Supersymmetric effects in top quark decay into polarized W-boson

We investigate the one-loop supersymmetric QCD (SUSY-QCD) and electroweak (SUSY-EW) corrections to the top quark decay into a b-quark and a longitudinal or transverse W-boson. The corrections are presented in terms of the longitudinal ratio \Gamma(t-->W_L b)/\Gamma(t--> W b) and the transverse ratio \Gamma(t-->W_- b)/\Gamma(t--> W b). In most of the parameter space, both SUSY-QCD and SUSY-EW corrections to these ratios are found to be less than 1% in magnitude and they tend to have opposite signs. The corrections to the total width \Gamma(t-->W b) are also presented for comparison with the existing results in the literature. We find that our SUSY-EW corrections to the total width differ significantly from previous studies: the previous studies give a large correction of more than 10% in magnitude for a large part of the parameter space while our results reach only few percent at most.Comment: Version in PRD (explanation and refs added

Supersymmetric Electroweak Corrections to Charged Higgs Boson Production in Association with a Top Quark at Hadron Colliders

We calculate the $O(\alpha_{ew}m_{t(b)}^{2}/m_{W}^{2})$ and $O(\alpha_{ew} m_{t(b)}^4/m_W^4)$ supersymmetric electroweak corrections to the cross section for the charged Higgs boson production in association with a top quark at the Tevatron and the LHC. These corrections arise from the quantum effects which are induced by potentially large Yukawa couplings from the Higgs sector and the chargino-top(bottom)-sbottom(stop) couplings, neutralino-top(bottom)-stop(sbottom) couplings and charged Higgs-stop-sbottom couplings. They can decrease or increase the cross section depending on $\tan\beta$ but are not very sensitive to the mass of the charged Higgs boson for high $\tan\beta$. At low $\tan\beta(=2)$ the corrections decrease the total cross sections significantly, which exceed -12% for $m_{H^{\pm}}$ below $300GeV$ at both the Tevatron and the LHC, but for $m_{H^{\pm}}>300GeV$ the corrections can become very small at the LHC. For high $\tan\beta(=10,30)$ these corrections can decrease or increase the total cross sections, and the magnitude of the corrections are at most a few percent at both the Tevatron and the LHC.Comment: 28 pages including 4 eps figure

Angular Distributions of Drell-Yan Lepton Pairs at the Tevatron: Order αs2\alpha_s^2 Corrections and Monte Carlo Studies

We investigate the angular distribution of the lepton pair in the process $p \bar{p} \rightarrow \gamma^{\ast} + X \rightarrow \ell^+\ell^- + X$, where the virtual photon is produced at high transverse momentum. The angular distribution of the leptons is very sensitive to possible nonperturbative effects, such as a nontrivial vacuum structure of QCD, and offers a good chance to test such effects. We present complete ${\cal O}(\alpha_s^2)$ calculations of the decay lepton distributions in the lepton pair rest frame. An order ${\cal O}(\alpha_s)$ Monte Carlo study of the lepton angular distributions, with acceptance cuts and energy resolution smearing applied to the leptons, is also presented.Comment: 26 pages (Revtex) plus 9 (uuencoded) postscript figures available as a compressed tar file at ftp://phenom.physics.wisc.edu/pub/preprints/madph-94-857-figs.tar.

Higgs-boson production associated with a bottom quark at hadron colliders with SUSY-QCD corrections

The Higgs boson production p p (p\bar p) -> b h +X via b g -> b h at the LHC, which may be an important channel for testing the bottom quark Yukawa coupling, is subject to large supersymmetric quantum corrections. In this work the one-loop SUSY-QCD corrections to this process are evaluated and are found to be quite sizable in some parameter space. We also study the behavior of the corrections in the limit of heavy SUSY masses and find the remnant effects of SUSY-QCD. These remnant effects, which are left over in the Higgs sector by the heavy sparticles, are found to be so sizable (for a light CP-odd Higgs and large \tan\beta) that they might be observable in the future LHC experiment. The exploration of such remnant effects is important for probing SUSY, especially in case that the sparticles are too heavy (above TeV) to be directly discovered at the LHC.Comment: Results for the Tevatron adde

