Photon collider search strategy for sleptons and dark matter at the LHC

We propose a search strategy using the LHC as a photon collider to open sensitivity to scalar lepton (slepton $\tilde{\ell}$) production with masses around 15 to 60 GeV above that of neutralino dark matter $\tilde{\chi}^0_1$. This region is favored by relic abundance and muon $(g-2)_\mu$ arguments. However, conventional searches are hindered by the irreducible diboson background. We overcome this obstruction by measuring initial state kinematics and the missing momentum four-vector in proton-tagged ultraperipheral collisions using forward detectors. We demonstrate sensitivity beyond LEP for slepton masses of up to 220 GeV for $15 \lesssim \Delta m(\tilde{\ell}, \tilde{\chi}^0_1) \lesssim 60$ GeV with 100 fb$^{-1}$ of 13 TeV proton collisions. We encourage the LHC collaborations to open this forward frontier for discovering new physics.Comment: 4 pages + bibliography, 3 figure

iSpace: Printed English After Joyce, Shannon, and Derrida

To begin my essay with a nonword or borderline word is to relive the consequence of manifest entanglements between the literary imagination and technoscience. iSpace is one of many graphic aberrations introduced into English by James Joyce. There are others, of course—printed signs on paper as well as electronic pulses on the computer screen—that can go anywhere from exuberant nonsense to promised logographical embodiment: “alaphbedic,” “televisible,” “verbivocovisual,” and so on. Joyce scholars have rightly pointed out that literary theory is still catching up with the author of Finnegans Wake, that modernist engineer of a cyberspace avant la lettre of outrageous signs and letter sequences. Joyce conjured up the printed sign iSpace long before the internet or the iPod. The novelty of his vision and technē of writing never ceases to surprise the generations of readers who have since grown up and experienced the dramatic unfolding of biocybernetic events in their own lives.I am interested in exploring whether the perceived entanglements between literature and technoscience can promise a new understanding of the nature and function of the phonetic alphabet and alphabetical writing. What insights or implications, if any, can we glean from contemporary biocybernetic developments that may help us rethink literary theory and make it truly relevant to the task of interpreting social life, text, and machine from the ground up, which is to say, from the basic building blocks of literacy

Translingual Folklore and Folklorics in China

Folklore can mean different things to different people and even become different things as it travels from place to place across the various technological media: writing, print, gramophone, radio, film, television, and so on. Focusing on the work of modern folklorists in China and their translation of a colonial discourse, this article – a chapter in "Companion to Folklore" (2012) – examines the global trajectory of folklore studies in colonial mimicry, nationalism, and the staging of the world revolution in the twentieth century

The Eventfulness of Translation: Temporality, Difference, and Competing Universals

The article seeks to develop a new angle for translation studies by rethinking its relationship to the political. It begins with the question “Can the eventfulness of translation itself be thought?” Since neither the familiar model of communication (translatable and untranslatable) nor the biblical model of the Tower of Babel (the promise or withdrawal of meaning) can help us work out a suitable answer to that question, the author proposes an alternative method that incorporates the notions of temporality, difference, and competing universals in the reframing of translation. This method requires close attention to the multiple temporalities of translation in concrete analyses of translingual practices, or what the author calls “differentially distributed discursive practices across languages.” The author’s textual analysis focuses on a few pivotal moments of translation in global history—chosen for their world transforming influences or actual and potential global impact—to demonstrate what is meant by the “eventfulness of translation.” These include, for example, the nineteenth-century Chinese translation of Henry Wheaton’s "Elements of International Law" or "Wanguo gongfa", the post-World War II multilingual fashioning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with a focus on P. C. Chang’s unique contribution, and the Afro-Asian writers’ translation project during the Cold War

Shadows of Universalism: The Untold Story of Human Rights around 1948

How did the idea of self-determination get written into human rights after World War II? And by whom? In this article, Lydia H. Liu reopens the history of how the postwar norms of human rights were radically transformed by an unexpected clash with the classical standard of civilization in international law. She analyzes the drafting of the document of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the UN debates surrounding it to explore the translingual forging of universalism in the multiple temporalities of global history

The Thug, the Barbarian, and the Work of Injury in Imperial Warfare

In the modern English lexicon, the curious word thug is usually traced to Hindi. In the early days of the antithug military campaign in India, William Henry Sleeman, the British architect of the campaign, brought out a thug lexicon entitled Ramaseeana; or, A Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language Used by the Thugs in 1836. This lexicon represents the first systematic attempt to identify who the thugs are and how they communicate with one another in secret society. It appears to provide hard linguistic evidence for a newly discovered threat to the British presence in India, cobbling together a large collection of predominantly Hindi words and phrases and building them into a coherent image of the thug that attests to the authenticity of Hindu thuggism. The graphic details of thugs’ cold-blooded strangling of innocent travelers are as numerous as the amount of verbs and nouns that have found their way into the book and into subsequent embellishments by popular media. That the word thug is of Hindi origin (thag, theg, or thak) seems sufficient to prove that thugs exist and pose a threat

New physics and tau g−2g-2 using LHC heavy ion collisions

The anomalous magnetic moment of the tau lepton $a_τ=(g_τ-2)/2$ strikingly evades measurement but is highly sensitive to new physics such as compositeness or supersymmetry. We propose using ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions at the LHC to probe modified magnetic $δa_τ$ and electric dipole moments $δd_τ$. We design a suite of analyses with signatures comprising one electron/muon plus track(s), leveraging the exceptionally clean photon fusion $γγ→ττ$ events to reconstruct both leptonic and hadronic tau decays sensitive to $δa_τ,δd_τ$. Assuming 10% systematic uncertainties, the current $2 nb^{-1}$ lead-lead dataset could already provide constraints of $-0.0080<a_τ<0.0046$ at 68% C.L. This surpasses 15-year-old lepton collider precision by a factor of 3 while opening novel avenues to new physics

Design Guidelines for Prompt Engineering Text-to-Image Generative Models

Text-to-image generative models are a new and powerful way to generate visual artwork. However, the open-ended nature of text as interaction is double-edged; while users can input anything and have access to an infinite range of generations, they also must engage in brute-force trial and error with the text prompt when the result quality is poor. We conduct a study exploring what prompt keywords and model hyperparameters can help produce coherent outputs. In particular, we study prompts structured to include subject and style keywords and investigate success and failure modes of these prompts. Our evaluation of 5493 generations over the course of five experiments spans 51 abstract and concrete subjects as well as 51 abstract and figurative styles. From this evaluation, we present design guidelines that can help people produce better outcomes from text-to-image generative models