Particle decay in false vacuum

We revisit the problem of decay of a metastable vacuum induced by the presence of a particle. For the bosons of the `master field' the problem is solved in any number of dimensions in terms of the spontaneous decay rate of the false vacuum, while for a fermion we find a closed expression for the decay rate in (1+1) dimensions. It is shown that in the (1+1) dimensional case an infrared problem of one-loop correction to the decay rate of a boson is resolved due to a cancellation between soft modes of the field. We also find the boson decay rate in the `sine-Gordon staircase' model in the limits of strong and weak coupling.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figure

Direct photon production from hadronic sources in high-energy heavy-ion collisions

The low $p_T$ direct photon production from a variety of the hadronic sources is studied within the microscopic HSD transport approach for p+C, p+Pb and Pb+Pb collisions at 160 A GeV. The direct photon emission from elementary hadronic scatterings as well as meson-meson bremsstrahlung are incorporated. The influence of in-medium effects such as a collisional broadening of the vector-meson spectral functions on the photon emission rate is found to be hardly observable in the final spectra which are dominated by bremsstrahlung type processes. The uncertainties in the subtraction of the 'background' from the photon decay of hadronic resonances inside the hot and dense fireball is investigated, additionally. Our findings are relevant for the interpretation and extraction of experimental data on direct photon production at low $p_T$.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

BcB_c Physics at Hadron Colliders

In this paper we summarize the results of the theory working group dedicated to the analysis of $B_c$ production at hadron colliders.Comment: 7 pages, LaTe