Dynamical simulation of heavy-ion collisions in the energy range from a few tens MeV/A to a few hundreds MeV/A

The overlapping stage of heavy-ion reactions can be simulated by dynamical microscopical models, such as those built on the basis of the Molecular Dynamics (MD) approaches, allowing to study the fragment formation process. The present performances of the Quantum MD (QMD) code developed at the University of Milano are discussed, showing results concerning fragment and particle production at bombarding energies up to \lsim 700 MeV/A, as well as a preliminary analysis on the isoscaling behaviour of isotopic yield ratios for reactions with isospin composition N/Z in the (1 - 1.2) range, at a 45 MeV/A bombarding energy.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures. Invited talk presented at the 27th Workshop on Nuclear Theory, Rila Mountains, June 23 - 28 200

Bayesian View Of Solar Neutrino Oscillations

We present the results of a Bayesian analysis of solar neutrino data in terms of nu_e->nu_{mu,tau} and nu_e->nu_s oscillations, where nu_s is a sterile neutrino. We perform a Rates Analysis of the rates of solar neutrino experiments, including the first SNO CC result, and spectral data of the CHOOZ experiment, and a Global Analysis that takes into account also the Super-Kamiokande day and night electron energy spectra. We show that the Bayesian analysis does not suffer any problem from the inclusion of the numerous bins of the CHOOZ and Super-Kamiokande energy spectra and allows to reach the same conclusions on the favored type of neutrino transitions and on the determination of the most favored values of the oscillation parameters in both the Rates and Global Analysis. Our Bayesian analysis shows that nu_e->nu_s transitions are strongly disfavored with respect to nu_e->nu_{mu,tau} transitions. In the case of nu_e->nu_{mu,tau} oscillations, the LMA region is favored by the data (86% probability), the LOW region has some small chance (13% probability), the VO region is almost excluded (1% probability) and the SMA region is practically excluded (0.01% probability). We calculate also the marginal posterior probability distributions for tan^2 theta and Delta m^2 and we show that the data imply large mixing almost with certainty and large values of Delta m^2 are favored. We present also the results of a standard least-squares analysis and we show that the standard goodness of fit test is not able to rejects pure nu_e->nu_s transitions. The likelihood ratio test allows to reject pure nu_e->nu_s transitions in favor of nu_e->nu_{mu,tau} transitions only in the Global Analysis.Comment: 31 pages, 8 figures. Final version to be published in JHE

Statistical Analysis of Solar Neutrino Data

We calculate with Monte Carlo the goodness of fit and the confidence level of the standard allowed regions for the neutrino oscillation parameters obtained from the fit of the total rates measured in solar neutrino experiments. We show that they are significantly overestimated in the standard method. We also calculate exact allowed regions with correct frequentist coverage. We show that the exact VO, LMA and LOW regions are much larger than the standard ones and merge together giving an allowed band at large mixing angles for all Delta m^2 > 10^{-10} eV^2.Comment: 4 pages. Talk presented by C. Giunti at NOW 2000, Conca Specchiulla (Otranto, Italy), 9-16 Sep. 200

R2SM: a package for the analytic computation of the R2 Rational terms in the Standard Model of the Electroweak interactions

The analytical package written in FORM presented in this paper allows the computation of the complete set of Feynman Rules producing the Rational terms of kind R2 contributing to the virtual part of NLO amplitudes in the Standard Model of the Electroweak interactions. Building block topologies filled by means of generic scalars, vectors and fermions, allowing to build these Feynman Rules in terms of specific elementary particles, are explicitly given in the Rxi gauge class, together with the automatic dressing procedure to obtain the Feynman Rules from them. The results in more specific gauges, like the 't Hooft Feynman one, follow as particular cases, in both the HV and the FDH dimensional regularization schemes. As a check on our formulas, the gauge independence of the total Rational contribution (R1 + R2) to renormalized S-matrix elements is verified by considering the specific example of the H --> gamma-gamma decay process at 1-loop. This package can be of interest for people aiming at a better understanding of the nature of the Rational terms. It is organized in a modular way, allowing a further use of some its files even in different contexts. Furthermore, it can be considered as a first seed in the effort towards a complete automation of the process of the analytical calculation of the R2 effective vertices, given the Lagrangian of a generic gauge theory of particle interactions

