Off-Shell Effects for Top Quark Production at Hadron Colliders.

A good description of processes involving the production and decay of top quarks is crucial to phenomenology at the Tevatron and LHC. In this thesis, a general method constructed using ideas from Effective Theories is presented, allowing predictions to be made for differential observables that importantly include the effects of non-zero top quark virtuality. Calculations using this method can be significantly simpler than those in standard perturbation theory and its use enables the identification of potentially important structures in the amplitudes. The method is applied to the example of top-pair production for a realistic experimental setup at the Tevatron. A number of observables are studied and an evaluation of off-shell effects is given. The latter tend to be small in general but do become enhanced in regions near kinematical boundaries for distributions that are sensitive to the invariant mass of top quarks

Probing the top-quark width through ratios of resonance contributions of e+e−→W+W−bbˉe^+e^-\rightarrow W^+W^-b\bar{b}

We exploit offshell regions in the process $e^+e^-\rightarrow W^+W^-b\bar{b}$ to gain access to the top-quark width. Working at next-to-leading order in QCD we show that carefully selected ratios of offshell regions to onshell regions in the reconstructed top and antitop invariant mass spectra are, \emph{independently} of the coupling $g_{tbW}$, sensitive to the top-quark width. We explore this approach for different centre of mass energies and initial-state beam polarisations at $e^+e^-$ colliders and briefly comment on the applicability of this method for a measurement of the top-quark width at the LHC.Comment: 31 pages, 10 figures, 2 table

Resummation and Matching of bb-quark Mass Effects in bbˉHb\bar{b}H Production

We use a systematic effective field theory setup to derive the $b\bar{b}H$ production cross section. Our result combines the merits of both fixed 4-flavor and 5-flavor schemes. It contains the full 4-flavor result, including the exact dependence on the $b$-quark mass, and improves it with a resummation of collinear logarithms of $m_b/m_H$. In the massless limit, it corresponds to a reorganized 5-flavor result. While we focus on $b\bar{b}H$ production, our method applies to generic heavy-quark initiated processes at hadron colliders. Our setup resembles the variable flavor number schemes known from heavy-flavor production in deep-inelastic scattering, but also differs in some key aspects. Most importantly, the effective $b$-quark PDF appears as part of the perturbative expansion of the final result where it effectively counts as an $O(\alpha_s)$ object. The transition between the fixed-order (4-flavor) and resummation (5-flavor) regimes is governed by the low matching scale at which the $b$-quark is integrated out. Varying this scale provides a systematic way to assess the perturbative uncertainties associated with the resummation and matching procedure and reduces by going to higher orders. We discuss the practical implementation and present numerical results for the $b\bar{b}H$ production cross section at NLO+NLL. We also provide a comparison to the corresponding predictions in the fixed 4-flavor and 5-flavor results and the Santander matching prescription. Compared to the latter, we find a slightly reduced uncertainty and a larger central value, with its central value lying at the lower edge of our uncertainty band.Comment: 54 pages, 16 figures. Final version to be published in JHEP (one ref added

Synthetic Melatonin Receptor Agonists and Antagonists

The functions of the pineal hormone melatonin are of intense and continuous interest. Synthetic melatonin receptor analogues, as agonists and antagonists, have been explored, and the molecule can be viewed as consisting of an indole nucleus, acting mainly as a spacer, and the C5-OMe and the C3-ethylamido side chains, acting as pharmacophoric components. The present chapter focuses on the synthetic routes towards these melatonin derivatives, first the aromatic nucleus, then the functionalities that have been introduced to the nucleus, and finally those analogues with restrained conformations and those that are optically active. The importance of the various parameters involved in the agonist and antagonist profile of the compounds is indicated, as is the difference in the action of the chiral melatoninergics

Stringent and reproducible tetracycline-regulated transgene expression by site-specific insertion at chromosomal loci with pre-characterised induction characteristics

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The ability to regulate transgene expression has many applications, mostly concerning the analysis of gene function. Desirable induction characteristics, such as low un-induced expression, high induced expression and limited cellular heterogeneity, can be seriously impaired by chromosomal position effects at the site of transgene integration. Many clones may therefore need to be screened before one with optimal induction characteristics is identified. Furthermore, such screens must be repeated for each new transgene investigated, and comparisons between clones with different transgenes is complicated by their different integration sites.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>To circumvent these problems we have developed a "screen and insert" strategy in which clones carrying a transgene for a fluorescent reporter are first screened for those with optimal induction characteristics. Site-specific recombination (SSR) is then be used repeatedly to insert any new transgene at the reporter transgene locus of such clones so that optimal induction characteristics are conferred upon it. Here we have tested in a human fibrosarcoma cell line (HT1080) two of many possible implementations of this approach. Clones (e.g. Rht14-10) in which a GFP reporter gene is very stringently regulated by the tetracycline (tet) transactivator (tTA) protein were first identified flow-cytometrically. Transgenes encoding luciferase, I-<it>Sce</it>I endonuclease or Rad52 were then inserted by SSR at a <it>LoxP </it>site adjacent to the GFP gene resulting stringent tet-regulated transgene expression. In clone Rht14-10, increases in expression from essentially background levels (+tet) to more than 10⁴-fold above background (-tet) were reproducibly detected after Cre-mediated insertion of either the luciferase or the I-<it>Sce</it>I transgenes.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Although previous methods have made use of SSR to integrate transgenes at defined sites, none has effectively combined this with a pre-selection step to identify integration sites that support optimal regulatory characteristics. Rht14-10 and similar HT1080-derived clones can now be used in conjunction with a convenient delivery vector (pIN2-neoMCS), in a simple 3-step protocol leading to stringent and reproducible transgene regulation. This approach will be particularly useful for transgenes whose products are very active at low concentrations and/or for comparisons of multiple related transgenes.</p

Heavy-flavor parton distributions without heavy-flavor matching prescriptions

We show that the well-known obstacle for working with the zero-mass variable flavor number scheme, namely, the omission of O(1) mass power corrections close to the conventional heavy flavor matching point (HFMP) mu_b=m, can be easily overcome. For this it is sufficient to take advantage of the freedom in choosing the position of the HFMP. We demonstrate that by choosing a sufficiently large HFMP, which could be as large as 10 times the mass of the heavy quark, one can achieve the following improvements: 1) above the HFMP the size of missing power corrections O(m) is restricted by the value of mu_b and, therefore, the error associated with their omission can be made negligible; 2) additional prescriptions for the definition of cross-sections are not required; 3) the resummation accuracy is maintained and 4) contrary to the common lore we find that the discontinuity of alpha_s and pdfs across thresholds leads to improved continuity in predictions for observables. We have considered a large set of proton-proton and electron-proton collider processes, many through NNLO QCD, that demonstrate the broad applicability of our proposal