On a link between a species survival time in an evolution model and the Bessel distributions

We consider a stochastic model for species evolution. A new species is born at rate lambda and a species dies at rate mu. A random number, sampled from a given distribution F, is associated with each new species at the time of birth. Every time there is a death event, the species that is killed is the one with the smallest fitness. We consider the (random) survival time of a species with a given fitness f. We show that the survival time distribution depends crucially on whether ff_c where f_c is a critical fitness that is computed explicitly.Comment: 13 page

A stochastic model of evolution

We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event then the type that is killed is the one with the smallest fitness. We show that there is a sharp phase transition when the birth probability is larger than the death probability. The set of species with fitness higher than a certain critical value approach an uniform distribution. On the other hand all the species with fitness less than the critical disappear after a finite (random) time.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, TeX, Added references, To appear in Markov Processes and Related Field

On the renormalization of the electroweak chiral Lagrangian with a Higgs

We consider the scalar sector of the effective non-linear electroweak Lagrangian with a light "Higgs" particle, up to four derivatives in the chiral expansion. The complete off-shell renormalization procedure is implemented, including one loop corrections stemming from the leading two-derivative terms, for finite Higgs mass. This determines the complete set of independent chiral invariant scalar counterterms required for consistency; these include bosonic operators often disregarded. Furthermore, new counterterms involving the Higgs particle which are apparently chiral non-invariant are identified in the perturbative analysis. A novel general parametrization of the pseudoescalar field redefinitions is proposed, which reduces to the various usual ones for specific values of its parameter; the non-local field redefinitions reabsorbing all chiral non-invariant counterterms are then explicitly determined. The physical results translate into renormalization group equations which may be useful when comparing future Higgs data at different energies

Estimations for the Single Diffractive production of the Higgs boson at the Tevatron and the LHC

The single diffractive production of the standard model Higgs boson is computed using the diffractive factorization formalism, taking into account a parametrization for the Pomeron structure function provided by the H1 Collaboration. We compute the cross sections at next-to-leading order accuracy for the gluon fusion process, which includes QCD and electroweak corrections. The gap survival probability ($$) is also introduced to account for the rescattering corrections due to spectator particles present in the interaction, and to this end we compare two different models for the survival factor. The diffractive ratios are predicted for proton-proton collisions at the Tevatron and the LHC for the Higgs boson mass of $M_H$ = 120 GeV. Therefore, our results provide updated estimations for the diffractive ratios of the single diffractive production of the Higgs boson in the Tevatron and LHC kinematical regimes.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, 3 table

Darth Fader: Using wavelets to obtain accurate redshifts of spectra at very low signal-to-noise

We present the DARTH FADER algorithm, a new wavelet-based method for estimating redshifts of galaxy spectra in spectral surveys that is particularly adept in the very low SNR regime. We use a standard cross-correlation method to estimate the redshifts of galaxies, using a template set built using a PCA analysis on a set of simulated, noise-free spectra. Darth Fader employs wavelet filtering to both estimate the continuum & to extract prominent line features in each galaxy spectrum. A simple selection criterion based on the number of features present in the spectrum is then used to clean the catalogue: galaxies with fewer than six total features are removed as we are unlikely to obtain a reliable redshift estimate. Applying our wavelet-based cleaning algorithm to a simulated testing set, we successfully build a clean catalogue including extremely low signal-to-noise data (SNR=2.0), for which we are able to obtain a 5.1% catastrophic failure rate in the redshift estimates (compared with 34.5% prior to cleaning). We also show that for a catalogue with uniformly mixed SNRs between 1.0 & 20.0, with realistic pixel-dependent noise, it is possible to obtain redshifts with a catastrophic failure rate of 3.3% after cleaning (as compared to 22.7% before cleaning). Whilst we do not test this algorithm exhaustively on real data, we present a proof of concept of the applicability of this method to real data, showing that the wavelet filtering techniques perform well when applied to some typical spectra from the SDSS archive. The Darth Fader algorithm provides a robust method for extracting spectral features from very noisy spectra. The resulting clean catalogue gives an extremely low rate of catastrophic failures, even when the spectra have a very low SNR. For very large sky surveys, this technique may offer a significant boost in the number of faint galaxies with accurately determined redshifts.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic