Tau anomalous magnetic moment form factor at Super B/Flavor factories

The proposed high-luminosity B/Flavor factories offer new opportunities for the improved determination of the fundamental physical parameters of standard heavy leptons. Compared to the electron or the muon case, the magnetic properties of the $\tau$ lepton are largely unexplored. We show that the electromagnetic properties of the $\tau$, and in particular its magnetic form factor, may be measured competitively in these facilities, using unpolarized or polarized electron beams. Various observables of the $\tau$'s produced on top of the $\Upsilon$ resonances, such as cross-section and normal polarization for unpolarized electrons or longitudinal and transverse asymmetries for polarized beams, can be combined in order to increase the sensitivity on the magnetic moment form factor. In the case of polarized electrons, we identify a special combination of transverse and longitudinal $\tau$ polarizations able to disentangle this anomalous magnetic form factor from both the charge form factor and the interference with the Z-mediating amplitude. For an integrated luminosity of $15 \times 10^{18} b^{-1}$ one could achieve a sensitivity of about $10^{-6}$, which is several orders of magnitude below any other existing high- or low-energy bound on the magnetic moment. Thus one may obtain a QED test of this fundamental quantity to a few % precision.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure

Entropy involved in fidelity of DNA replication

Information has an entropic character which can be analyzed within the Statistical Theory in molecular systems. R. Landauer and C.H. Bennett showed that a logical copy can be carried out in the limit of no dissipation if the computation is performed sufficiently slowly. Structural and recent single-molecule assays have provided dynamic details of polymerase machinery with insight into information processing. We introduce a rigorous characterization of Shannon Information in biomolecular systems and apply it to DNA replication in the limit of no dissipation. Specifically, we devise an equilibrium pathway in DNA replication to determine the entropy generated in copying the information from a DNA template in the absence of friction. Both the initial state, the free nucleotides randomly distributed in certain concentrations, and the final state, a polymerized strand, are mesoscopic equilibrium states for the nucleotide distribution. We use empirical stacking free energies to calculate the probabilities of incorporation of the nucleotides. The copied strand is, to first order of approximation, a state of independent and non-indentically distributed random variables for which the nucleotide that is incorporated by the polymerase at each step is dictated by the template strand, and to second order of approximation, a state of non-uniformly distributed random variables with nearest-neighbor interactions for which the recognition of secondary structure by the polymerase in the resultant double-stranded polymer determines the entropy of the replicated strand. Two incorporation mechanisms arise naturally and their biological meanings are explained. It is known that replication occurs far from equilibrium and therefore the Shannon entropy here derived represents an upper bound for replication to take place. Likewise, this entropy sets a universal lower bound for the copying fidelity in replication.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figure