Quantum measurement in a family of hidden-variable theories

The measurement process for hidden-configuration formulations of quantum mechanics is analysed. It is shown how a satisfactory description of quantum measurement can be given in this framework. The unified treatment of hidden-configuration theories, including Bohmian mechanics and Nelson's stochastic mechanics, helps in understanding the true reasons why the problem of quantum measurement can succesfully be solved within such theories.Comment: 16 pages, LaTeX; all special macros are included in the file; a figure is there, but it is processed by LaTe

Chinese food security and climate change: Agriculture futures

Climate change is now affecting agriculture and food production in every country of the world. Here the authors present the IMPACT model results on yield, production, and net trade of major crops in China, and on daily calorie availability as an overall indicator of food security under climate change scenarios and socio-economic pathways in 2050. The obtained results show a relatively optimistic outlook on yield, production and trade toward 2050. The outcomes of calorie availability suggest that China will be able to maintain a level of at least 3,000 kilocalories per day through 2010 to 2050. Overall, Chinese agriculture is relatively resilient to climate change. It is unlikely that Chinese food security by 2050 will be compromised in the context of climate change. The major challenge to food security, however, will rise from increasing demand coupled with regional disparities in adaptive capacity to climate change

Anthropogenic drivers of ecosystem change: An overview

This paper provides an overview of what the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) call "indirect and direct drivers" of change in ecosystem services at a global level. The MA definition of a driver is any natural or human-induced factor that directly or indirectly causes a change in an ecosystem. A direct driver unequivocally influences ecosystem processes. An indirect driver operates more diffusely by altering one or more direct drivers. Global driving forces are categorized as demographic, economic, sociopolitical, cultural and religious, scientific and technological, and physical and biological. Drivers in all categories other than physical and biological are considered indirect. Important direct drivers include changes in climate, plant nutrient use, land conversion, and diseases and invasive species. This paper does not discuss natural drivers such as climate variability, extreme weather events, or volcanic eruptions

Minimal Flavour Violation and Multi-Higgs Models

We propose an extension of the hypothesis of Minimal Flavour Violation (MFV) to general multi-Higgs Models without the assumption of Natural Flavour Conservation in the Higgs sector. We study in detail under what conditions the neutral Higgs couplings are only functions of $V_{CKM}$ and propose a MFV expansion for the neutral Higgs couplings to fermions.Comment: 16 pages, no figures. References adde

Complex CKM from Spontaneous CP Violation Without Flavor Changing Neutral Current

We analyse the general constraints on unified gauge models with spontaneous CP breaking that satisfy the conditions that (i) CP violation in the quark sector is described by a realistic complex CKM matrix, and (ii) there is no significant flavor changing neutral current effects in the quark sector. We show that the crucial requirement in order to conform to the above conditions is that spontaneous CP breaking occurs at a very high scale by complex vevs of standard model singlet Higgs fields. Two classes of models are found, one consisting of pure Higgs extensions and the other one involving fermionic extensions of the standard model. We give examples of each class and discuss their possible embeddings into higher unified theories. One of the models has the interesting property that spontaneous CP violation is triggered by spontaneous P violation, thereby linking the scale of CP violation to the seesaw scale for neutrino masses.Comment: Latex file ; 18 pages; No figures; some typos correcte

Spontaneous CP Violation in a SUSY Model with a complex CKM

It is pointed out that the recent measurement of the angle $\gamma$ of the unitarity triangle, providing irrefutable evidence for a complex Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix, presents a great challenge for supersymmetric models with spontaneous CP violation. We construct a new minimal extension of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM), with spontaneous CP breaking, which leads to a complex CKM matrix, thus conforming to present experimental data. This is achieved through the introduction of two singlet chiral superfields and a vector-like quark chiral superfield which mixes with the standard quarks. A $Z_3$ symmetry is introduced in order to have a potential solution to the strong CP problem.Comment: 12 pages. Uses the elsart.cls LaTeX class. Minor corrections and references adde

Z decays into light gluinos: a calculation based on unitarity

The Z boson can decay to a pair of light gluinos through loop-mediated processes. Based on unitarity of the S-matrix, the imaginary part of the decay amplitude is computed in the presence of a light bottom squark. This imaginary part can provide useful information on the full amplitude. Implications are discussed for a recently proposed light gluino and light bottom squark scenario.Comment: 19 pages, LaTeX, 3 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Supersymmetric effects in top quark decay into polarized W-boson

We investigate the one-loop supersymmetric QCD (SUSY-QCD) and electroweak (SUSY-EW) corrections to the top quark decay into a b-quark and a longitudinal or transverse W-boson. The corrections are presented in terms of the longitudinal ratio \Gamma(t-->W_L b)/\Gamma(t--> W b) and the transverse ratio \Gamma(t-->W_- b)/\Gamma(t--> W b). In most of the parameter space, both SUSY-QCD and SUSY-EW corrections to these ratios are found to be less than 1% in magnitude and they tend to have opposite signs. The corrections to the total width \Gamma(t-->W b) are also presented for comparison with the existing results in the literature. We find that our SUSY-EW corrections to the total width differ significantly from previous studies: the previous studies give a large correction of more than 10% in magnitude for a large part of the parameter space while our results reach only few percent at most.Comment: Version in PRD (explanation and refs added

Spontaneous CP Violation in Non-Minimal Supersymmetric Models

We study the possibilities of spontaneous CP violation in the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model with an extra singlet tadpole term in the scalar potential. We calculate the Higgs boson masses and couplings with radiative corrections including dominant two loop terms. We show that it is possible to satisfy the LEP constraints on the Higgs boson spectrum with non-trivial spontaneous CP violating phases. We also show that these phases could account for the observed value of epsilonK.Comment: 21 pages, 7 Figures in Encapsulated Postscrip