447 research outputs found
Protease domain and transmembrane domain of the type VII secretion mycosin protease determine system-specific functioning in mycobacteria
Mycobacteria use type VII secretion (T7S) systems to secrete proteins across their highly hydrophobic diderm cell envelope. Pathogenic mycobacteria, such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium marinum, have up to five of these systems, named ESX-1 to -5. Most of these systems contain a set of five conserved membrane components, of which the four Ecc proteins form the core membrane-embedded secretion complex. The fifth conserved membrane protein, the mycosin protease (MycP), is not part of the core complex, but is essential for secretion, as it stabilizes this membrane complex. Here, we investigated which MycP domain is required for this stabilization by producing hybrid constructs between MycP1 and MycP5 in M. marinum and analyzed their effect on ESX-1 and ESX-5 secretion. We found that both the protease and transmembrane (TM) domain are required for the ESX system-specific function of mycosins. In addition, we observed that the TM domain strongly affects MycP protein levels. We also show that the extended loops 1 and 2 in the protease domain are probably primarily involved in MycP stability, whereas loop 3 and the MycP5-specific loop 5 are dispensable. The atypical propeptide, or N-terminal extension, is required only for MycP stability. Finally, we show that the protease domain of MycPP1, encoded by the esx-P1 locus on the pRAW plasmid, is functionally redundant to the protease domain of MycP5 These results provide the first insight into the regions of mycosins involved in the interaction with and the stabilization of their respective ESX complexes
R-Parity Violation and Non-Abelian Discrete Family Symmetry
We investigate the implications of R-parity violating operators in a model
with family symmetry. The family symmetry can determine the form of R-parity
violating operators as well as the Yukawa matrices responsible for fermion
masses and mixings. In this paper we consider a concrete model with non-abelian
discrete symmetry Q_6 which contains only three R-parity violating operators.
We find that ratios of decay rates of the lepton flavor violating processes are
fixed thanks to the family symmetry, predicting BR(tau to 3e)/BR(tau to 3mu) ~
4 m_{mu}^2/m_{tau}^2.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure
The Casimir Problem of Spherical Dielectrics: Numerical Evaluation for General Permittivities
The Casimir mutual free energy F for a system of two dielectric concentric
nonmagnetic spherical bodies is calculated, at arbitrary temperatures. The
present paper is a continuation of an earlier investigation [Phys. Rev. E {\bf
63}, 051101 (2001)], in which F was evaluated in full only for the case of
ideal metals (refractive index n=infinity). Here, analogous results are
presented for dielectrics, for some chosen values of n. Our basic calculational
method stems from quantum statistical mechanics. The Debye expansions for the
Riccati-Bessel functions when carried out to a high order are found to be very
useful in practice (thereby overflow/underflow problems are easily avoided),
and also to give accurate results even for the lowest values of l down to l=1.
Another virtue of the Debye expansions is that the limiting case of metals
becomes quite amenable to an analytical treatment in spherical geometry. We
first discuss the zero-frequency TE mode problem from a mathematical viewpoint
and then, as a physical input, invoke the actual dispersion relations. The
result of our analysis, based upon the adoption of the Drude dispersion
relation at low frequencies, is that the zero-frequency TE mode does not
contribute for a real metal. Accordingly, F turns out in this case to be only
one half of the conventional value at high temperatures. The applicability of
the Drude model in this context has however been questioned recently, and we do
not aim at a complete discussion of this issue here. Existing experiments are
low-temperature experiments, and are so far not accurate enough to distinguish
between the different predictions. We also calculate explicitly the
contribution from the zero-frequency mode for a dielectric. For a dielectric,
this zero-frequency problem is absent.Comment: 23 pages, LaTeX, 7 ps figures; expanded discussion, especially in
Sec. 5. To appear in Phys. Rev.
Higgs-Boson Production Induced by Bottom Quarks
Bottom quark-induced processes are responsible for a large fraction of the
LHC discovery potential, in particular for supersymmetric Higgs bosons.
Recently, the discrepancy between exclusive and inclusive Higgs boson
production rates has been linked to the choice of an appropriate bottom
factorization scale. We investigate the process kinematics at hadron colliders
and show that it leads to a considerable decrease in the bottom factorization
scale. This effect is the missing piece needed to understand the corresponding
higher order results. Our results hold generally for charged and for neutral
Higgs boson production at the LHC as well as at the Tevatron. The situation is
different for single top quark production, where we find no sizeable
suppression of the factorization scale. Turning the argument around, we can
specify how large the collinear logarithms are, which can be resummed using the
bottom parton picture.Comment: 18 page
Charged Higgs Boson Production in Bottom-Gluon Fusion
We compute the complete next-to-leading order SUSY-QCD corrections for the
associated production of a charged Higgs boson with a top quark via
bottom-gluon fusion. We investigate the applicability of the bottom parton
description in detail. The higher order corrections can be split into real and
virtual corrections for a general two Higgs doublet model and into additional
massive supersymmetric loop contributions. We find that the perturbative
behavior is well under control. The supersymmetric contributions consist of the
universal bottom Yukawa coupling corrections and non-factorizable diagrams.
