Selected design issues of a dedicated facility for generic QCD studies

QCD, even if presently out of fashion, deserves a dedicated, generic research program providing new challenges for the theory and aiming at understanding hadronic matter and vacuum in terms of quark and gluon degrees of freedom. Such a research program needs a dedicated facility to re-address basic questions which remain unanswered and to open new vistas.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, talk at Workshop on the Spin Structure of the Proton and Polarized Collider Physic

Summary of the Experimental part of the XXXIVth Rencontre de Moriond

I summarise the experimental results presented during the hadronic session of the XXXIVth Rencontre de Moriond.Comment: Moriond summary talk, Les Arcs, March 20-27, 1999, 15 page

Ascertaining the origin of the lνlνl\nu l\nu excess events at the LHC by a change of beam energy

A higher than predicted rate of two leptons plus missing transverse energy events, reported at the summer HEP conferences, can originate from a decay of the Higgs boson into a $WW^{(*)}$ pair, a misjudgement of the rate of SM background processes or a statistical fluctuation. In this paper we discuss a way to resolve this three-fold ambiguity.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, version 2: Fig. 1 removed to comply with the ATLAS policy rule

Challenges for precision measurements at the LHC

Challenges for precision measurements at the LHC are discussed and a proposal how to move forward to overcome the LHC-specific precision brick-walls is presented.Comment: 4 pages, Presented at the ICISE Inaugural Conference "Windows on the Universe" - Quy Nhon, Vietnam, August 11-17, 201

The Gamma Factory proposal for CERN

This year, 2015, marks the centenary of the publication of Einsteins Theory of General Relativity and it has been named the International Year of Light and light-based technologies by the UN General Assembly. It is thus timely to discuss the possibility of broadening the present CERN research program by including a new component based on a novel concept of the light source which could pave a way towards a multipurpose Gamma Factory. The proposed light source could be realized at CERN by using the infrastructure of the existing accelerators. It could push the intensity limits of the presently operating light-sources by at least 7 orders of magnitude, reaching the flux of the order of 10^17 photons/s, in the particularly interesting gamma-ray energy domain of 1 < Ephoton < 400 MeV. This domain is out of reach for the FEL-based light sources. The energy-tuned, quasi-monochromatic gamma beams, together with the gamma-beam-driven, high intensity secondary beams of polarized positrons, polarized muons, neutrons and radioactive ions would constitute the basic research tools of the proposed Gamma Factory. The Gamma Factory could open new research opportunities in a vast domain of uncharted fundamental physics and industrial application territories. It could strengthen the leading role of CERN in the high energy frontier research territory by providing the unprecedented-brilliance secondary beams of polarized muons for the TeV-energy-scale muon collider and the polarized- muon-beam based neutrino factory.Comment: An Executive Summary of the Gamma Factory proposal addressed to the CERN management. 6 page

Citizen Science in Disaster and Conflict Resilience

*Background/Question/Methods*&#xd;&#xa;&#xd;&#xa;Within the disaster and conflict response communities, concern about lack of effectiveness of outside responses has led to a debate about the role of local people in developing the capacity to prepare for a crisis and to respond after calamity has struck. Pelling (2007) points out the potential for participatory disaster risk assessment to build local capacity and for generating knowledge that, along with more expert-driven data collection, is used to identify and reduce the risk of disaster. Similarly, Weinstein and Tidball (2007) and Tidball et al. (2008) present an alternative model for post-crisis intervention based on local assets, including ongoing attempts of communities to manage their natural resources. For example, these authors suggest that civic ecology (CE) practices, including community forestry, watershed enhancement, community agriculture and gardening, and other participatory environmental restoration initiatives that emerge from the actions of local residents (Tidball and Krasny 2007), should be examined and perhaps leveraged by outsiders for their ability to mitigate post-crisis situations. The question is, how might CE relate to citizen science in applications post-disaster or conflict?&#xd;&#xa;&#xd;&#xa;*Results/Conclusions*&#xd;&#xa;&#xd;&#xa;CE practices emerge through the actions of people wanting to manage a local resource, and integrate both learning through small-scale experimentation and observations (adaptive management) and collaborative or participatory processes (co-management). They can be considered as an emergent form of adaptive co-management (Ruitenbeek and Cartier 2001; Armitage, Plummer et al. 2009). The local knowledge of individuals who initiate the practices is critical, although often linkages are made with scientists from universities, government, and non-profit organizations, so multiple forms of knowledge are incorporated into the stewardship activities. This learning shortens feedback times between management actions, such as participatory approaches for planting trees, and seeing the impact of tree planting on local ecological and social systems. CE practices embody attributes that may foster resilience both prior to and post-crisis, including multiple forms of knowledge and governance, self-organization, adaptive learning, shorter feedbacks, and ecosystem services (Folke, S. Carpenter et al. 2002; Walker and Salt 2006). We demonstrate that similar to CE, citizen science could build capacity to mitigate disaster and conflict through shortening feedbacks and through making available multiple forms of knowledge and data collection. Further, given the need for asset-based and participatory interventions post-crisis, and the paucity of existing mechanisms that address this need (Weinstein and Tidball 2007), we examine citizen science and its potential to become part of a tool kit of participatory responses that engage citizens in meaningful activity post-conflict

Charge asymmetries of lepton transverse momenta in Drell-Yan processes at the LHC

Charged lepton transverse momenta in the Drell-Yan processes play an important role at the LHC in precision measurements of the Standard Model parameters, such as the W-boson mass and width, their charge asymmetries and sin^2(theta_W). Therefore, their distributions should be described as accurate as possible by the Monte Carlo event generators. In this paper we discuss the problem of matching the hard-process kinematics of the Monte Carlo generator WINHAC with the parton-shower kinematics of the PYTHIA 6.4 generator while interfacing these two programs. We show that improper assignment of the quark and antiquark effective momenta in the LO matrix element computations may affect considerably the predicted lepton transverse momenta and even completely reverse their charge asymmetries at the LHC. We propose two matching schemes in which the NLO QCD distributions of the leptonic kinematical variables can be well reproduced by the LO WINHAC generator.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figure

The LHC excess of four-lepton events interpreted as Higgs-boson signal: background from Double Drell--Yan process?

We construct a simple model of the Double Drell--Yan Process (DDYP) for proton--proton collisions and investigate its possible contribution to the background for the Higgs-boson searches at the LHC. We demonstrate that under the assumption of the predominance of short range, ${\cal O}(0.1)\,$fm, transverse-plane correlations of quark--antiquark pairs within the proton this contribution becomes important and may even explain the observed excess of the four-lepton events at the LHC -- the events interpreted as originating from the Higgs-boson decays: $H \rightarrow ZZ^{*} \rightarrow 4l$ and $H \rightarrow WW^{*} \rightarrow 2l 2 \nu$.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, Version 2 matches the published versio