ttˉbbˉt\bar{t}b\bar{b} hadroproduction with massive bottom quarks with PowHel

The associated production of top-antitop-bottom-antibottom quarks is a relevant irreducible background for Higgs boson analyses in the top-antitop-Higgs production channel, with Higgs decaying into a bottom-antibottom quark pair. We implement this process in the PowHel event generator, considering the bottom quarks as massive in all steps of the computation which involves hard-scattering matrix-elements in the 4-flavour number scheme combined with 4-flavour Parton Distribution Functions. Predictions with NLO QCD + Parton Shower accuracy, as obtained by PowHel + PYTHIA, are compared to those which resulted from a previous PowHel implementation with hard-scattering matrix-elements in the 5-flavour number scheme, considering as a baseline the example of a realistic analysis of top-antitop hadroproduction with additional $b$-jet activity, performed by the CMS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Lepton fluxes from atmospheric charm revisited

We update predictions for lepton fluxes from the hadroproduction of charm quarks in the scattering of primary cosmic rays with the Earth's atmosphere. The calculation of charm-pair hadroproduction applies the latest results from perturbative QCD through next-to-next-to-leading order and modern parton distributions, together with estimates on various sources of uncertainties. Our predictions for the lepton fluxes turn out to be compatible, within the uncertainty band, with recent results in the literature. However, by taking into account contributions neglected in previous works, our total uncertainties are much larger. The predictions are crucial for the interpretation of results from neutrino experiments like IceCube, when disentangling signals of neutrinos of astrophysical origin from the atmospheric background.Comment: 40 pages, 24 figure

Assessing the role of nuclear effects in the interpretation of the MiniBooNE low-energy anomaly

We study the impact of the effect of multinucleon interactions in the reconstruction of the neutrino energy on the fit of the MiniBooNE data in terms of neutrino oscillations. We obtain some improvement of the fit of the MiniBooNE low-energy excess in the framework of two-neutrino oscillations and a shift of the allowed region in the $\sin^2 2\vartheta$--$\Delta{m}^2$ plane towards smaller values of $\sin^2 2\vartheta$ and larger values of $\Delta{m}^2$. However this effect is not enough to solve the problem of the appearance-disappearance tension in the global fit of short-baseline neutrino oscillation data.Comment: 14 pages; to be published in PR

Hadroproduction of W+W−bbˉW^+ W^- b \bar{b} at NLO accuracy matched with shower Monte Carlo programs

We present the computation of the differential cross section for the process $pp(\bar{p}) \to (W^+\,W^-\,b\,\bar{b} \to)\;e^+\,\nu_e\,\mu^-\,\bar{\nu}_\mu\,b\, \bar{b}+X$ at NLO QCD accuracy matched to Shower Monte Carlo (SMC) simulations using PowHel, on the basis of the interface between HELAC-NLO and POWHEG-BOX. We include all resonant and non-resonant contributions. This is achieved by fully taking into account the effect of off-shell t-quarks and off-shell W-bosons in the complex mass scheme. We also present a program called DECAYER that can be used to let the t-quarks present in the event files for $pp(\bar{p}) \to {t\,\bar{t}\,X}$ processes decay including both the finite width of the t-quarks and spin correlations. We present predictions for both the Tevatron and the LHC, with emphasis on differences emerging from three different $W^+\,W^-\,b\,\bar{b}$ hadroproduction computations: (i) full implementation of the $p\,p(\bar{p}) \to W^+\,W^-\,b\,\bar{b}$ process, (ii) generating on-shell t-quarks pushed off-shell with a Breit-Wigner finite width and decayed by DECAYER, and (iii) on-shell t-quark production followed by decay in the narrow width approximation, as described by the SMC.Comment: 40 pages, 26 figures; slightly expanded version matching the one published in JHE