Diffraction for non-believers

Diffractive reactions involving a hard scale can be understood in terms of quarks and gluons. These reactions have become a valuable tool for investigating the low-x structure of the proton and the behavior of QCD in the high-density regime, and they may provide a clean environment to study or even discover the Higgs boson at the LHC. In this paper we give a brief introduction to the description of diffraction in QCD. We focus on key features studied in ep collisions at HERA and outline challenges for understanding diffractive interactions at the LHC.Comment: 23 pages, 26 figures. Contributed to the Proceedings of the Workshop on HERA and the LHC, DESY and CERN, 2004-200

Nuclear modification difference between u_v and d_v distributions and its relation to NuTeV sin^2 theta_W anomaly

We investigate a possible nuclear correction to the NuTeV measurement of the weak-mixing angle sin^2 theta_W. In particular, a nuclear modification difference between u_v and d_v distributions contributes to the NuTeV measurement with the iron target. First, the modification differenceis determined by a chi^2 analysis so as to reproduce nuclear data on the structure function F_2 and Drell-Yan processes. Then, taking the NuTeV kinematics into account, we calculate a contribution to the sin^2 theta_W determination. In addition, its uncertainty is estimated by the Hessian method. Although the uncertainty becomes comparable to the NuTeV deviation, the effect is not large enough to explain the whole NuTeV sin^2 theta_W anomaly at this stage. However, it is difficult to determine such a nuclear modification difference, so that we need further investigations on the difference and its effect on the NuTeV anomaly.Comment: 6 pages,3 figure

A Spectrometer to Study Elastic and Diffractive Physics at LHC

The possibility to study elastic and diffractive physics in pp collisions at LHC is investigated. For this purpose we have considered detectors close to the beam in conjunction with the magnetic elements of the accelerator to provide a high precision spectrometer for very forward final state protons. The geometrical acceptance is given and momentum resolution is calculated for different spatial resolution detectors.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figures, Latex, submitted in International Journal of Modern Physics

Effect due to charge symmetry violation on the Paschos-Wolfenstein relation

The modification of the Paschos-Wolfenstein relation is investigated when the charge symmetry violations of valence and sea quark distributions in the nucleon are taken into account. We also study qualitatively the impact of charge symmetry violation (CSV) effect on the extraction of $\sin^{2}\theta_{w}$ from deep inelastic neutrino- and antineutrino-nuclei scattering within the light-cone meson-baryon fluctuation model. We find that the effect of CSV is too small to give a sizable contribution to the NuTeV result with various choices of mass difference inputs, which is consistence with the prediction that the strange-antistrange asymmetry can account for largely the NuTeV deviation in this model. It is noticeable that the effect of CSV might contribute to the NuTeV deviation when the larger difference between the internal momentum scales, $\alpha_{p}$ of the proton and $\alpha_{n}$ of the neutron, is considered.Comment: 15 Latex pages, no figure, final version to appear in PR

Relating high-energy lepton-hadron, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions through geometric scaling

A characteristic feature of small-x lepton-proton data from HERA is geometric scaling -- the fact that over a wide range of x and Q^2 all data can be described by a single variable $Q^2/Q_{sat}^2(x)$, with all x-dependence encoded in the so-called saturation momentum $Q_{sat}(x)$. Here, we observe that the same scaling ansatz accounts for nuclear photoabsorption cross sections and favors the nuclear dependence $Q_{sat,A}^2\propto A^{\alpha}Q_{sat}^2$, $\alpha \simeq 4/9$. We then make the empirical finding that the same A-dependence accounts for the centrality evolution of the multiplicities measured in Au+Au collisions at RHIC. It also allows to parametrize the high-p_t particle suppression in d+Au collisions at forward rapidities. If these geometric scaling properties have a common dynamical origin, then this A-dependence of $Q_{sat,A}^2$ should emerge as a consequence of the underlying dynamical model.Comment: 4 pages, 3 postscript figure

Nuclear parton distributions at next to leading order

We perform a next to leading order QCD global analysis of nuclear deep inelastic scattering and Drell-Yan data using the convolution approach to parameterize nuclear parton densities. We find both a significant improvement in the agreement with data compared to previous extractions, and substantial differences in the scale dependence of nuclear effects compared to leading order analyses.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figure

Wavelet Based Fractal Analysis of Airborne Pollen

The most abundant biological particles in the atmosphere are pollen grains and spores. Self protection of pollen allergy is possible through the information of future pollen contents in the air. In spite of the importance of airborne pol len concentration forecasting, it has not been possible to predict the pollen concentrations with great accuracy, and about 25% of the daily pollen forecasts have resulted in failures. Previous analysis of the dynamic characteristics of atmospheric pollen time series indicate that the system can be described by a low dimensional chaotic map. We apply the wavelet transform to study the multifractal characteristics of an a irborne pollen time series. We find the persistence behaviour associated to low pollen concentration values and to the most rare events of highest pollen co ncentration values. The information and the correlation dimensions correspond to a chaotic system showing loss of information with time evolution.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Twist Three Distribution f_\perp(x,k^\perp) in Light-front Hamiltonian Approach

We calculate the twist three distribution f_\perp(x,k^\perp) contributing to Cahn effect in unpolarized semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering. We use light-front Hamiltonian technique and take the state to be a dressed quark at one loop in perturbation theory. The 'genuine twist three' contribution comes from the quark-gluon interaction part in the operator and is explicitly calculated. f_\perp(x,k^\perp) is compared with f_1(x,k^\perp).Comment: Two figures added, one author added, some parts rewritten for clarificatio

DIPSI: a Monte Carlo generator for elastic vector meson production in charged lepton-proton scattering

We present a Monte Carlo generator for exclusive vector meson production in charged lepton-proton interactions, l+p --> l+p+V, based on a QCD leading logarithm model calculation according to which the cross section for this process is proportional to the square of the gluon momentum density in the proton. The generator can be used for both fixed target and collider kinematics. Each event is assigned a weight equal to its cross section, so that the independent variables can be generated according to convenient distributions, not necessarily identical to the physics ones.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, Latex, to be published in Computer Physics Communication