CP violation effects in the diphoton spectrum of heavy scalars

In a class of new physics models, an extended Higgs sector and new CP-violating sources are simultaneously present in order to explain the baryon asymmetry in the Universe. The aim of this work is to study the implications of beyond the Standard Model (SM) CP violation for the searches of heavy scalars at the LHC. In particular, we focus on the diphoton channel searches in the CP-violating two-Higgs-doublet model (CPV 2HDM). To have a sizable CPV in the scalar sector, the two heavy neutral scalars in 2HDM tend to be nearly degenerate. The theoretical constraints of unitarity, perturbativity and vacuum stability are considered, which requires that the heavy scalars $M_H \lesssim 1$ TeV in a large region of the parameter space. The experimental limits are also taken into account, including the direct searches of heavy neutral scalars in the final state of the SM $h$, $W$ and $Z$ bosons, the differential $t\bar{t}$ data, those from the charged scalar sector which is implied by the oblique $T$ parameter, as well as the precise measurements of the electric dipole moments of electron and mercury. The quantum interference effects between the resonances and the SM background are crucially important for the diphoton signals, and the CPV mixing of the quasi-degenerate heavy scalars could enhance significantly the resonance peak. With an integrated luminosity of 3000 fb$^{-1}$ at the LHC, almost the whole parameter space of CPV 2HDM could be probed in the diphoton channel, and the CPV could also be directly detected via the diphoton spectrum.Comment: 32 pages (two columns), 20 figures, 1 table, minor changes, version to appear in PR

Prospects for Triple Gauge Coupling Measurements at Future Lepton Colliders and the 14 TeV LHC

The $WW$ production is the primary channel to directly probe the triple gauge couplings. We first analyze the $e^+ e^- \rightarrow W^+ W^-$ process at the future lepton collider, China's proposed Circular Electron-Positron Collider (CEPC). We use the five kinematical angles in this process to constrain the anomalous triple gauge couplings and relevant dimension six operators at the CEPC up to the order of magnitude of $10^{-4}$. The most sensible information is obtained from the distributions of the production scattering angle and the decay azimuthal angles. We also estimate constraints at the 14 TeV LHC, with both 300 fb$^{-1}$ and 3000 fb$^{-1}$ integrated luminosity from the leading lepton $p_T$ and azimuthal angle difference $\Delta \phi_{ll}$ distributions in the di-lepton channel. The constrain is somewhat weaker, up to the order of magnitude of $10^{-3}$. The limits on the triple gauge couplings are complementary to those on the electroweak precision observables and Higgs couplings. Our results show that the gap between sensitivities of the electroweak and triple gauge boson precision can be significantly decreased to less than one order of magnitude at the 14 TeV LHC, and that both the two sensitivities can be further improved at the CEPC.Comment: 36 pages, 5 figures, 8 tables, version to appear in JHE

Twin roll casting and melt conditioned twin-roll casting of magnesium alloys

Recently, BCAST at Brunel University has developed a MCAST (melt conditioning by advanced shear technology) process for conditioning liquid metal at temperature either above or bellow the alloy liquidus using a high shear twin-screw mechanism. The MCAST process has now been combined with the twin roll casting (TRC) process to form an innovative technology, namely, the melt conditioned twin roll casting (MC-TRC) process for casting Al-alloy and Mg-alloy strips. During the MC-TRC process, liquid alloy with a specified temperature is continuously fed into the MCAST machine. By intensive shearing under the high shear rate and high intensity of turbulence, the liquid is transformed into conditioned melt with uniform temperature and composition throughout the whole volume. The conditioned melt is then fed continuously into the twin-roll caster for strip production. The experimental results show that the AZ91D MC-TRC strips with different thicknesses have fine and uniform microstructure. The strip consists of equiaxed grains with a mean size of 60-70μm. The strip displays extremely uniform grain size and composition throughout the whole cross-section. Investigation also shows that both TRC and MC-TRC processes with reduced deformation are effective to reduce the formation of defects, particularly the formation of the central line segregations

Adversarial Sparse-View CBCT Artifact Reduction

We present an effective post-processing method to reduce the artifacts from sparsely reconstructed cone-beam CT (CBCT) images. The proposed method is based on the state-of-the-art, image-to-image generative models with a perceptual loss as regulation. Unlike the traditional CT artifact-reduction approaches, our method is trained in an adversarial fashion that yields more perceptually realistic outputs while preserving the anatomical structures. To address the streak artifacts that are inherently local and appear across various scales, we further propose a novel discriminator architecture based on feature pyramid networks and a differentially modulated focus map to induce the adversarial training. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can greatly correct the cone-beam artifacts from clinical CBCT images reconstructed using 1/3 projections, and outperforms strong baseline methods both quantitatively and qualitatively