Optimal Intermediation Under Aggregate Consumption Uncertainty

The paper develops a banking framework where a welfare comparison is made between non-tradable demand deposit and equity contracts. Contrary to the existing literature that relies heavily on smooth preferences assumption to justify the liquidity insurance superiority of the ‘run-prone’ debt contracts over the ‘run-free’ equity contracts, the paper shows that when aggregate consumption uncertainty is introduced, the welfare dominance of deposit contracts emerges for a simpler preference structure as deposit contracts offer more risk-sharing opportunities. The model illustrates that such uncertainty creates a high dispersion between the allocations that can be attained by trading in the secondary market, and therefore the equity contract provides ex ante less risk-sharing to risk-averse consumers than a tailored-made debt contract.financial intermediation, aggregate uncertainty, deposit contracts, equity contracts.

Scale dependence and collinear subtraction terms for Higgs production in gluon fusion at N3LO

The full, explicit, scale dependence of the inclusive N3LO cross section for single Higgs hadroproduction is obtained by calculating the convolutions of collinear splitting kernels with lower-order partonic cross sections. We provide results for all convolutions of splitting kernels and lower-order partonic cross sections to the order in epsilon needed for the full N3LO computation, as well as their expansions around the soft limit. We also discuss the size of the total scale uncertainty at N3LO that can be anticipated with existing information.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure, 1 table, 8 ancillary files. v2: added 4 references, changed labelling of contour plot

iHixs 2 - Inclusive Higgs Cross Sections

We present a new release of the program iHixs. This easy-to-use tool allows to derive state of the art predictions for the inclusive production cross section of a Higgs boson at hadron colliders in the gluon fusion production mode. This includes the most up-to-date corrections in perturbative QCD and electro-weak theory, effects due to finite quark masses as well as an option to perform threshold resummation. In particular, exact perturbative QCD corrections through N3LO are included in the heavy top quark effective theory. Furthermore, iHixs contains automatic routines that allow to assess residual uncertainties on the prediction for the Higgs boson production cross section according to well established standard definitions. iHixs can be obtained from https://github.com/dulatf/ihixs .Comment: 46 pages, 3 awesome figure

A model of cytoskeletal reorientation in response to substrate stretching

Living adherent cells change their orientation in response to substrate stretching such that their cytoskeletal components reorganize in a new direction. To study this phenomenon, we model the cytoskeleton as a planar system of elastic cables and struts both pinned at their endpoints to a flat flexible substrate. Tensed (pre-strained) cables represent acting stress fibers, whereas compression-bearing struts represent microtubules. We assume that in response to uniaxial substrate stretching the model reorients and deforms into a new configuration that minimizes its total potential energy. Using the Maxwell's global stability criterion, we find global minima configurations during static extension and compression of the substrate. Based on these results, we predict reorientation during cyclic stretching of the substrate. We find that in response to cyclic stretching cells either reorient transversely to the direction of stretching, or exhibit multiple configurations symmetrically distributed relative to the direction of stretching. These predictions are consistent with experimental data on living cells from the literature

NLO QCD corrections to the production of t-tbar-Z in gluon fusion

We compute the O(alpha_s) QCD corrections to the partonic process gg -> t-tbar-Z at the LHC. This partonic channel is the dominant component of the scattering process pp -> t-tbar-Z, which will be important for measuring the t-tbar-Z electroweak couplings. The O(alpha_s) corrections increase the total cross section by up to 75% for reasonable choices of the renormalization and factorization scales. Inclusion of these contributions descreases the residual scale dependence of the cross section coming from uncalculated higher order terms to +-5%.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

QCD corrections to tri-boson production

We present a computation of the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the production of three Z bosons at the LHC. We calculate these corrections using a completely numerical method that combines sector decomposition to extract infrared singularities with contour deformation of the Feynman parameter integrals to avoid internal loop thresholds. The NLO QCD corrections to pp -> ZZZ are approximately 50%, and are badly underestimated by the leading order scale dependence. However, the kinematic dependence of the corrections is minimal in phase space regions accessible at leading order.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures; typos fixed, references and event listing adde

t \bar{t} W production and decay at NLO

We present results for the production of a top pair in association with a W-boson at next-to-leading order. We have implemented this process into the parton-level integrator MCFM including the decays of both the top quarks and the W-bosons with full spin correlations. Although the cross section for this process is small, it is a Standard Model source of same-sign lepton events that must be accounted for in many new physics searches. For a particular analysis of same-sign lepton events in which b-quarks are also present, we investigate the effect of the NLO corrections as a function of the signal region cuts.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Automatic Integral Reduction for Higher Order Perturbative Calculations

We present a program for the reduction of large systems of integrals to master integrals. The algorithm was first proposed by Laporta; in this paper, we implement it in MAPLE. We also develop two new features which keep the size of intermediate expressions relatively small throughout the calculation. The program requires modest input information from the user and can be used for generic calculations in perturbation theory.Comment: 23 page