Prospects and status of quark mass renormalization in three-flavour QCD

We present the current status of a revised strategy to compute the running of renormalized quark masses in QCD with three flavours of massless O(a) improved Wilson quarks. The strategy employed uses the standard finite-size scaling method in the Schr\"odinger functional and accommodates for the non-perturbative scheme-switch which becomes necessary at intermediate renormalized couplings as discussed in [arXiv:1411.7648].Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 1 table; Proceedings of the 33rd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 14-18 July 2015, Kobe, Japa

Suitability of soil bioengineering techniques in Central America: a case study in Nicaragua

International audienceIn the last few years "D. I. A. F." (Department of Agriculture and Forestry Engineering of Florence University), has been testing the effectiveness of Soil Bio-Engineering techniques in Central America. The focus of the present study was to find out which native plants were most suited for soil bio-engineering purposes, particularly in the realization of riverbank protection. Furthermore, we have also been aiming at economic efficiency. In the context of sustainable watershed management, these techniques seem to be appropriate, especially in underdeveloped countries. Concerning the plants to be used, we considered three native species, Gliricidia Sepium, Cordia dentata and Jatropha curcas, to be appropriate for this type of work. Economically speaking, the low cost of such interventions in underdeveloped countries, has been shown by the construction of riverbank protection using vegetated crib-walls in Nicaragua

Negative Prognostic Effect of Baseline Antipsychotic Exposure in Clinical High Risk for Psychosis (CHR-P): Is Pre-Test Risk Enrichment the Hidden Culprit?

INTRODUCTION: Sample enrichment is a key factor in contemporary early-detection strategies aimed at the identification of help-seekers at increased risk of imminent transition to psychosis. We undertook a meta-analytic investigation to ascertain the role of sample enrichment in the recently highlighted negative prognostic effect of baseline antipsychotic (AP) exposure in clinical high-risk (CHR-P) of psychosis individuals. METHODS: Systematic review and meta-analysis of all published studies on CHR-P were identified according to a validated diagnostic procedure. The outcome was the proportion of transition to psychosis, which was calculated according to the Freeman‐Tukey double arcsine transformation. RESULTS: Thirty-three eligible studies were identified, including 16 samples with details on AP exposure at baseline and 17 samples with baseline AP exposure as exclusion criterion for enrollment. Those with baseline exposure to AP (n = 395) had higher transition rates (29.9%; 95% CI: 25.1%–34.8%) than those without baseline exposure to AP in the same study (n = 1289; 17.2%; 15.1%–19.4%) and those coming from samples that did not include people who were exposed to AP at baseline (n = 2073; 16.2%; 14.6%–17.8%; P < .05 in both the fixed-effects and the random-effects models). Heterogeneity within studies was substantial, with values above 75% in all comparisons. CONCLUSIONS: Sample enrichment is not a plausible explanation for the higher risk of transition to psychosis of CHR-P individuals who were already exposed to AP at the enrollment in specialized early-detection programs. Baseline exposure to AP at CHR-P assessment is a major index of enhanced, imminent risk of psychosis

Non-perturbative renormalisation and running of BSM four-quark operators in Nf=2 QCD

We perform a non-perturbative study of the scale-dependent renormalisation factors of a complete set of dimension-six four-fermion operators without power subtractions. The renormalisation-group (RG) running is determined in the continuum limit for a specific Schrödinger Functional (SF) renormalisation scheme in the framework of lattice QCD with two dynamical flavours (Nf= 2). The theory is regularised on a lattice with a plaquette Wilson action and O(a)-improved Wilson fermions. For one of these operators, the computation had been performed in Dimopoulos et al. (JHEP 0805, 065 (2008). arXiv:0712.2429); the present work completes the study for the rest of the operator basis, on the same simulations (configuration ensembles). The related weak matrix elements arise in several operator product expansions; in Δ F= 2 transitions they contain the QCD long-distance effects, including contributions from beyond-Standard Model (BSM) processes. Some of these operators mix under renormalisation and their RG-running is governed by anomalous dimension matrices. In Papinutto et al. (Eur Phys J C 77(6), 376 (2017). arXiv:1612.06461) the RG formalism for the operator basis has been worked out in full generality and the anomalous dimension matrix has been calculated in NLO perturbation theory. Here the discussion is extended to the matrix step-scaling functions, which are used in finite-size recursive techniques. We rely on these matrix-SSFs to obtain non-perturbative estimates of the operator anomalous dimensions for scales ranging from O(Λ QCD) to O(MW)