Heavy quarkonium: progress, puzzles, and opportunities

A golden age for heavy quarkonium physics dawned a decade ago, initiated by the confluence of exciting advances in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and an explosion of related experimental activity. The early years of this period were chronicled in the Quarkonium Working Group (QWG) CERN Yellow Report (YR) in 2004, which presented a comprehensive review of the status of the field at that time and provided specific recommendations for further progress. However, the broad spectrum of subsequent breakthroughs, surprises, and continuing puzzles could only be partially anticipated. Since the release of the YR, the BESII program concluded only to give birth to BESIII; the $B$-factories and CLEO-c flourished; quarkonium production and polarization measurements at HERA and the Tevatron matured; and heavy-ion collisions at RHIC have opened a window on the deconfinement regime. All these experiments leave legacies of quality, precision, and unsolved mysteries for quarkonium physics, and therefore beg for continuing investigations. The plethora of newly-found quarkonium-like states unleashed a flood of theoretical investigations into new forms of matter such as quark-gluon hybrids, mesonic molecules, and tetraquarks. Measurements of the spectroscopy, decays, production, and in-medium behavior of c\bar{c}, b\bar{b}, and b\bar{c} bound states have been shown to validate some theoretical approaches to QCD and highlight lack of quantitative success for others. The intriguing details of quarkonium suppression in heavy-ion collisions that have emerged from RHIC have elevated the importance of separating hot- and cold-nuclear-matter effects in quark-gluon plasma studies. This review systematically addresses all these matters and concludes by prioritizing directions for ongoing and future efforts.Comment: 182 pages, 112 figures. Editors: N. Brambilla, S. Eidelman, B. K. Heltsley, R. Vogt. Section Coordinators: G. T. Bodwin, E. Eichten, A. D. Frawley, A. B. Meyer, R. E. Mitchell, V. Papadimitriou, P. Petreczky, A. A. Petrov, P. Robbe, A. Vair

Saccharomyces cerevisiae Ccr4–Not complex contributes to the control of Msn2p-dependent transcription by the Ras/cAMP pathway

The Ccr4–Not complex is a global regulator of transcription that affects genes positively and negatively and is thought to modulate the activity of TFIID. In the present work, we provide evidence that the Ccr4–Not complex may contribute to transcriptional regulation by the Ras/cAMP pathway. Several observations support this model. First, Msn2/4p-dependent transcription, which is known to be under negative control of cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA), is derepressed in all ccr4–not mutants. This phenotype is paralleled by specific post-translational modification defects of Msn2p in ccr4–not mutants relative to wild-type cells. Secondly, mutations in various NOT genes result in a synthetic temperature-sensitive growth defect when combined with mutations that compromise cells for PKA activity and at least partially suppress the effects of both a dominant-active RAS2Val-19 allele and loss of Rim15p. Thirdly, Not3p and Not5p, which are modified and subsequently degraded by stress signals that also lead to increased Msn2/4p-dependent activity, show a specific twohybrid interaction with Tpk2p. Together, our results suggest that the Ccr4–Not complex may function as an effector of the Ras/cAMP pathway that contributes to repress basal, stress- and starvation-induced transcription by Msn2/4p