Observable T_7 Lepton Flavor Symmetry at the Large Hadron Collider

More often than not, models of flavor symmetry rely on the use of nonrenormalizable operators (in the guise of flavons) to accomplish the phenomenologically successful tribimaximal mixing of neutrinos. We show instead how a simple renormalizable two-parameter neutrino mass model of tribimaximal mixing can be constructed with the non-Abelian discrete symmetry T_7 and the gauging of B-L. This is also achieved without the addition of auxiliary symmetries and particles present in almost all other proposals. Most importantly, it is verifiable at the Large Hadron Collider.Comment: 4 pages, 1 table, 1 figure; version accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter

Scalar Mass Bounds in Two Supersymmetric Extended Electroweak Gauge Models

In two recently proposed supersymmetric extended electroweak gauge models, the reduced Higgs sector at the 100-GeV energy scale consists of only two doublets, but they have quartic scalar couplings different from those of the minimal supersymmetric standard model. In the SU(2) X SU(2) X U(1) model, there is an absolute upper bound of about 145 GeV on the mass of the lightest neutral scalar boson. In the SU(3) X U(1) model, there is only a parameter-dependent upper bound which formally goes to infinity in a particular limitComment: 9 pages (6 figures not included), UCRHEP-T128 (July 1994

Derivation of mA≃MZm_A \simeq M_Z and tan⁡β>3\tan \beta > \sqrt 3 in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model

In the minimal supersymmetric standard model, the Higgs sector has two unknown parameters, usually taken to be $\tan \beta \equiv v_2/v_1$ and $m_A$, the mass of its one physical pseudoscalar particle. By minimizing the minimum of the Higgs potential along a certain direction in parameter space, it is shown that $m_A = M_Z$ + radiative correction, and if one further plausible assumption is made, $\tan \beta > \sqrt 3$.Comment: 7 pages, University of California, Riverside Report No. UCRHEP-T105 (Feb 1993). [Discussion of radiative correction is now included.

Light Charged Higgs Bosons in Supersymmetric Models

We point out that present experimental limits from searches for neutral Higgs bosons at LEP already imply stringent lower bounds on the mass of the charged Higgs boson in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM); these bounds are especially severe for low values of \tanb (\tanb \leq 3), where the $H^+ \bar{t} b$ coupling is large. However, these indirect constraints are much weaker in simple extensions of the MSSM Higgs sector involving the introduction of an extra U(1) gauge group or an extra $SU(2) \times U(1)_Y$ Higgs singlet field; in the latter case charged Higgs bosons can even be light enough to be pair produced at LEP.Comment: LaTeX with equation.sty, 3 PS figures. Version to appear in PLB: Added one paragraph concerning charged Higgs searches at the Tevatro

D6 Family Symmetry and Cold Dark Matter at LHC

We consider a non-supersymmetric extension of the standard model with a family symmetry based on D6 Z2 Z2, where one of Z2's is exactly conserved. This Z2 forbids the tree-level neutrino masses and simultaneously ensures the stability of cold dark matter candidates. From the assumption that cold dark matter is fermionic we can single out the D6 singlet right-handed neutrino as the best cold dark mater candidate. We find that an inert charged Higgs with a mass between 300 and 750 GeV decays mostly into an electron (or a positron) with a large missing energy, where the missing energy is carried away by the cold dark matter candidate. This will be a clean signal at LHC.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure

Nonzero Theta13 for Neutrino Mixing in a Supersymmetric B-L Gauge Model with T_7 Lepton Flavor Symmetry

We discuss how \theta_{13} \neq 0 is accommodated in a recently proposed renormalizable model of neutrino mixing using the non-Abelian discrete symmetry T_7 in the context of a supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model with gauged U(1)_{B-L}. We predict a correlation between \theta_{13} and \theta_{23}, as well as the effective neutrino mass m_{ee} in neutrinoless double beta decay.Comment: 12 pages, 1 table, 9 figures; version accepted for publication in Rapid Communication in Physical Review

Advancing Pancreas Segmentation in Multi-protocol MRI Volumes using Hausdorff-Sine Loss Function

Computing pancreatic morphology in 3D radiological scans could provide significant insight about a medical condition. However, segmenting the pancreas in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains challenging due to high inter-patient variability. Also, the resolution and speed of MRI scanning present artefacts that blur the pancreas bound- aries between overlapping anatomical structures. This paper proposes a dual-stage automatic segmentation method: 1) a deep neural network is trained to address the problem of vague organ boundaries in high class-imbalanced data. This network integrates a novel loss function to rigorously optimise boundary delineation using the modified Hausdorff metric and a sinusoidal component; 2) Given a test MRI volume, the output of the trained network predicts a sequence of targeted 2D pan- creas classes that are reconstructed as a volumetric binary mask. An energy-minimisation approach fuses a learned digital contrast model to suppress the intensities of non-pancreas classes, which, combined with the binary volume performs a refined segmentation in 3D while reveal- ing dense boundary detail. Experiments are performed on two diverse MRI datasets containing 180 and 120 scans, in which the proposed ap- proach achieves a mean Dice score of 84.1 ± 4.6% and 85.7 ± 2.3%, respectively. This approach is statistically stable and outperforms state- of-the-art methods on MRI

Kinesin Is an Evolutionarily Fine-Tuned Molecular Ratchet-and-Pawl Device of Decisively Locked Direction

Conventional kinesin is a dimeric motor protein that transports membranous organelles toward the plus-end of microtubules (MTs). Individual kinesin dimers show steadfast directionality and hundreds of consecutive steps, yetthe detailed physical mechanism remains unclear. Here we compute free energies for the entire dimer-MT system for all possible interacting configurations by taking full account of molecular details. Employing merely first principles and several measured binding and barrier energies, the system-level analysis reveals insurmountable energy gaps between configurations, asymmetric ground state caused by mechanically lifted configurational degeneracy, and forbidden transitions ensuring coordination between both motor domains for alternating catalysis. This wealth of physical effects converts a kinesin dimer into a molecular ratchet-and-pawl device, which determinedly locks the dimer's movement into the MT plus-end and ensures consecutive steps in hand-over-hand gait.Under a certain range of extreme loads, however, the ratchet-and-pawl device becomes defective but not entirely abolished to allow consecutive back-steps. This study yielded quantitative evidence that kinesin's multiple molecular properties have been evolutionarily adapted to fine-tune the ratchet-and-pawl device so as to ensure the motor's distinguished performance.Comment: 10 printed page