In-medium Hadrons - Properties, Interaction and Formation

In this talk various aspects of in-medium behavior of hadrons are discussed with an emphasis on observable effects. Examples for theoretical predictions of in-medium spectral functions are given and the importance of resonance-hole excitations is stressed. It is also stressed that final state interactions can have a major effect on observables and thus have to be considered as part of the theory. This is demonstrated with examples from neutrino-nucleus interactions. Finally, the possibility to access hadron formation times in high-energy photonuclear (or neutrino-induced) reactions is illustrated.Comment: Invited talk given by U. Mosel at Vth Conference on Hadronic Physics, ICTP, Trieste, May 200

Hadrons in Medium — Theory Confronts Experiment

In this talk we briefly summarize our theoretical understanding of in-medium selfenergies of hadrons. With the special case of the $\omega$ meson we demonstrate that earlier calculations that predicted a significant lowering of the mass in medium are based on an incorrect treatment of the model Lagrangian; more consistent calculations lead to a significant broadening, but hardly any mass shift. We stress that the experimental reconstruction of hadron spectral functions from measured decay products always requires knowledge of the decay branching ratios which may also be strongly mass-dependent. It also requires a quantitatively reliable treatment of final state interactions which has to be part of any reliable theory.Comment: Key Lecture at YKIS2006, Kyoto, Dec. 200

Large-scale genotyping identifies 41 new loci associated with breast cancer risk

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women. Common variants at 27 loci have been identified as associated with susceptibility to breast cancer, and these account for ~9% of the familial risk of the disease. We report here a meta-analysis of 9 genome-wide association studies, including 10,052 breast cancer cases and 12,575 controls of European ancestry, from which we selected 29,807 SNPs for further genotyping. These SNPs were genotyped in 45,290 cases and 41,880 controls of European ancestry from 41 studies in the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC). The SNPs were genotyped as part of a collaborative genotyping experiment involving four consortia (Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study, COGS) and used a custom Illumina iSelect genotyping array, iCOGS, comprising more than 200,000 SNPs. We identified SNPs at 41 new breast cancer susceptibility loci at genome-wide significance (P < 5 × 10−8). Further analyses suggest that more than 1,000 additional loci are involved in breast cancer susceptibility