Rare Decays

Studies of rare decays play an important role in the search of physics beyond the standard model. New particles may participate in the loop processes and can be probed by seeing any deviations from the standard model predictions. The very rare decay $B_s\to\mu^+\mu^-$ has been observed with the data collected by CMS and LHCb experiments. The signal seen by the ATLAS experiment is less significant but is compatible with the predictions. The measurement itself provides stringent constraints to new physics models. The first effective lifetime measurement with $B_s\to\mu^+\mu^-$ candidates has been carried out by the LHCb experiment. More data are still required to observe the $B^0\to\mu^+\mu^-$ decays. The $B\to K^*\mu^+\mu^-$ decay also proceeds through a flavour changing neutral current process, and is sensitive to the new physics. Extended measurements are carried out for $B\to K^*\mu^+\mu^-$ decays. Most of the classical physics parameters are found to be consistent with the predictions, but tensions do emerge in some of the observables. More data will help to clarify these potential deviations.Comment: 7 pages, for LHCP 2017 conferenc

Improved Successive Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes

As improved versions of successive cancellation (SC) decoding algorithm, successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding and successive cancellation stack (SCS) decoding are used to improve the finite-length performance of polar codes. Unified descriptions of SC, SCL and SCS decoding algorithms are given as path searching procedures on the code tree of polar codes. Combining the ideas of SCL and SCS, a new decoding algorithm named successive cancellation hybrid (SCH) is proposed, which can achieve a better trade-off between computational complexity and space complexity. Further, to reduce the complexity, a pruning technique is proposed to avoid unnecessary path searching operations. Performance and complexity analysis based on simulations show that, with proper configurations, all the three improved successive cancellation (ISC) decoding algorithms can have a performance very close to that of maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding with acceptable complexity. Moreover, with the help of the proposed pruning technique, the complexities of ISC decoders can be very close to that of SC decoder in the moderate and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime.Comment: This paper is modified and submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communication