Bottom-quark associated Higgs-boson production: reconciling the four- and five-flavour scheme approach

The main arguments in the discussion of the proper treatment of the total inclusive cross section for bottom-quark associated Higgs-boson production are briefly reviewed. A simple and pragmatic formula for the combination of the so-called four- and five-flavour schemes is suggested, including the treatment of the respective theory error estimates. The numerical effects of this matching formula are discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Higgs Boson Searches with ATLAS based on 2010 Data

The results of Higgs Boson searches with the ATLAS detector based on 2010 proton proton collision data corresponding to integrated luminosities of up to 39 pb-1are presented. Searches for H --> 2 photons, H --> W+W- --> l+l- 2 neutrinos and H --> ZZ --> l+l- 2 neutrinos / l+l- qqbar in the context of the Standard Model (SM), for H--> tau+ tau- in the context of the Minimal Supersymmetric Extension of the Standard Model (MSSM) and for a generic scalar at low mass in the vicinity of the Ypsilon resonance decaying to a pair of muons are discussed. All observations are in agreement with the expectations from the background-only hypothesis. Hence exclusion limits at 95% confidence level are derivedComment: 6 pages, 15 figures, contribution to the proceedings of the XLVIth Rencontres de Moriond session devoted to Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theorie

Simultaneous normal faulting and extensional flexuring during rifting: an example from the southernmost Upper Rhine Graben

The southern end of the Upper Rhine Graben (URG) is formed by a major continental transfer zone, which was localised by the reactivation of ENE-oriented basement faults of Late Palaeozoic origin. A combination of subcrop data (derived from exploration wells and reflection seismic lines) and palaeostress analysis provided new constraints on the timing and kinematics of interacting basement faults. Rifting in the southern URG began in the Upper Priabonian under regional WNW-ESE-directed extension, oriented roughly perpendicular to the graben axis. In the study area, this led to the formation of NNE-trending half-grabens. Simultaneously, ENE-trending basement faults, situated in the area of the future Rhine-Bresse Transfer Zone (RBTZ), were reactivated in a sinistrally transtensive mode. In the sedimentary cover the strike-slip component was accommodated by the development of en-échelon aligned extensional flexures. Flexuring and interference between the differently oriented basement faults imposed additional, but locally confined extension in the sedimentary cover, which deviated by as much as 90° from the regional WNW-ESE extension. The interference of regional and local stresses led to a regime approaching radial extension at the intersection between the URG and RBT

A Comparative Evaluation of Quantification Methods

Quantification represents the problem of predicting class distributions in a given target set. It also represents a growing research field in supervised machine learning, for which a large variety of different algorithms has been proposed in recent years. However, a comprehensive empirical comparison of quantification methods that supports algorithm selection is not available yet. In this work, we close this research gap by conducting a thorough empirical performance comparison of 24 different quantification methods. To consider a broad range of different scenarios for binary as well as multiclass quantification settings, we carried out almost 3 million experimental runs on 40 data sets. We observe that no single algorithm generally outperforms all competitors, but identify a group of methods including the Median Sweep and the DyS framework that perform significantly better in binary settings. For the multiclass setting, we observe that a different, broad group of algorithms yields good performance, including the Generalized Probabilistic Adjusted Count, the readme method, the energy distance minimization method, the EM algorithm for quantification, and Friedman's method. More generally, we find that the performance on multiclass quantification is inferior to the results obtained in the binary setting. Our results can guide practitioners who intend to apply quantification algorithms and help researchers to identify opportunities for future research

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