An Effective pTp_T Cutoff for the Isolalated Lepton Background from Bottom Decay --

There is a strong correlation between the $p_T$ and isolation of the lepton coming from $B$ decay. Consequently the isolated lepton background from $B$ decay goes down rapidly with increasing lepton $p_T$; and there is a $p_T$ cutoff beyond which it effectively vanishes. For the isolation cut of $E^{AC}_T < 10$ GeV, appropriate for LHC, the lepton $p_T$ cutoff is 80 GeV. This can be exploited to effectively eliminate the $B$ background from the like sign dilepton channel apropriate for Majorana particle searches, as well as the unlike sign dilepton and the single lepton channels appropriate for the top quark search. We illustrate this with a detailed analysis of the $B$ background in these channels along with the signals at LHC energy using both parton level MC and ISAJET programs.Comment: TIFR/TH/93-23 (LATEX, 20 pages, 7 figures available on request

Tuning the conductance of Dirac fermions on the surface of a topological insulator

We study the transport properties of the Dirac fermions with Fermi velocity $v_F$ on the surface of a topological insulator across a ferromagnetic strip providing an exchange field ${\mathcal J}$ over a region of width $d$. We show that the conductance of such a junction changes from oscillatory to a monotonically decreasing function of $d$ beyond a critical ${\mathcal J}$. This leads to the possible realization of a magnetic switch using these junctions. We also study the conductance of these Dirac fermions across a potential barrier of width $d$ and potential $V_0$ in the presence of such a ferromagnetic strip and show that beyond a critical ${\mathcal J}$, the criteria of conductance maxima changes from $\chi= e V_0 d/\hbar v_F = n \pi$ to $\chi= (n+1/2)\pi$ for integer $n$. We point out that these novel phenomena have no analogs in graphene and suggest experiments which can probe them.Comment: v1 4 pages 5 fig

Magnetotransport of Dirac Fermions on the surface of a topological insulator

We study the properties of Dirac fermions on the surface of a topological insulator in the presence of crossed electric and magnetic fields. We provide an exact solution to this problem and demonstrate that, in contrast to their counterparts in graphene, these Dirac fermions allow relative tuning of the orbital and Zeeman effects of an applied magnetic field by a crossed electric field along the surface. We also elaborate and extend our earlier results on normal metal-magnetic film-normal metal (NMN) and normal metal-barrier-magnetic film (NBM) junctions of topological insulators [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 104}, 046403 (2010)]. For NMN junctions, we show that for Dirac fermions with Fermi velocity $v_F$, the transport can be controlled using the exchange field ${\mathcal J}$ of a ferromagnetic film over a region of width $d$. The conductance of such a junction changes from oscillatory to a monotonically decreasing function of $d$ beyond a critical ${\mathcal J}$ which leads to the possible realization of magnetic switches using these junctions. For NBM junctions with a potential barrier of width $d$ and potential $V_0$, we find that beyond a critical ${\mathcal J}$, the criteria of conductance maxima changes from $\chi= e V_0 d/\hbar v_F = n \pi$ to $\chi= (n+1/2)\pi$ for integer $n$. Finally, we compute the subgap tunneling conductance of a normal metal-magnetic film-superconductor (NMS) junctions on the surface of a topological insulator and show that the position of the peaks of the zero-bias tunneling conductance can be tuned using the magnetization of the ferromagnetic film. We point out that these phenomena have no analogs in either conventional two-dimensional materials or Dirac electrons in graphene and suggest experiments to test our theory.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures; v

On Upward Drawings of Trees on a Given Grid

Computing a minimum-area planar straight-line drawing of a graph is known to be NP-hard for planar graphs, even when restricted to outerplanar graphs. However, the complexity question is open for trees. Only a few hardness results are known for straight-line drawings of trees under various restrictions such as edge length or slope constraints. On the other hand, there exist polynomial-time algorithms for computing minimum-width (resp., minimum-height) upward drawings of trees, where the height (resp., width) is unbounded. In this paper we take a major step in understanding the complexity of the area minimization problem for strictly-upward drawings of trees, which is one of the most common styles for drawing rooted trees. We prove that given a rooted tree $T$ and a $W\times H$ grid, it is NP-hard to decide whether $T$ admits a strictly-upward (unordered) drawing in the given grid.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017