Probing Topcolor-Assisted Technicolor from Top-Charm Associated Production at LHC

We propose to probe the topcolor-assisted technicolor (TC2) model from the top-charm associated productions at the LHC, which are highly suppressed in the Standard Model. Due to the flavor-changing couplings of the top quark with the scalars (top-pions and top-Higgs) in TC2 model, the top-charm associated productions can occur via both the s-channel and t-channel parton processes by exchanging a scalar field at the LHC. We examined these processes through Monte Carlo simulation and found that they can reach the observable level at the LHC in quite a large part of the parameter space of the TC2 model.Comment: Version to appear in PRD (Rapid Communication

The fully differential single-top-quark cross section in next-to-leading order QCD

We present a new next-to-leading order calculation for fully differential single-top-quark final states. The calculation is performed using phase space slicing and dipole subtraction methods. The results of the methods are found to be in agreement. The dipole subtraction method calculation retains the full spin dependence of the final state particles. We show a few numerical results to illustrate the utility and consistency of the resulting computer implementations.Comment: 37 pages, latex, 2 ps figure

Global Search for New Physics with 2.0/fb at CDF

Data collected in Run II of the Fermilab Tevatron are searched for indications of new electroweak-scale physics. Rather than focusing on particular new physics scenarios, CDF data are analyzed for discrepancies with the standard model prediction. A model-independent approach (Vista) considers gross features of the data, and is sensitive to new large cross-section physics. Further sensitivity to new physics is provided by two additional algorithms: a Bump Hunter searches invariant mass distributions for "bumps" that could indicate resonant production of new particles; and the Sleuth procedure scans for data excesses at large summed transverse momentum. This combined global search for new physics in 2.0/fb of ppbar collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV reveals no indication of physics beyond the standard model.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures. Final version which appeared in Physical Review D Rapid Communication

Shrinking a large dataset to identify variables associated with increased risk of Plasmodium falciparum infection in Western Kenya

Large datasets are often not amenable to analysis using traditional single-step approaches. Here, our general objective was to apply imputation techniques, principal component analysis (PCA), elastic net and generalized linear models to a large dataset in a systematic approach to extract the most meaningful predictors for a health outcome. We extracted predictors for Plasmodium falciparum infection, from a large covariate dataset while facing limited numbers of observations, using data from the People, Animals, and their Zoonoses (PAZ) project to demonstrate these techniques: data collected from 415 homesteads in western Kenya, contained over 1500 variables that describe the health, environment, and social factors of the humans, livestock, and the homesteads in which they reside. The wide, sparse dataset was simplified to 42 predictors of P. falciparum malaria infection and wealth rankings were produced for all homesteads. The 42 predictors make biological sense and are supported by previous studies. This systematic data-mining approach we used would make many large datasets more manageable and informative for decision-making processes and health policy prioritization

Measurement of the Bottom-Strange Meson Mixing Phase in the Full CDF Data Set

We report a measurement of the bottom-strange meson mixing phase \beta_s using the time evolution of B0_s -> J/\psi (->\mu+\mu-) \phi (-> K+ K-) decays in which the quark-flavor content of the bottom-strange meson is identified at production. This measurement uses the full data set of proton-antiproton collisions at sqrt(s)= 1.96 TeV collected by the Collider Detector experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron, corresponding to 9.6 fb-1 of integrated luminosity. We report confidence regions in the two-dimensional space of \beta_s and the B0_s decay-width difference \Delta\Gamma_s, and measure \beta_s in [-\pi/2, -1.51] U [-0.06, 0.30] U [1.26, \pi/2] at the 68% confidence level, in agreement with the standard model expectation. Assuming the standard model value of \beta_s, we also determine \Delta\Gamma_s = 0.068 +- 0.026 (stat) +- 0.009 (syst) ps-1 and the mean B0_s lifetime, \tau_s = 1.528 +- 0.019 (stat) +- 0.009 (syst) ps, which are consistent and competitive with determinations by other experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, Phys. Rev. Lett 109, 171802 (2012