Student Loans and their effect on Parental Views of Education Financing

Using the 2012 wave National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, this study examines the effect that parents\u27 student debt have on their decision to use tax advantage education vehicles to save for their children\u27s college. We also examine parental decisions on obtaining student loans on behalf of their children. The results show that parents who report having student loans are 61% less likely than those that report no student loan debt to use tax-advantaged education saving vehicles. However, we find no difference in the effect of having student loans on the decision to obtain debt to fund their children\u27s college education

The other Higgses, at resonance, in the Lee-Wick extension of the Standard Model

Within the framework of the Lee Wick Standard Model (LWSM) we investigate Higgs pair production $gg \to h_0 h_0$, $gg \to h_0 \tilde p_0$ and top pair production $gg \to \bar tt$ at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where the neutral particles from the Higgs sector ($h_0$, $\tilde h_0$ and $\tilde p_0$) appear as possible resonant intermediate states. We investigate the signal $gg \to h_0 h_0 \to \bar b b \gamma \gamma$ and we find that the LW Higgs, depending on its mass-range, can be seen not long after the LHC upgrade in 2012. More precisely this happens when the new LW Higgs states are below the top pair threshold. In $gg \to \bar tt$ the LW states, due to the wrong-sign propagator and negative width, lead to a dip-peak structure instead of the usual peak-dip structure which gives a characteristic signal especially for low-lying LW Higgs states. We comment on the LWSM and the forward-backward asymmetry in view of the measurement at the TeVatron. Furthermore, we present a technique which reduces the hyperbolic diagonalization to standard diagonalization methods. We clarify issues of spurious phases in the Yukawa sector.Comment: 36 pages, 16 figures, 3 table

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Higgs Production via Weak Boson Fusion in the Standard Model and the MSSM

Weak boson fusion is expected to be an important Higgs production channel at the LHC. Complete one-loop results for weak boson fusion in the Standard Model have been obtained by calculating the full virtual electroweak corrections and photon radiation and implementing these results into the public Monte Carlo program VBFNLO which includes the NLO QCD corrections. Furthermore the dominant supersymmetric one-loop corrections to neutral Higgs production, in the general case where the MSSM includes complex phases, have been calculated. These results have been combined with all one-loop corrections of Standard Model type and with the propagator-type corrections from the Higgs sector of the MSSM up to the two-loop level. Within the Standard Model the electroweak corrections are found to be as important as the QCD corrections after the application of appropriate cuts. The corrections yield a shift in the cross section of order 5% for a Higgs of mass 100-200 GeV, confirming the result obtained previously in the literature. For the production of a light Higgs boson in the MSSM the Standard Model result is recovered in the decoupling limit, while the loop contributions from superpartners to the production of neutral MSSM Higgs bosons can give rise to corrections in excess of 10% away from the decoupling region.Weak boson fusion is expected to be an important Higgs production channel at the LHC. Complete one-loop results for weak boson fusion in the Standard Model have been obtained by calculating the full virtual electroweak corrections and photon radiation and implementing these results into the public Monte Carlo program VBFNLO which includes the NLO QCD corrections. Furthermore the dominant supersymmetric one-loop corrections to neutral Higgs production, in the general case where the MSSM includes complex phases, have been calculated. These results have been combined with all one-loop corrections of Standard Model type and with the propagator-type corrections from the Higgs sector of the MSSM up to the two-loop level. Within the Standard Model the electroweak corrections are found to be as important as the QCD corrections after the application of appropriate cuts. The corrections yield a shift in the cross section of order 5% for a Higgs of mass 100-200 GeV, confirming the result obtained previously in the literature. For the production of a light Higgs boson in the MSSM the Standard Model result is recovered in the decoupling limit, while the loop contributions from superpartners to the production of neutral MSSM Higgs bosons can give rise to corrections in excess of 10% away from the decoupling region