\,{\rm eV}$ and the isotropic background contributes the remaining $1-f_{\rm C}$ fraction. The effect of the intergalactic magnetic fields on the bending of the trajectory of Cen A originated UHECR is parameterized by the gaussian smearing angle $\theta_s$. Using the correlational angular distance distribution (CADD), we identify the excess of UHECR in the Cen A direction and fit the CADD of the observed PAO data by varying two parameters $f_{\rm C}$ and $\theta_s$ of the Cen A dominance model. The best-fit parameter values are $f_{\rm C}\approx0.1$ (The corresponding Cen A fraction observed at PAO is $f_{\rm C,PAO}\approx0.15$, that is, about 10 out of 69 UHECR.) and $\theta_s=5^\circ$ with the maximum probability $P_{\rm max}=0.29$. Considering the uncertainty concerning the assumption of isotropic background in the Cen A dominance model, we extend the viable parameter ranges to the $2\sigma$ band, $0.09\lesssim f_{\rm C,PAO}\lesssim 0.25$ and $0^\circ\lesssim \theta_s\lesssim 20^\circ$. This result supports the existence of a point source extended by the intergalactic magnetic fields in the direction of Cen A. If Cen A is actually the source responsible for the observed excess of UHECR, the average deflection angle of the excess UHECR implies the order of $10\,{\rm nG}$ intergalactic magnetic field in the vicinity of Cen A.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure