Impact of QED corrections to Higgs decay into four leptons at the LHC

At the LHC a precise measurement of the Higgs boson mass (if discovered), at the level of 0.1-1%, will be possible through the channel g g --> H --> 4l for a wide range of Higgs mass values. To match such an accuracy, the systematic effects induced by QED corrections need to be investigated. In the present study the calculation of O(alpha) and higher order QED corrections is illustrated as well as their impact on the Higgs mass determination, once realistic event selection criteria for charged leptons and photons are considered.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Presented at HEP2005 July 21st-27th, 2005, Lisboa, Portugal and at RADCOR 2005, Shonan Village, October 2nd-7th, 2005, Japa

Dynamical System Analysis of Cosmologies with Running Cosmological Constant from Quantum Einstein Gravity

We discuss a mechanism that induces a time-dependent vacuum energy on cosmological scales. It is based on the instability induced renormalization triggered by the low energy quantum fluctuations in a Universe with a positive cosmological constant. We employ the dynamical systems approach to study the qualitative behavior of Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmologies where the cosmological constant is dynamically evolving according with this nonperturbative scaling at low energies. It will be shown that it is possible to realize a "two regimes" dark energy phases, where an unstable early phase of power-law evolution of the scale factor is followed by an accelerated expansion era at late times.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figures. To appear in New Journal of Physic

Multi-photon corrections to W boson mass determination at hadron colliders

The impact of higher-order final-state photonic corrections on the precise determination of the W-boson mass at the Tevatron and LHC colliders is evaluated. The W-mass shift from a fit to the transverse mass distribution is found to be about 10 MeV in the W --> mu nu channel and a few MeV in the W --> e nu channel. The calculation, which is implemented in the Monte Carlo event generator HORACE for data analysis, can contribute to reduce the uncertainty associated to the W mass measurement at present and future hadron collider experiments.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, to appear in the proceedings of International Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics (EPS 2003), Aachen, Germany, 17-23 Jul 200

A new approach to evaluate the leading hadronic corrections to the muon g-2

We propose a novel approach to determine the leading hadronic corrections to the muon g-2. It consists in a measurement of the effective electromagnetic coupling in the space-like region extracted from Bhabha scattering data. We argue that this new method may become feasible at flavor factories, resulting in an alternative determination potentially competitive with the accuracy of the present results obtained with the dispersive approach via time-like data.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures. Version accepted for publication in Phys. Lett.

Global gravitational instability of FLRW backgrounds - interpreting the dark sectors

The standard model of cosmology is based on homogeneous-isotropic solutions of Einstein's equations. These solutions are known to be gravitationally unstable to local inhomogeneous perturbations, commonly described as evolving on a background given by the same solutions. In this picture, the FLRW backgrounds are taken to describe the average over inhomogeneous perturbations for all times. We study in the present article the (in)stability of FLRW dust backgrounds within a class of averaged inhomogeneous cosmologies. We examine the phase portraits of the latter, discuss their fixed points and orbital structure and provide detailed illustrations. We show that FLRW cosmologies are unstable in some relevant cases: averaged models are driven away from them through structure formation and accelerated expansion. We find support for the proposal that the dark components of the FLRW framework may be associated to these instability sectors. Our conclusion is that FLRW cosmologies have to be considered critically as for their role to serve as reliable models for the physical background.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures, 1 table. Matches published version in CQ

Full one-loop electroweak corrections to e+e- to 3 jets at linear colliders

We describe the impact of the full one-loop electroweak terms of O(alpha_s alpha_EM^3) entering the electron-positron into three-jet cross-section from sqrt(s)=M_Z to TeV scale energies. We include both factorisable and non-factorisable virtual corrections and photon bremsstrahlung. Their importance for the measurement of alpha_S from jet rates and shape variables is explained qualitatively and illustrated quantitatively, also in presence of b-tagging.Comment: 6 pages, to appear in the proceedings of the workshop "LC09 -- e+e- Physics at the TeV scale and the Dark Matter Connection", 21-24 September 2009, Perugia (Italy). Minor corrections, references added

Accelerator Memory Reuse in the Dark Silicon Era

Accelerators integrated on-die with General-Purpose CPUs (GP-CPUs) can yield significant performance and power improvements. Their extensive use, however, is ultimately limited by their area overhead; due to their high degree of specialization, the opportunity cost of investing die real estate on accelerators can become prohibitive, especially for general-purpose architectures. In this paper we present a novel technique aimed at mitigating this opportunity cost by allowing GP-CPU cores to reuse accelerator memory as a non-uniform cache architecture (NUCA) substrate. On a system with a last level-2 cache of 128kB, our technique achieves on average a 25% performance improvement when reusing four 512 kB accelerator memory blocks to form a level-3 cache. Making these blocks reusable as NUCA slices incurs on average in a 1.89% area overhead with respect to equally-sized ad hoc cache slice