On the Renormalization of a Bosonized Version of the Chiral Fermion-Meson Model at Finite Temperature

Feynman's functional formulation of statistical mechanics is used to study the renormalizability of the well known Linear Chiral Sigma Model in the presence of fermionic fields at finite temperature in an alternative way. It is shown that the renormalization conditions coincide with those of the zero temperature model.Comment: 12 pages, no figures, LaTex, reference [17] is updated, to appear in Phys. Lett.

A nonlocal, covariant generalisation of the NJL model

We solve a nonlocal generalisation of the NJL model in the Hartree approximation. This model has a separable interaction, as suggested by instanton models of the QCD vacuum. The choice of form factor in this interaction is motivated by the confining nature of the vacuum. A conserved axial current is constructed in the chiral limit of the model and the pion properties are shown to satisfy the Gell-Mann--Oakes--Renner relation. For reasonable values of the parameters the model exhibits quark confinement.Comment: 13 pages (RevTeX), MC/TH 94/1

Supersymmetric Leptogenesis

We study leptogenesis in the supersymmetric standard model plus the seesaw. We identify important qualitative differences that characterize supersymmetric leptogenesis with respect to the non-supersymmetric case. The lepton number asymmetries in fermions and scalars do not equilibrate, and are related via a non-vanishing gaugino chemical potential. Due to the presence of new anomalous symmetries, electroweak sphalerons couple to winos and higgsinos, and QCD sphalerons couple to gluinos, thus modifying the corresponding chemical equilibrium conditions. A new constraint on particles chemical potentials corresponding to an exactly conserved $R$-charge, that also involves the number density asymmetry of the heavy sneutrinos, appears. These new ingredients determine the $3\times 4$ matrices that mix up the density asymmetries of the lepton flavours and of the heavy sneutrinos. We explain why in all temperature ranges the particle thermodynamic system is characterized by the same number of independent quantities. Numerical differences with respect to usual treatment remain at the ${\cal O}(1)$ level.Comment: 30 pages, 2 figures. Typos corrected, one reference added. Version published in JCA

Leptogenesis without violation of B-L

We study the possibility of generating the observed baryon asymmetry via leptogenesis in the decay of heavy Standard Model singlet fermions which carry lepton number, in a framework without Majorana masses above the electroweak scale. Such scenario does not contain any source of total lepton number violation besides the Standard Model sphalerons, and the baryon asymmetry is generated by the interplay of lepton flavour effects and the sphaleron decoupling in the decay epoch.Comment: V2 (published version): 21 pages, 4 figures. Some explanations have been adde

Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations and New Physics

We study the robustness of the determination of the neutrino masses and mixing from the analysis of atmospheric and K2K data under the presence of different forms of phenomenologically allowed new physics in the nu_mu--nu_tau sector. We focus on vector and tensor-like new physics interactions which allow us to treat, in a model independent way, effects due to the violation of the equivalence principle, violations of the Lorentz invariance both CPT conserving and CPT violating, non-universal couplings to a torsion field and non-standard neutrino interactions with matter. We perform a global analysis of the full atmospheric data from SKI together with long baseline K2K data in the presence of nu_mu -> nu_tau transitions driven by neutrino masses and mixing together with sub-dominant effects due to these forms of new physics. We show that within the present degree of experimental precision, the extracted values of masses and mixing are robust under those effects and we derive the upper bounds on the possible strength of these new interactions in the nu_mu--nu_tau sector.Comment: 22 pages, LaTeX file using RevTEX4, 5 figures and 4 tables include

