“Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence

The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organisations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning in academia. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. To investigate whether this linguistic function is useful we examine how the rhetoric of excellence combines with narratives of scarcity and competition to show that the hypercompetition that arises from the performance of “excellence” is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. In the final analysis, it turns out that that “excellence” is not excellent. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship

Next-to-leading order predictions for Z gamma+jet and Z gamma gamma final states at the LHC

We present next-to-leading order predictions for final states containing leptons produced through the decay of a Z boson in association with either a photon and a jet, or a pair of photons. The effect of photon radiation from the final state leptons is included and we also allow for contributions arising from fragmentation processes. Phenomenological studies are presented for the LHC in the case of final states containing charged leptons and in the case of neutrinos. We also use the procedure introduced by Stewart and Tackmann to provide a reliable estimate of the scale uncertainty inherent in our theoretical calculations of jet-binned Z gamma cross sections. These computations have been implemented in the public code MCFM.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figure

t \bar{t} W production and decay at NLO

We present results for the production of a top pair in association with a W-boson at next-to-leading order. We have implemented this process into the parton-level integrator MCFM including the decays of both the top quarks and the W-bosons with full spin correlations. Although the cross section for this process is small, it is a Standard Model source of same-sign lepton events that must be accounted for in many new physics searches. For a particular analysis of same-sign lepton events in which b-quarks are also present, we investigate the effect of the NLO corrections as a function of the signal region cuts.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to Higgs boson production in association with a photon via weak-boson fusion at the LHC

Higgs boson production in association with a hard central photon and two forward tagging jets is expected to provide valuable information on Higgs boson couplings in a range where it is difficult to disentangle weak-boson fusion processes from large QCD backgrounds. We present next-to-leading order QCD corrections to Higgs production in association with a photon via weak-boson fusion at a hadron collider in the form of a flexible parton-level Monte Carlo program. The QCD corrections to integrated cross sections are found to be small for experimentally relevant selection cuts, while the shape of kinematic distributions can be distorted by up to 20% in some regions of phase space. Residual scale uncertainties at next-to-leading order are at the few-percent level.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl

Towards W b bbar + j at NLO with an automatized approach to one-loop computations

We present results for the O(alpha_s) virtual corrections to q g -> W b bbar q' obtained with a new automatized approach to the evaluation of one-loop amplitudes in terms of Feynman diagrams. Together with the O(alpha_s) corrections to q q' -> W b bbar g, which can be obtained from our results by crossing symmetry, this represents the bulk of the next-to-leading order virtual QCD corrections to W b bbar + j and W b + j hadronic production, calculated in a fixed-flavor scheme with four light flavors. Furthermore, these corrections represent a well defined and independent subset of the 1-loop amplitudes needed for the NNLO calculation of W b bbar. Our approach was tested against several existing results for NLO amplitudes including selected O(alpha_s) one-loop corrections to W + 3 j hadronic production. We discuss the efficiency of our method both with respect to evaluation time and numerical stability.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

Vector boson pair production at the LHC

We present phenomenological results for vector boson pair production at the LHC, obtained using the parton-level next-to-leading order program MCFM. We include the implementation of a new process in the code, pp -> \gamma\gamma, and important updates to existing processes. We incorporate fragmentation contributions in order to allow for the experimental isolation of photons in \gamma\gamma, W\gamma, and Z\gamma production and also account for gluon-gluon initial state contributions for all relevant processes. We present results for a variety of phenomenological scenarios, at the current operating energy of \sqrt{s} = 7 TeV and for the ultimate machine goal, \sqrt{s} = 14 TeV. We investigate the impact of our predictions on several important distributions that enter into searches for new physics at the LHC.Comment: 35 pages, 14 figure

NLO QCD corrections to WZ+jet production with leptonic decays

We compute the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to WZ+jet production at the Tevatron and the LHC, including decays of the electroweak bosons to light leptons with all off-shell effects taken into account. The corrections are sizable and have significant impact on the differential distributions.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Next-to-leading order QCD predictions for Z0H0+jetZ^0 H^0 + {\rm jet} production at LHC

We calculate the complete next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to the $Z^0H^0$ production in association with a jet at the LHC. We study the impacts of the NLO QCD radiative corrections to the integrated and differential cross sections and the dependence of the cross section on the factorization/renormalization scale. We present the transverse momentum distributions of the final $Z^0$-, Higgs-boson and leading-jet. We find that the NLO QCD corrections significantly modify the physical observables, and obviously reduce the scale uncertainty of the LO cross section. The QCD K-factors can be 1.183 and 1.180 at the $\sqrt{s}=14 TeV$ and $\sqrt{s}=7 TeV$ LHC respectively, when we adopt the inclusive event selection scheme with $p_{T,j}^{cut}=50 GeV$, $m_H=120 GeV$ and $\mu=\mu_r=\mu_f=\mu_0 \equiv 1/2(m_Z+m_H)$. Furthermore, we make the comparison between the two scale choices, $\mu=\mu_0$ and $\mu=\mu_1=1/2(E_{T}^{Z}+E_{T}^{H}+ \sum_{j}E_{T}^{jet})$, and find the scale choice $\mu=\mu_1$ seems to be more appropriate than the fixed scale $\mu=\mu_0$.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure

Heavy Higgs signal-background interference in gg → VV in the Standard Model plus real singlet

For the Standard Model extended with a real scalar singlet field, the modification of the heavy Higgs signal due to interference with the continuum background and the off-shell light Higgs contribution is studied for gg --> ZZ, WW --> 4 lepton processes at the Large Hadron Collider. Interference effects can range from O(10%) to O(1) effects for integrated cross sections. Despite a strong cancellation between the heavy Higgs-continuum and the heavy Higgs-light Higgs interference, the full interference is clearly non-negligible and modifies the heavy Higgs line shape. A |M_VV - M_h2| < Gamma_h2 cut mitigates interference effects to O(10%) or less. A public program that allows to simulate the full interference is presented.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures, 9 tables; added results and references, improved discussion, corrected v2 results (heavy top approximation was inadvertently active, results deviate by less than 5%), conclusions unchanged, updated gg2VV code, version to appear in EPJ

NLO QCD corrections to off-shell top-antitop production with leptonic decays at hadron colliders

We present details of a calculation of the cross section for hadronic top-antitop production in next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD, including the decays of the top and antitop into bottom quarks and leptons. This calculation is based on matrix elements for \nu e e+ \mu- \bar{\nu}_{\mu}b\bar{b} production and includes all non-resonant diagrams, interferences, and off-shell effects of the top quarks. Such contributions are formally suppressed by the top-quark width and turn out to be small in the inclusive cross section. However, they can be strongly enhanced in exclusive observables that play an important role in Higgs and new-physics searches. Also non-resonant and off-shell effects due to the finite W-boson width are investigated in detail, but their impact is much smaller than naively expected. We also introduce a matching approach to improve NLO calculations involving intermediate unstable particles. Using a fixed QCD scale leads to perturbative instabilities in the high-energy tails of distributions, but an appropriate dynamical scale stabilises NLO predictions. Numerical results for the total cross section, several distributions, and asymmetries are presented for Tevatron and the LHC at 7 TeV, 8 TeV, and 14 TeV.Comment: 61 pp. Matches version published in JHEP; one more reference adde