Signature of exotic particles in light by light scattering

We discuss the implications on light by light scattering of two kind of exotic particles: doubly charged scalar bosons and doubly charged fermions; the virtual effects of a nonstandard singly charged gauge boson are also examined. These particles, if their masses lie in the range 0.1--1.0 TeV, will have a clear signature in the future linear colliders. The present analysis has the advantage that it depends only on electromagnetic symmetry, so it is applicable to any model which predicts this class of particles. In particular, our results have interesting consequences on left-right models and their supersymmetric extension.Comment: 6 eps figures. Requires elsevier.cl

How unusual was autumn 2006 in Europe?

The temperatures in large parts of Europe have been record high during the meteorological autumn of 2006. Compared to 1961-1990, the 2m temperature was more than three degrees Celsius above normal from the North side of the Alps to southern Norway. This made it by far the warmest autumn on record in the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, with the records in Central England going back to 1659, in the Netherlands to 1706 and in Denmark to 1768. Assuming that the mean of the temperature distribution changes proportional to the global mean temperature, but the shape remains the same includes to first order the effects of global warming. Even under this assumption the autumn temperatures were very unusual, with estimates of the return time of 200 to 2000 years in this region. The lower bound of the 95% confidence interval is more than 100 to 300 years. Climate models that simulate the current atmospheric circulation well underestimate the observed mean rise in autumn temperatures. They do not simulate a change in the shape of the distribution that would increase the probability of warm events under global warming. This implies that the warm autumn 2006 either was a very rare coincidence, or the local temperature rise is much stronger than modelled, or non-linear physics that is missing from these models increases the probability of warm extremes

Two-photon exchange and elastic electron-proton scattering

Two-photon exchange contributions to elastic electron-proton scattering cross sections are evaluated in a simple hadronic model including the finite size of the proton. The corrections are found to be small in magnitude, but with a strong angular dependence at fixed $Q^2$. This is significant for the Rosenbluth technique for determining the ratio of the electric and magnetic form factors of the proton at high $Q^2$, and partly reconciles the apparent discrepancy with the results of the polarization transfer technique.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, v2: additional references and minor clarifications in text, accepted in Physical Review Letter

Large-scale atmospheric circulation biases and changes in global climate model simulations and their importance for climate change in Central Europe

The quality of global sea level pressure patterns has been assessed for simulations by 23 coupled climate models. Most models showed high pattern correlations. With respect to the explained spatial variance, many models showed serious large-scale deficiencies, especially at mid-latitudes. Five models performed well at all latitudes and for each month of the year. Three models had a reasonable skill. <p style='line-height: 20px;'> We selected the five models with the best pressure patterns for a more detailed assessment of their simulations of the climate in Central Europe. We analysed observations and simulations of monthly mean geostrophic flow indices and of monthly mean temperature and precipitation. We used three geostrophic flow indices: the west component and south component of the geostrophic wind at the surface and the geostrophic vorticity. We found that circulation biases were important, and affected precipitation in particular. Apart from these circulation biases, the models showed other biases in temperature and precipitation, which were for some models larger than the circulation induced biases. <p style='line-height: 20px;'> For the 21st century the five models simulated quite different changes in circulation, precipitation and temperature. Precipitation changes appear to be primarily caused by circulation changes. Since the models show widely different circulation changes, especially in late summer, precipitation changes vary widely between the models as well. Some models simulate severe drying in late summer, while one model simulates significant precipitation increases in late summer. With respect to the mean temperature the circulation changes were important, but not dominant. However, changes in the distribution of monthly mean temperatures, do show large indirect influences of circulation changes. Especially in late summer, two models simulate very strong warming of warm months, which can be attributed to severe summer drying in the simulations by these models. The models differ also significantly in the simulated warming of cold winter months. Finally, the models simulate rather different changes in North Atlantic sea surface temperature, which is likely to impact on changes in temperature and precipitation. These results imply that several important aspects of climate change in Central Europe are highly uncertain. Other aspects of the simulated climate change appear to be more robust. All models simulate significant warming all year round and an increase in precipitation in the winter half-year