Models of Neutrino Masses: Anarchy versus Hierarchy

We present a quantitative study of the ability of models with different levels of hierarchy to reproduce the solar neutrino solutions, in particular the LA solution. As a flexible testing ground we consider models based on SU(5)xU(1)_F. In this context, we have made statistical simulations of models with different patterns from anarchy to various types of hierachy: normal hierarchical models with and without automatic suppression of the 23 (sub)determinant and inverse hierarchy models. We find that, not only for the LOW or VO solutions, but even in the LA case, the hierarchical models have a significantly better success rate than those based on anarchy. The normal hierachy and the inverse hierarchy models have comparable performances in models with see-saw dominance, while the inverse hierarchy models are particularly good in the no see-saw versions. As a possible distinction between these categories of models, the inverse hierarchy models favour a maximal solar mixing angle and their rate of success drops dramatically as the mixing angle decreases, while normal hierarchy models are far more stable in this respect.Comment: v1: 28 pages, 12 figures; v2: 34 pages, 14 figures, updated previous analysis with the inclusion of recent SNO result

Long-term trends in tropical cyclone tracks around Korea and Japan in late summer and early fall

This study investigates long-term trends in tropical cyclones (TCs) over the extratropical western North Pacific (WNP) over a period of 35 years (1982-2016). The area analyzed extended across 30-45 degrees N and 120-150 degrees E, including the regions of Korea and Japan that were seriously affected by TCs. The northward migration of TCs over the WNP to the mid-latitudes showed a sharp increase in early fall. In addition, the duration of TCs over the WNP that migrated northwards showed an increase, specifically in early to mid-September. Therefore, more recently, TC tracks have been observed to significantly extend into the mid-latitudes. The recent northward extension of TC tracks over the WNP in early fall was observed to be associated with changes in environmental conditions that were favorable for TC activities, including an increase in sea surface temperature (SST), decrease in vertical wind shear, expansion of subtropical highs, strong easterly steering winds, and an increase in relative vorticity. In contrast, northward migrations of TCs to Korea and Japan showed a decline in late August, because of the presence of unfavorable environmental conditions for TC activities. These changes in environmental conditions, such as SST and vertical wind shear, can be partially associated with the Pacific decadal oscillation

Improved tensor-product expansions for the two-particle density matrix

We present a new density-matrix functional within the recently introduced framework for tensor-product expansions of the two-particle density matrix. It performs well both for the homogeneous electron gas as well as atoms. For the homogeneous electron gas, it performs significantly better than all previous density-matrix functionals, becoming very accurate for high densities and outperforming Hartree-Fock at metallic valence electron densities. For isolated atoms and ions, it is on a par with previous density-matrix functionals and generalized gradient approximations to density-functional theory. We also present analytic results for the correlation energy in the low density limit of the free electron gas for a broad class of such functionals.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Renormalization Group Evolution of Dirac Neutrino Masses

There are good reasons why neutrinos could be Majorana particles, but there exist also a number of very good reasons why neutrinos could have Dirac masses. The latter option deserves more attention and we derive therefore analytic expressions describing the renormalization group evolution of mixing angles and of the CP phase for Dirac neutrinos. Radiative corrections to leptonic mixings are in this case enhanced compared to the quark mixings because the hierarchy of neutrino masses is milder and because the mixing angles are larger. The renormalization group effects are compared to the precision of current and future neutrino experiments. We find that, in the MSSM framework, radiative corrections of the mixing angles are for large \tan\beta comparable to the precision of future experiments.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures; error in eq. 8 corrected, references adde

Neutrino Oscillations v.s. Leptogenesis in SO(10) Models

We study the link between neutrino oscillations and leptogenesis in the minimal framework assuming an SO(10) see-saw mechanism with 3 families. Dirac neutrino masses being fixed, the solar and atmospheric data then generically induce a large mass-hierarchy and a small mixing between the lightest right-handed neutrinos, which fails to produce sufficient lepton asymmetry by 5 orders of magnitudes at least. This failure can be attenuated for a very specific value of the mixing sin^2(2\theta_{e3})=0.1, which interestingly lies at the boundary of the CHOOZ exclusion region, but will be accessible to future long baseline experiments.Comment: 23 pages, 8 eps figures, JHEP3 format; more accurate effect of dilution reduces previous results, inclusion of all phases, added reference