Voices from the diaspora: changing hierarchies and dynamics of Chinese multilingualism

The so-called Chinese diasporas, i.e. Chinese communities outside Greater China (China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan), have traditionally been dialect dominant; that is, the vast majority of Chinese immigrants are speakers of (especially Southern) dialects. Cantonese and Hokkien are two of the most prominent dialects. With globalization and the rise of China as a world politico-economic power, the national, standardized variety, Putonghua, is gaining particular prestige amongst the Chinese diasporas. For example, all the Cantonese schools for British Chinese children in the UK now also teach Putonghua, but none of the Putonghua schools teach Cantonese. Using ethnographic interviews with and participant observation of Chinese people of different generations in various diasporic communities, this paper examines the changing hierarchies of varieties of Chinese, the implications of such changes for the education and identity development of the young, and the constitution of a (speech) community in the post-modern era. It focuses on language attitude and linguistic practices (including literacy practices). It also investigates the tensions between the competing ideologies and discourses on national and ethnic identities, nationalism, community relations and cultural values

Single soft gluon emission at two loops

We study the single soft-gluon current at two loops with two energetic partons in massless perturbative QCD, which describes, for example, the soft limit of the two-loop amplitude for $gg\to Hg$. The results are presented as Laurent expansions in $\epsilon$ in $D=4-2\epsilon$ spacetime dimension. We calculate the expansion to order $\epsilon^2$ analytically, which is a necessary ingredient for Higgs production at hadron colliders at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order in the soft-virtual approximation. We also give two-loop results of the single soft-gluon current in ${\cal N}=4$ Super-Yang-Mills theory, and find that it has uniform transcendentality. By iteration relation of splitting amplitudes, our calculations can determine the three-loop single soft-gluon current to order $\epsilon^0$ in ${\cal N}=4$ Super-Yang-Mills theory in the limit of large $N_c$.Comment: typos corrected; journal versio

Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to tZtZ associated production via the flavor-changing neutral-current couplings at hadron colliders

We present the complete next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to $tZ$ associated production induced by the model-independent $tqg$ and $tqZ$ flavor-changing neutral-current couplings at hadron colliders, respectively. Our results show that, for the $tuZ$ coupling the NLO QCD corrections can enhance the total cross sections by about 60% and 42%, and for the $tcZ$ coupling by about 51% and 43% at the Tevatron and LHC, respectively. The NLO corrections, for the $tug$ couplings, can enhance the total cross sections by about 27%, and by about 42% for the $tcg$ coupling at the LHC. We also consider the mixing effects between the $tqg$ and $tqZ$ couplings for this process, which can either be large or small depending on the values of the anomalous couplings. Besides, the NLO corrections reduce the dependence of the total cross sections on the renormalization or factorization scale significantly, which lead to increased confidence on the theoretical predictions. And we also evaluate the NLO corrections to several important kinematic distributions.Comment: Published version in Phys. Rev.

Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to a heavy resonance production and decay into top quark pair at the LHC

We present a complete next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD calculation to a heavy resonance production and decay into a top quark pair at the LHC, where the resonance could be either a Randall-Sundrum (RS) Kaluza-Klein (KK) graviton $G$ or an extra gauge boson $Z'$. The complete NLO QCD corrections can enhance the total cross sections by about $80\%- 100\%$ and $20\%- 40\%$ for the $G$ and the $Z'$, respectively, depending on the resonance mass. We also explore in detail the NLO corrections to the polar angle distributions of the top quark, and our results show that the shapes of the NLO distributions can be different from the leading order (LO) ones for the KK graviton. Moreover, we study the NLO corrections to the spin correlations of the top quark pair production via the above process, and find that the corrections are small.Comment: Published version in PR

Top-Quark Decay at Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order in QCD

We present the complete calculation of the top-quark decay width at next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD, including next-to-leading electroweak corrections as well as finite bottom quark mass and $W$ boson width effects. In particular, we also show the first results of the fully differential decay rates for top-quark semileptonic decay $t\to W^+(l^+\nu)b$ at next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD. Our method is based on the understanding of the invariant mass distribution of the final-state jet in the singular limit from effective field theory. Our result can be used to study arbitrary infrared-safe observables of top-quark decay with the highest perturbative accuracy.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures; version accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter

The roles of endoglin gene in cerebrovascular diseases.

