Contributions of natural and human factors to increases in vegetation productivity in China

Increasing trends in vegetation productivity have been identified for the last three decades for many regions in the northern hemisphere including China. Multiple natural and human factors are possibly responsible for the increases in vegetation productivity, while their relative contributions remain unclear. Here we analyzed the long-term trends in vegetation productivity in China using the satellite-derived normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and assessed the relationships of NDVI with a suite of natural (air temperature, precipitation, photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations, and nitrogen (N) deposition) and human (afforestation and improved agricultural management practices) factors. Overall, China exhibited an increasing trend in vegetation productivity with an increase of 2.7%. At the provincial scale, eleven provinces exhibited significant increases in vegetation productivity, and the majority of these provinces are located within the northern half of the country. At the national scale, annual air temperature was most closely related to NDVI and explained 36.8% of the variance in NDVI, followed by afforestation (25.5%) and crop yield (15.8%). Altogether, temperature, total forest plantation area, and crop yield explained 78.1% of the variance in vegetation productivity at the national scale, while precipitation, PAR, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and N deposition made no significant contribution to the increases in vegetation productivity. At the provincial scale, each factor explained a part of the variance in NDVI for some provinces, and the increases in NDVI for many provinces could be attributed to the combined effects of multiple factors. Crop yield and PAR were correlated with NDVI for more provinces than were other factors, indicating that both elevated crop yield resulting from improved agricultural management practices and increasing diffuse radiation were more important than other factors in increasing vegetation productivity at the provincial scale. The relative effects of the natural and human factors on vegetation productivity varied with spatial scale. The true contributions of multiple factors can be obscured by the correlation among these variables, and it is essential to examine the contribution of each factor while controlling for other factors. Future changes in climate and human activities will likely have larger influences on vegetation productivity in China

More hidden heavy quarkonium molecules and their discovery decay modes

To validate the molecular description of the observed $Z_b(10610)/Z_b(10650)$ and $Z_c(3900)/Z_c(4025)$, it is valuable to investigate their counterparts, denoted as $Z_{QV}^{(\prime)}$ in this work, and the corresponding decay modes. In this work, we present an analysis of the $Z_{QV}^{(\prime)}$ using flavor symmetry. We also use the effective Lagrangian based on the heavy quark symmetry to explore the rescattering mechanism and calculate the partial widths for the isospin conserved channels $Z_{QV}^{(\prime)} \to \eta_Q V$. The predicted partial widths are of an order of MeV for $Z_{QV} \to \eta_Q V$, which correspond to branching ratios of the order of $10^{-2}\sim 10^{-1}$. For $Z_{QV}^\prime \to \eta_Q V$, the partial widths are a few hundreds of keV and the branching ratios are about $10^{-3}$. Future experimental measurements can test our predictions on the partial widths and thus examine the molecule description of heavy quarkoniumlike exotic states.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures; accepted by Phys. Rev.

Branching ratios, CPCP asymmetries and polarizations of B→ψ(2S)VB\rightarrow \psi(2S) V decays

We analyzed the nonleptonic decays $B/B_s\to \psi(2S) V$ with $V=(\rho, \omega, K^{*}, \phi)$ by employing the perturbative QCD (PQCD) factorization approach. Here the branching ratios, the $CP$ asymmetries and the complete set of polarization observables are investigated systematically. Besides the traditional contributions from the factorizable and nonfactorizable diagrams at the leading order, the next-to-leading order (NLO) vertex corrections could also provide considerable contributions. The PQCD predictions for the branching ratios of the $B_{(s)}\to \psi(2S)K^{*}, \psi(2S) \phi$ decays are consistent with the measured values within errors. As for $B\to \psi(2S) \rho, \psi(2S) \omega$ decays, the branching ratios can reach the order of $10^{-5}$ and could be measured in the LHCb and Belle-II experiments. The numerical results show that the direct $CP$ asymmetries of the considered decays are very small. Thus the observation of any large direct $CP$ asymmetry for these decays will be a signal for new physics. The mixing induced $CP$ asymmetries in the neutral modes are very close to $\sin 2\beta_{(s)}$, which suggests that these channels can give a cross-check on the measurement of the Cabbibo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) angle $\beta$ and $\beta_s$. We found that the longitudinal polarization fractions $f_0$ are suppressed to $\sim 50\%$ due to the large nonfactorizable contributions. The magnitudes and phases of the two transverse amplitudes $\mathcal {A}_{\parallel}$ and $\mathcal {A}_{\perp}$ are roughly equal, which is an indication for the approximate light quark helicity conservation in these decays. The overall polarization observables of $B\to \psi(2S) K^{*0}$ and $B_s\to \psi(2S) \phi$ channels are also in good agreement with the experimental measurements as reported by LHCb and BaBar. Other results can also be tested by the LHCb and Belle-II experiments.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure, 6 table

Semileptonic decays of BcB_c meson to S-wave charmonium states in the perturbative QCD approach

Inspired by the recent measurement of the ratio of $B_c$ branching fractions to $J/\psi \pi^+$ and $J/\psi \mu^+\nu_{\mu}$ final states at the LHCb detector, we study the semileptonic decays of $B_c$ meson to the S-wave ground and radially excited 2S and 3S charmonium states with the perturbative QCD approach. After evaluating the form factors for the transitions $B_c\rightarrow P,V$, where $P$ and $V$ denote pseudoscalar and vector S-wave charmonia, respectively, we calculate the branching ratios for all these semileptonic decays. The theoretical uncertainty of hadronic input parameters are reduced by utilizing the light-cone wave function for $B_c$ meson. It is found that the predicted branching ratios range from $10^{-6}$ up to $10^{-2}$ and could be measured by the future LHCb experiment. Our prediction for the ratio of branching fractions $\frac{\mathcal {BR}(B_c^+\rightarrow J/\Psi \pi^+)}{\mathcal {BR}(B_c^+\rightarrow J/\Psi \mu^+\nu_{\mu})}$ is in good agreement with the data. For $B_c\rightarrow V l \nu_l$ decays, the relative contributions of the longitudinal and transverse polarization are discussed in different momentum transfer squared regions. These predictions will be tested on the ongoing and forthcoming experiments.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 5 table