Strong gauge boson scattering at the LHC

In the standard model with electroweak symmetry breaking through the Higgs mechanism, electroweak gauge-boson scattering amplitudes are large if the Higgs boson is heavy, and electroweak gauge interactions become strong. In theories with electroweak symmetry breaking through alternative mechanisms, there could be a strongly interacting gauge sector, possibly with resonances in an accessible energy region. In general, the scattering of longitudinally polarized massive gauge bosons can give information on the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking. At energies below the symmetry breaking scale, the equivalence theorem relates the scattering amplitudes to those of the "would-be" Goldstone modes. In the absence of Higgs bosons, unitarity would be restored by some new physics which can be studied through WW scattering. Some representatives models are discussed. Isolating WW scattering at a hadron collider from other contributions involving W emission from parton lines needs a good understanding of the backgrounds. Resonances, if they exist below about a TeV, would be feasible of observation at the LHC.Comment: Latex, uses insa.sty (included in submission). Invited contribution to the INSA Platinum Jubilee Special Issue "Physics at the Large Hadron Collider". Submitted for publication in August 200

A Longitudinal Evaluation of the Speech Perception Capabilities of Children Using Multichannel Tactile Vocoders

Thirty children (mean age 6:11, range 4:3 to 11:0, SD = 2:3) with profound hearing impairments were followed longitudinally over a 3-year period and evaluated every 6 months with a battery of speech perception tests. The battery spanned several levels of perception, from pattern perception to open-set word recognition. The children were all enrolled in a single full-day educational program that used multichannel tactile aids in addition to hearing aids. Testing was conducted in Auditory alone (A), Tactile plus Auditory (TA), Tactile alone (T), and in one instance, Tactile plus Auditory plus Vision (TAV) conditions because the primary interest of the work was the relationship between auditory and tactile training on perception. Results indicated that children\u27s performance improved with age, with the oldest children achieving open-set speech recognition in the TA condition. Performance in the TA condition generally exceeded that in both A and T conditions. Outcomes were compared to those from two studies in the literature for children of similar age with cochlear implants and tactile aids on the same tests. Results suggest that performance of children who had cochlear implants for an average of 21 months was similar to TA and TAV performance of children in the present study who had tactile experience over a similar period. © 1996, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association