Endoglin (ENG, also known as CD105) is a transforming growth factor β (TGFβ) associated receptor and is required for both vasculogenesis and angiogenesis. Angiogenesis is important in the development of cerebral vasculature and in the pathogenesis of cerebral vascular diseases. ENG is an essential component of the endothelial nitric oxide synthase activation complex. Animal studies showed that ENG deficiency impairs stroke recovery. ENG deficiency also impairs the regulation of vascular tone, which contributes to the pathogenesis of brain arteriovenous malformation (bAVM) and vasospasm. In human, functional haploinsufficiency of ENG gene causes type I hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT1), an autosomal dominant disorder. Compared to normal population, HHT1 patients have a higher prevalence of AVM in multiple organs including the brain. Vessels in bAVM are fragile and tend to rupture, causing hemorrhagic stroke. High prevalence of pulmonary AVM in HHT1 patients are associated with a higher incidence of paradoxical embolism in the cerebral circulation causing ischemic brain injury. Therefore, HHT1 patients are at risk for both hemorrhagic and ischemic stroke. This review summarizes the possible mechanism of ENG in the pathogenesis of cerebrovascular diseases in experimental animal models and in patients

Resummation prediction on top quark transverse momentum distribution at large pT

We study the factorization and resummation of t-channel top quark transverse momentum distribution at large pT in the SM at both the Tevatron and the LHC with soft-collinear effective theory. The cross section in the threshold region can be factorized into a convolution of hard, jet and soft functions. In particular, we first calculate the NLO soft functions for this process, and give a RG improved cross section by evolving the different functions to a common scale. Our results show that the resummation effects increase the NLO results by about 9%-13% and 4%-9% when the top quark pT is larger than 50 and 70 GeV at the Tevatron and the 8 TeV LHC, respectively. Also, we discuss the scale independence of the cross section analytically, and show how to choose the proper scales at which the perturbative expansion can converge fast.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures, version published in Phys.Rev.

Probing CP-violating htˉth\bar{t}t coupling in e+e−→hγe^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow h \gamma

We investigate the possibility of probing the CP-violating $h\bar{t}t$ coupling in the process $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow h \gamma$ at the future high luminosity $e^{+}e^{-}$ colliders. Our numerical results show that the cross section for this process can be significantly increased for the allowed CP phase $\xi$ and center of mass energy. For example the cross section is about 6 times of that in the standard model (SM) for $\sqrt{s}=350~\mathrm{GeV}$ and $\xi =3\pi/5$ (see text for $\xi$ definition). The simulation for the signal process $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow h \gamma \rightarrow b \bar{b}\gamma$ and its backgrounds shows that the signal significance can reach more than $4.8\sigma$ and $2.3\sigma$ for $\sqrt{s}=350~\mathrm{GeV},\ 500~\mathrm{GeV}$ respectively, with the integrated luminosity $\mathcal{L}=3~\text{ab}^{-1}$ and $\xi\in[\pi/2,3\pi/5]$. For $\mathcal{L}=10~\text{ab}^{-1}$, the signal significance can be greater than 5 for $\sqrt{s}=350~\mathrm{GeV}$ and 3.9 for $\sqrt{s}=500~\mathrm{GeV}$ with the CP phase $\xi\in[\pi/2,3\pi/5]$. Besides the cross section enhancement, the CP-violating $h\bar{t}t$ coupling will induce the forward-backward asymmetry $A_{FB}$ which is absent in the SM and is a clear signal of new CP violation. Compared with the $A_{FB}$ in the Higgs decay $h\rightarrow l^{+}l^{-}\gamma$, the $A_{FB}$ can be greatly enhanced in the production process. For example $A_{FB}$ can reach 0.5 for $\cos\xi\simeq 0.7$ and $\sqrt{s}=500~\mathrm{GeV}$. Due to the large backgrounds, the significance of the expected $A_{FB}$ can only be observed at $1.7\sigma$ with $\mathcal{L}=10~\text{ab}^{-1}$ and $\sqrt{s}=500~\mathrm{GeV}$. It is essential to trigger the single photon in the final state to separate the bottom jets arising from scalar or vector bosons, in order to isolate the signal from the backgrounds more efficiently.Comment: Published version. 19 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables. Discussion on the forward-backward asymmetry is adde

Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the top quark associated with γ\gamma production via model-independent flavor-changing neutral-current couplings at hadron colliders

We present the complete next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to the top quark associated with $\gamma$ production induced by model-independent $tq\gamma$ and $tqg$ flavor-changing neutral-current (FCNC) couplings at hadron colliders, respectively. We also consider the mixing effects between the $tq\gamma$ and $tqg$ FCNC couplings for this process. Our results show that, for the $tq\gamma$ couplings, the NLO QCD corrections can enhance the total cross sections by about 50% and 40% at the Tevatron and LHC, respectively. Including the contributions from the $tq\gamma$, $tqg$ FCNC couplings and their mixing effects, the NLO QCD corrections can enhance the total cross sections by about 50% for the $tu\gamma$ and $tug$ FCNC couplings, and by about the 80% for the $tc\gamma$ and $tcg$ FCNC couplings at the LHC, respectively. Moreover, the NLO corrections reduce the dependence of the total cross section on the renormalization and factorization scale significantly. We also evaluate the NLO corrections for several important kinematic distributions.Comment: 25 pages, 16 figure