Combined Electroweak Analysis

Recent developments in the measurement of precision electroweak measurements are summarised, notably new results on the mass of the top quark and mass and width of the W boson. Predictions of the Standard Model are compared to the experimental results which are used to constrain the input parameters of the Standard Model, in particular the mass of the Higgs boson. The agreement between measurements and expectations from theory is discussed. Invited talk presented at the EPS HEP 2007 conference Manchester, England, July 19th to 25th, 2007Comment: 7 pages and 6 figure

The Production of Chloropicrin as Needed from Dry Mixtures of Picric Acid and Bleaching Powder

Chloropicrin or trichloromethane is a colorless liquid boiling at l 12°C and having a specific gravity of 1.69. It was first prepared by Stenhouse from picric acid and bleaching powder. Its first use was in chemical warfare by the Allied troops in 1918. It was prepared in large quantities at Edgewood Arsenal during the World War, by the method developed and patented by the senior author. Picric acid, hydrated lime, and water were mixed to form a calcium picrate suspension. This suspension together with a suspension of bleaching powder and water was run into a still. The chloropicrin was steam-distilled off

The automated computation of tree-level and next-to-leading order differential cross sections, and their matching to parton shower simulations

We discuss the theoretical bases that underpin the automation of the computations of tree-level and next-to-leading order cross sections, of their matching to parton shower simulations, and of the merging of matched samples that differ by light-parton multiplicities. We present a computer program, MadGraph5_aMC@NLO, capable of handling all these computations -- parton-level fixed order, shower-matched, merged -- in a unified framework whose defining features are flexibility, high level of parallelisation, and human intervention limited to input physics quantities. We demonstrate the potential of the program by presenting selected phenomenological applications relevant to the LHC and to a 1-TeV $e^+e^-$ collider. While next-to-leading order results are restricted to QCD corrections to SM processes in the first public version, we show that from the user viewpoint no changes have to be expected in the case of corrections due to any given renormalisable Lagrangian, and that the implementation of these are well under way.Comment: 158 pages, 27 figures; a few references have been adde

Down Type Isosinglet Quarks in ATLAS

We evaluate the discovery reach of the ATLAS experiment for down type isosinglet quarks, $D$, using both their neutral and charged decay channels, namely the process $pp\to D\bar{D}+X$ with subsequent decays resulting in $2\ell+2j+E^{miss}_{T}$, $3\ell+2j+E^{miss}_{T}$ and $2\ell+4j$ final states. The integrated luminosity required for observation of a heavy quark is estimated for a mass range between 600 and 1000 GeV using the combination of results from different search channels.Comment: 12 page

TYC 8380-1953-1: Discovery of an RS CVn binary through the XMM-Newton slew survey

In this paper we report the discovery of the chromospherically active (RS CVn type) binary TYC 8380-1953-1 through the XMM-Newton slew survey and present results of our optical and X-ray follow-up. With a flux limit of $6 \times 10^{-13}$ erg cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ in the soft band ($0.2 - 2$ keV), the XMM-Newton slew has a similar sensitivity to the ROSAT All Sky Survey allowing interesting sources to be identified by their long-term variability. Two different types of stellar sources are detected in shallow X-ray surveys: young stars (both pre-main and main sequence stars) and chromospherically active binaries (BY Dra and RS CVn type systems). The discovery of stars in such surveys and the study of their nature through optical follow-ups is valuable to determine their spatial distribution and scale height in the Galaxy. Our analysis shows that TYC 8380-1953-1 is a double-lined spectroscopic binary with both components having similar spectral type (likely K0/2+K3/5) and luminosity. With a typical coronal temperature for an RS CVn system ($kT \sim 1.15$ keV) and an X-ray luminosity in the $0.3-10$ keV energy band higher than $4 \times 10^{31}$ erg\,s$^{-1}$, TYC 8380-1953-1 lies among the most X-ray luminous RS CVn binaries.Comment: Accepted for publication in the PASP. 18 pages, 10 figure

The t W- Mode of Single Top Production

The t W- mode of single top production is proposed as an important means to study the weak interactions of the top quark. While the rate of this mode is most likely too small to be observed at Run II of the Fermilab Tevatron, it is expected to be considerably larger at the CERN LHC. In this article the inclusive t W- rate is computed, including O(1 / log (m_t^2 / m_b^2)) corrections, and when combined with detailed Monte Carlo simulations including the top and W decay products, indicate that the t W- single top process may be extracted from the considerable t tbar and W+ W- j backgrounds at low luminosity runs of the LHC.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figure

Prototype tests for the ALICE TRD

A Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) has been designed to improve the electron identification and trigger capability of the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. We present results from tests of a prototype of the TRD concerning pion rejection for different methods of analysis over a momentum range from 0.7 to 2 GeV/c. We investigate the performance of different radiator types, composed of foils, fibres and foams.Comment: Presented at the IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference, Lyon, October 15-20, 2000 (accepted for publication in IEEE TNS), Latex (IEEEtran.cls), 7 pages, 11 eps figure