589 research outputs found
Editorial: New Themes in Analytic Dogmatic Theology
Analytic theology (AT) is a particular approach to theology and the study of religion that engages with the tools, categories, and methodological concerns of analytic philosophy. As a named-entity, AT arrived on the academic scene with the 2009 Oxford University Press publication, Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea. AT was arguably represented, prior to this publication, by the proto-analytic theologian Richard Swinburne in his noteworthy works on Christian doctrine (e.g. Providence and the Problem of Evil, Responsibility and Atonement, The Christian God, Faith and Reason, and The Resurrection of God Incarnate), as well as by other professional philosophers of religion such as Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Swinburne, William Alston, Eleonore Stump, Robert and Marilyn McCord Adams, Basil Mitchell, Keith Yandell, Paul Helm, and Stephen T. Davis, among others. These philosophers were addressing such topics as the coherence of theism, the rationality of religious belief, and the contributions of such philosophical theologians of the medieval past including Thomas Aquinas or William Ockham and those from modernity including René Descartes and Jonathan Edwards. Yet, the impetus for utilizing analytic philosophy to treat these topics emerged, not from the theological side of the conversation, but from the philosophical side. Anachronistically, then, the term “analytic theology” seems to aptly describe the work of these philosophers of religion
Indole Synthesis Using Silver Catalysis
Indoles are amongst the most important class of heteroaromatics in organic chemistry, being commonly found in biologically active natural products and therapeutically useful compounds. The synthesis of indoles is therefore important and several methods for their synthesis that make use of silver(I) catalysts and reagents have been developed in recent years. This Focus Review contains, to the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive coverage of silver-mediated indole forming reactions since the first reaction of this type was reported in 2004
Gravitino Dark Matter in Tree Level Gauge Mediation with and without R-parity
We investigate the cosmological aspects of Tree Level Gauge Mediation, a
recently proposed mechanism in which the breaking of supersymmetry is
communicated to the soft scalar masses by extra gauge interactions at the tree
level. Embedding the mechanism in a Grand Unified Theory and requiring the
observability of sfermion masses at the Large Hadron Collider, it follows that
the Lightest Supersymmetric Particle is a gravitino with a mass of the order of
10 GeV. The analysis in the presence of R-parity shows that a typical Tree
Level Gauge Mediation spectrum leads to an overabundance of the Dark Matter
relic density and a tension with the constraints from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis.
This suggests to relax the exact conservation of the R-parity. The underlying
SO(10) Grand Unified Theory together with the bounds from proton decay provide
a rationale for considering only bilinear R-parity violating operators. We
finally analyze the cosmological implications of this setup by identifying the
phenomenologically viable regions of the parameter space.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures. References added. To appear in JHE
Neutrino masses from operator mixing
We show that in theories that reduce, at the Fermi scale, to an extension of
the standard model with two doublets, there can be additional dimension five
operators giving rise to neutrino masses. In particular there exists a singlet
operator which can not generate neutrino masses at tree level but generates
them through operator mixing. Under the assumption that only this operator
appears at tree level we calculate the neutrino mass matrix. It has the Zee
mass matrix structure and leads naturally to bimaximal mixing. However, the
maximal mixing prediction for solar neutrinos is very sharp even when higher
order corrections are considered. To allow for deviations from maximal mixing a
fine tuning is needed in the neutrino mass matrix parameters. However, this
fine tuning relates the departure from maximal mixing in solar neutrino
oscillations with the neutrinoless double beta decay rate.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, revte
Present and Future Bounds on Non-Standard Neutrino Interactions
We consider Non-Standard neutrino Interactions (NSI), described by
four-fermion operators of the form , where is an electron or first generation quark. We
assume these operators are generated at dimension , so the related
vertices involving charged leptons, obtained by an SU(2) transformation
, do not appear at tree level. These related
vertices necessarily arise at one loop, via exchange. We catalogue current
constraints from measurements in neutrino scattering, from
atmospheric neutrino observations, from LEP, and from bounds on the related
charged lepton operators. We estimate future bounds from comparing KamLAND and
solar neutrino data, and from measuring at the near detector
of a neutrino factory. Operators constructed with and should
not confuse the determination of oscillation parameters at a factory,
because the processes we consider are more sensitive than oscillations at the
far detector. For operators involving , we estimate similar
sensitivities at the near and far detector.Comment: Erratum added at the end of the documen
Right-handed neutrino magnetic moments
We discuss the phenomenology of the most general effective Lagrangian, up to
operators of dimension 5, build with standard model fields and interactions
including right-handed neutrinos. In particular we find there is a dimension 5
electroweak moment operator of right-handed neutrinos, not discussed previously
in the literature, which could have interesting phenomenological consequences.Comment: 34 pages, 8 figure
On the nature of the fourth generation neutrino and its implications
We consider the neutrino sector of a Standard Model with four generations.
While the three light neutrinos can obtain their masses from a variety of
mechanisms with or without new neutral fermions, fourth-generation neutrinos
need at least one new relatively light right-handed neutrino. If lepton number
is not conserved this neutrino must have a Majorana mass term whose size
depends on the underlying mechanism for lepton number violation. Majorana
masses for the fourth generation neutrinos induce relative large two-loop
contributions to the light neutrino masses which could be even larger than the
cosmological bounds. This sets strong limits on the mass parameters and mixings
of the fourth generation neutrinos.Comment: To be published. Few typos corrected, references update
R-parity violation in SU(5)
We show that judiciously chosen R-parity violating terms in the minimal
renormalizable supersymmetric SU(5) are able to correct all the
phenomenologically wrong mass relations between down quarks and charged
leptons. The model can accommodate neutrino masses as well. One of the most
striking consequences is a large mixing between the electron and the Higgsino.
We show that this can still be in accord with data in some regions of the
parameter space and possibly falsified in future experiments.Comment: 30 pages, 1 figure. Revised version. To appear in JHE
Neutrino masses from new generations
We reconsider the possibility that Majorana masses for the three known
neutrinos are generated radiatively by the presence of a fourth generation and
one right-handed neutrino with Yukawa couplings and a Majorana mass term. We
find that the observed light neutrino mass hierarchy is not compatible with low
energy universality bounds in this minimal scenario, but all present data can
be accommodated with five generations and two right-handed neutrinos. Within
this framework, we explore the parameter space regions which are currently
allowed and could lead to observable effects in neutrinoless double beta decay,
conversion in nuclei and experiments. We
also discuss the detection prospects at LHC.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figures. Version to be published. Some typos corrected.
Improved figures 3 and
MFV Reductions of MSSM Parameter Space
The 100+ free parameters of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM)
make it computationally difficult to compare systematically with data,
motivating the study of specific parameter reductions such as the cMSSM and
pMSSM. Here we instead study the reductions of parameter space implied by using
minimal flavour violation (MFV) to organise the R-parity conserving MSSM, with
a view towards systematically building in constraints on flavour-violating
physics. Within this framework the space of parameters is reduced by expanding
soft supersymmetry-breaking terms in powers of the Cabibbo angle, leading to a
24-, 30- or 42-parameter framework (which we call MSSM-24, MSSM-30, and MSSM-42
respectively), depending on the order kept in the expansion. We provide a
Bayesian global fit to data of the MSSM-30 parameter set to show that this is
manageable with current tools. We compare the MFV reductions to the
19-parameter pMSSM choice and show that the pMSSM is not contained as a subset.
The MSSM-30 analysis favours a relatively lighter TeV-scale pseudoscalar Higgs
boson and with multi-TeV sparticles.Comment: 2nd version, minor comments and references added, accepted for
publication in JHE
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