Revisiting the Bs(∗)B^{(*)}_s-Meson Production at the Hadronic Colliders

The production of heavy-flavored hadron at the hadronic colliders provides a challenging opportunity to test the validity of pQCD predictions. There are two mechanisms for the $B^{(*)}_s$ hadroproduction, i.e. the gluon-gluon fusion mechanism via the subprocess $g+g\rightarrow B^{(*)}_s+b+\bar{s}$ and the extrinsic heavy quark mechanism via the subprocesses $g+\bar{b}\to B^{(*)}_s +\bar{s}$ and $g+s\to B^{(*)}_s +b$, both of which shall have sizable contributions in proper kinematic region. Different from the fixed-flavor-number scheme (FFNS) previously adopted in the literature, we study the $B^{(*)}_s$ hadroproduction under the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme (GM-VFNS), in which we can consistently deal with the double counting problem from the above two mechanisms. Properties for the $B^{(*)}_s$ hadroproduction are discussed. To be useful reference, a comparative study of FFNS and GM-VFNS is presented. Both of which can provide reasonable estimations for the $B^{(*)}_s$ hadroproduction. At the Tevatron, the difference between these two schemes is small, however such difference is obvious at the LHC. The forthcoming more precise data on LHC shall provide a good chance to check which scheme is more appropriate to deal with the $B^{(*)}_s$-meson production and to further study the heavy quark components in hadrons.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables. To match the published version. To be published in Eur.Phys.J.

B_c meson rare decays in the light-cone quark model

We investigate the rare decays $B_c \rightarrow D_s(1968) \ell \bar{\ell}$ and $B_c\rightarrow D_s^*(2317) \ell \bar{\ell}$ in the framework of the light-cone quark model (LCQM). The transition form factors are calculated in the space-like region and then analytically continued to the time-like region via exponential parametrization. The branching ratios and longitudinal lepton polarization asymmetries (LPAs) for the two decays are given and compared with each other. The results are helpful to investigating the structure of $B_c$ meson and to testing the unitarity of CKM quark mixing matrix. All these results can be tested in the future experiments at the LHC.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, version accepted for publication in EPJ

Convection and Shear Flow in TC Development and Intensification

Award # N0001412WX2084

Perceived coach autonomy support and athlete burnout : the role of athletes’ experiential avoidance

Researchers have found that perceived coach autonomy support is negatively related to athlete burnout. However, whether offering such support would be helpful for all athletes or only athletes with certain characteristics is unknown. Following the notion of autonomous goal regulation suggested in self-determination theory, the authors propose that having autonomy support from coaches will be more strongly associated with a decrease in athlete burnout among athletes with lower experiential avoidance than among those with higher experiential avoidance. Experiential avoidance is a tendency to escape, avoid, or modify the frequency of uncomfortable experiences. A total of 141 collegiate student athletes completed surveys at two time points over three months. The results indicate that perceived coach autonomy support is negatively related to athlete burnout. Furthermore, the negative relationship between perceived coach autonomy support and decreased athlete burnout is stronger when experiential avoidance is low rather than high. When the three dimensions of burnout were analyzed individually (i.e., emotional and physical exhaustion, reduced sense of accomplishment and sport devaluation), only emotional and physical exhaustion and overall score were significant. The implications and applications of these results are discussed from an interactionist perspective

Gene functionality's influence on the second codon: A large-scale survey of second codon composition in three domains

AbstractThe second codon of a transcript, besides encoding for an amino acid, is now known to also have multiple molecular functions and is involved in translation efficiency and protein turn-over and maturation processing. These multiple purposes therefore make the selection constraints on this codon's composition more complex. To examine the biological significance of various permutations of the second codon, we conducted a systematic survey of second codon composition from 442 selected genomes across three domains. The amino acid bias of the second codon is associated with specific protein functions. The most common amino acids (S, A, K and T) are significantly avoided in Cell Envelope-related genes but preferred in Translation or Energy Metabolism-related genes, suggesting that the function of a gene product is a significant factor influencing the composition of the second codon

Sample Path Large Deviations for Heavy-Tailed Lévy Processes and Random Walks

Let $X$ be a L\'evy process with regularly varying L\'evy measure $\nu$. We obtain sample-path large deviations of scaled processes $\bar X_n(t) \triangleq X(nt)/n$ and obtain a similar result for random walks. Our results yield detailed asymptotic estimates in scenarios where multiple big jumps in the increment are required to make a rare event happen. In addition, we investigate connections with the classical large-deviations framework. In that setting, we show that a weak large deviations principle (with logarithmic speed) holds, but a full large-deviations principle does not hold