Over most of the relevant supersymmetric parameter space the Yukawa coupling
corrections are sizeable, while the remaining supersymmetric loop contributions
are negligible.Comment: 18 pages, v2: some discussions added, v3: published versio
Supersymmetric Electroweak Corrections to Charged Higgs Boson Production in Association with a Top Quark at Hadron Colliders
We calculate the and supersymmetric electroweak corrections to the cross section
for the charged Higgs boson production in association with a top quark at the
Tevatron and the LHC. These corrections arise from the quantum effects which
are induced by potentially large Yukawa couplings from the Higgs sector and the
chargino-top(bottom)-sbottom(stop) couplings,
neutralino-top(bottom)-stop(sbottom) couplings and charged Higgs-stop-sbottom
couplings. They can decrease or increase the cross section depending on
but are not very sensitive to the mass of the charged Higgs boson
for high . At low the corrections decrease the total
cross sections significantly, which exceed -12% for below
at both the Tevatron and the LHC, but for the
corrections can become very small at the LHC. For high
these corrections can decrease or increase the total cross sections, and the
magnitude of the corrections are at most a few percent at both the Tevatron and
the LHC.Comment: 28 pages including 4 eps figure
Collision times in pi-pi and pi-K scattering and spectroscopy of meson resonances
Using the concept of collision time (time delay) introduced by Eisenbud and
Wigner and its connection to on-shell intermediate unstable states, we study
mesonic resonances in pi-pi and pi-K scattering. The time-delay method proves
its usefulness by revealing the spectrum of the well-known rho- and K*-mesons
and by supporting some speculations on rho-mesons in the 1200 MeV region. We
use this method further to shed some light on more speculative meson
resonances, among others the enigmatic scalars. We confirm the existence of
chiralons below 1 GeV in the unflavoured and strange meson sector.Comment: 22 pages LaTex, 8 figure
A Naturally Narrow Positive Parity Theta^+
We present a consistent color-flavor-spin-orbital wave function for a
positive parity Theta^+ that naturally explains the observed narrowness of the
state. The wave function is totally symmetric in its flavor-spin part and
totally antisymmetric in its color-orbital part. If flavor-spin interactions
dominate, this wave function renders the positive parity Theta^+ lighter than
its negative parity counterpart. We consider decays of the Theta^+ and compute
the overlap of this state with the kinematically allowed final states. Our
results are numerically small. We note that dynamical correlations between
quarks are not necessary to obtain narrow pentaquark widths.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, Revtex4, two-column format, version to be
published in Phys. Rev. D, includes numerical estimates of decay width
Tau Polarization Asymmetry in
Rare decays provide an opportunity to probe for new physics beyond the
Standard Model. In this paper, we propose to measure the tau polarization in
the inclusive decay and discuss how it can be used, in
conjunction with other observables, to completely determine the parameters of
the flavor-changing low-energy effective Hamiltonian. Both the Standard Model
and several new physics scenarios are examined. This process has a large enough
branching fraction, , such that sufficient
statistics will be provided by the B-Factories currently under construction.Comment: 11 pages, LaTex file with psfig. Figures included via uufiles.
Lengthened version. Includes new calculation of Monte Carlo fit to Wilson
coefficient
Reconstructing Neutrino Properties from Collider Experiments in a Higgs Triplet Neutrino Mass Model
We extend the minimal supersymmetric standard model with bilinear R-parity
violation to include a pair of Higgs triplet superfields. The neutral
components of the Higgs triplets develop small vacuum expectation values (VEVs)
quadratic in the bilinear R-parity breaking parameters. In this scheme the
atmospheric neutrino mass scale arises from bilinear R-parity breaking while
for reasonable values of parameters the solar neutrino mass scale is generated
from the small Higgs triplet VEVs. We calculate neutrino masses and mixing
angles in this model and show how the model can be tested at future colliders.
The branching ratios of the doubly charged triplet decays are related to the
solar neutrino angle via a simple formula.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures; one formula corrected, two author's names
corrected; some explanatory comments adde
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