QCD Corrections to Associated Higgs Boson-Heavy Quark Production

We compute the O(alpha_s) QCD corrections to the inclusive process e^+e^- --> t \bar t h. Although the total rate is small, it has a distinctive experimental signature and can potentially be used to measure the top quark-Higgs boson Yukawa coupling. The QCD corrections increase the rate by a factor of roughly 1.5 for e^+e^- --> t \bar t h at sqrt(s)=500 GeV and Mh=100 GeV. At sqrt(s)=1 TeV, the corrections are small.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures, version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Scaling and trends of hourly precipitation extremes in two different climate zones – Hong Kong and the Netherlands

Hourly precipitation extremes in very long time series from the Hong Kong Observatory and the Netherlands are investigated. Using the 2 m dew point temperature from 4 h before the rainfall event as a measure of near surface absolute humidity, hourly precipitation extremes closely follow a 14% per degree dependency – a scaling twice as large as following from the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. However, for dew point temperatures above 23 °C no significant dependency on humidity was found. Strikingly, in spite of the large difference in climate, results are almost identical in Hong Kong and the Netherlands for the dew point temperature range where both observational sets have sufficient data. Trends in hourly precipitation extremes show substantial increases over the last century for both De Bilt (the Netherlands) and Hong Kong. For De Bilt, not only the long term trend, but also variations in hourly precipitation extremes on an inter-decadal timescale of 30 yr and longer, can be linked very well to the above scaling; there is a very close resemblance between variations in dew point temperature and precipitation intensity with an inferred dependency of hourly precipitation extremes of 10 to 14% per degree. For Hong Kong there is no connection between variations in humidity and those in precipitation intensity in the wet season, May to September. This is consistent with the found zero-dependency of precipitation intensity on humidity for dew points above 23 °C. Yet, outside the wet season humidity changes do appear to explain the positive trend in hourly precipitation extremes, again following a dependency close to twice the Clausius-Clapeyron relation

A general reduction method for one-loop N-point integrals

In order to calculate cross sections with a large number of particles/jets in the final state at next-to-leading order, one has to reduce the occurring scalar and tensor one-loop integrals to a small set of known integrals. In massless theories, this reduction procedure is complicated by the presence of infrared divergences. Working in n=4-2*epsilon dimensions, it will be outlined how to achieve such a reduction for diagrams with an arbitrary number of external legs. As a result, any integral with more than four propagators and generic 4-dimensional external momenta can be reduced to box integrals.Comment: 5 pages Latex, 1 eps figure included, uses npb.sty (included). Talk presented at the conference: Loops and Legs in Quantum Field Theory, April 2000, Bastei, German

The fermion-loop scheme for finite-width effects in e^+ e^- annihilation into four fermions

We describe the gauge-invariant treatment of the finite-width effects of W and Z bosons in the fermion-loop scheme and its application to the six-fermion (LEP2) processes e^- e^+ -> four fermions, with massless external fermions. The fermion-loop scheme consists in including all fermionic one-loop corrections in tree-level amplitudes and resumming the self-energies. We give explicit results for the unrenormalized fermionic one-loop contributions to the gauge-boson self-energies and the triple gauge-boson vertices, and perform the renormalization in a gauge-invariant way by introducing complex pole positions and running couplings. A simple effective Born prescription is presented, which allows for a relatively straightforward implementation of the fermion-loop scheme in LEP1 and LEP2 processes. We apply this prescription to typical LEP2 processes, i.e., e^- e^+ -> \mu^- \bar{\nu}_\mu u \bar{d}, e^- e^+ -> s \bar{c} u \bar{d}, and e^- e^+ -> e^- \bar{\nu}_e u \bar{d}, and give numerical comparisons with other gauge-invariance-preserving schemes in the energy range of LEP2, NLC and beyond.Comment: 49 pages, LaTeX, 2 figures, uses amssymb, axodra