"Secret" neutrino interactions

We review the information about a potentially strong non-standard four-neutrino interaction that can be obtained from available experimental data. By using LEP results and nucleosynthesis data we find that a contact four-fermion neutrino interaction that involve only left-handed neutrinos or both left-handed and right-handed neutrinos cannot be stronger than the standard weak interactions. A much stronger interaction involving only right-handed neutrinos is still allowed.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, latex with ws-p8-50x6-00.cls, Talk presented in "Neutrino Mixing", in honour of Samoil Bilenky's 70th Birthday, Torino, March 199

One-loop Effective Lagrangian for a Standard Model with a Heavy Charged Scalar Singlet

We study several problems related to the construction and the use of effective Lagrangians by considering an extension of the standard model that includes a heavy scalar singlet coupled to the leptonic doublet. Starting from the full renormalizable model, we build an effective field theory by integrating out the heavy scalar. A local effective Lagrangian (up to operators of dimension six) is obtained by expanding the one-loop effective action in inverse powers of the heavy mass. This is done by matching some Green functions calculated with both the full and the effective theories. Using this simple example we study the renormalization of effective Lagrangians in general and discuss how they can be used to bound new physics. We also discuss the effective Lagrangian after spontaneous symmetry breaking, and the use of the standard model classical equations of motion to rewrite it in different forms. The final effective Lagrangian in the physical basis is well suited to the study of the phenomenology of the model, which we comment on briefly. Finally, as an example of the use of our effective field theory, we consider the leptonic flavour-changing decay of the $Z$ boson in the effective theory and compare the results obtained with the full model calculation.Comment: 39 pages + 7 figures (available upon request), LaTeX, CERN-TH.7030/9

Heavy quark mass effects in e(+)e(-) into three jets

Next-to-leading order calculation for three jet heavy quark production in e^+e^- collisions, including complete quark mass effects, is reviewed. Its applications at LEP/SLC are also discussed

FindPeaks 3.1: a tool for identifying areas of enrichment from massively parallel short-read sequencing technology

Summary: Next-generation sequencing can provide insight into protein–DNA association events on a genome-wide scale, and is being applied in an increasing number of applications in genomics and meta-genomics research. However, few software applications are available for interpreting these experiments. We present here an efficient application for use with chromatin-immunoprecipitation (ChIP-Seq) experimental data that includes novel functionality for identifying areas of gene enrichment and transcription factor binding site locations, as well as for estimating DNA fragment size distributions in enriched areas. The FindPeaks application can generate UCSC compatible custom ‘WIG’ track files from aligned-read files for short-read sequencing technology. The software application can be executed on any platform capable of running a Java Runtime Environment. Memory requirements are proportional to the number of sequencing reads analyzed; typically 4 GB permits processing of up to 40 million reads

Three-jet production at LEP and the bottom quark mass

We consider the possibility of extracting the bottom quark mass from LEP data. The inclusive decay rate for \zbb +\cdots is obtained at order \as by summing up the one-loop two-parton decay rate to the tree-level three-parton rate. We calculate the decay width of the $Z$-boson into two and three jets containing the $b$-quark including complete quark mass effects. In particular, we give analytic results for a slight modification of the JADE clustering algorithm. We also study the angular distribution with respect to the angle formed between the gluon and the quark jets, which has a strong dependence on the quark mass. The impact of higher order QCD corrections on these observables is briefly discussed. Finally, we present numerical results for some popular jet-clustering algorithms and show that, indeed, these three-jet observables are very sensitive to the $b$-quark mass and well suited for its determination at LEP.Comment: 24 pages, CERN-TH.7419/94, LaTeX, full postscript version with 6 figures included is available as an additional compressed uuencoded fil