Diffraction for non-believers

Diffractive reactions involving a hard scale can be understood in terms of quarks and gluons. These reactions have become a valuable tool for investigating the low-x structure of the proton and the behavior of QCD in the high-density regime, and they may provide a clean environment to study or even discover the Higgs boson at the LHC. In this paper we give a brief introduction to the description of diffraction in QCD. We focus on key features studied in ep collisions at HERA and outline challenges for understanding diffractive interactions at the LHC.Comment: 23 pages, 26 figures. Contributed to the Proceedings of the Workshop on HERA and the LHC, DESY and CERN, 2004-200

A Spectrometer to Study Elastic and Diffractive Physics at LHC

The possibility to study elastic and diffractive physics in pp collisions at LHC is investigated. For this purpose we have considered detectors close to the beam in conjunction with the magnetic elements of the accelerator to provide a high precision spectrometer for very forward final state protons. The geometrical acceptance is given and momentum resolution is calculated for different spatial resolution detectors.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figures, Latex, submitted in International Journal of Modern Physics

Effect due to charge symmetry violation on the Paschos-Wolfenstein relation

The modification of the Paschos-Wolfenstein relation is investigated when the charge symmetry violations of valence and sea quark distributions in the nucleon are taken into account. We also study qualitatively the impact of charge symmetry violation (CSV) effect on the extraction of $\sin^{2}\theta_{w}$ from deep inelastic neutrino- and antineutrino-nuclei scattering within the light-cone meson-baryon fluctuation model. We find that the effect of CSV is too small to give a sizable contribution to the NuTeV result with various choices of mass difference inputs, which is consistence with the prediction that the strange-antistrange asymmetry can account for largely the NuTeV deviation in this model. It is noticeable that the effect of CSV might contribute to the NuTeV deviation when the larger difference between the internal momentum scales, $\alpha_{p}$ of the proton and $\alpha_{n}$ of the neutron, is considered.Comment: 15 Latex pages, no figure, final version to appear in PR

Nuclear parton distributions at next to leading order

We perform a next to leading order QCD global analysis of nuclear deep inelastic scattering and Drell-Yan data using the convolution approach to parameterize nuclear parton densities. We find both a significant improvement in the agreement with data compared to previous extractions, and substantial differences in the scale dependence of nuclear effects compared to leading order analyses.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figure

DIPSI: a Monte Carlo generator for elastic vector meson production in charged lepton-proton scattering

We present a Monte Carlo generator for exclusive vector meson production in charged lepton-proton interactions, l+p --> l+p+V, based on a QCD leading logarithm model calculation according to which the cross section for this process is proportional to the square of the gluon momentum density in the proton. The generator can be used for both fixed target and collider kinematics. Each event is assigned a weight equal to its cross section, so that the independent variables can be generated according to convenient distributions, not necessarily identical to the physics ones.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, Latex, to be published in Computer Physics Communication

Resummed QCD Power Corrections to Nuclear Shadowing

We calculate and resum a perturbative expansion of nuclear enhanced power corrections to the structure functions measured in deeply inelastic scattering of leptons on a nuclear target. Our results for the Bjorken $x$-, $Q^2$- and $A$-dependence of nuclear shadowing in $F_2^A(x,Q^2)$ and the nuclear modifications to $F_L^A(x,Q^2)$, obtained in terms of the QCD factorization approach, are consistent with the existing data. We demonstrate that the low-$Q^2$ behavior of these data and the measured large longitudinal structure function point to a critical role for the power corrections when compared to other theoretical approaches.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, uses RevTeX 4. As published in Phys.Rev.Let

Color Transparency via Coherent Exclusive rho Production

We examine the potential of the COMPASS experiment at CERN to study color transparency via exclusive coherent vector meson production in hard muon-nucleus scattering. It is demonstrated that COMPASS has high sensitivity to test this important prediction of perturbative QCD.Comment: Feasibility study for COMPASS collaboration, 3 pages, no figures, 1 table. This contribution is based on talk presented at the Workshop on Spin Physics, Trento, Italy, July 2001. The conference www site is http://ECTstar.ect.it/contents.html The proceedings of the workshop will be published as a special issue of Nuclear Physics B (proc suppl), eds. S Bass, A De Roeck and A Deshpande. A more complete 26 page feasibility study with 7 figures and 3 tables is available as A. Sandacz et al., hep-ex/0106076 Revision of 26 Sept. for Ref. 11 modificatio

A Prototype Model of Stock Exchange

A prototype model of stock market is introduced and studied numerically. In this self-organized system, we consider only the interaction among traders without external influences. Agents trade according to their own strategy, to accumulate his assets by speculating on the price's fluctuations which are produced by themselves. The model reproduced rather realistic price histories whose statistical properties are also similar to those observed in real markets.Comment: LaTex, 4 pages, 4 Encapsulated Postscript figures, uses psfi