Bike Athlete Performance, Blog 10

Student blog posts from the Great VCU Bike Race Book

Undocumented Migrants as New (and Peaceful) American Revolutionaries

This essay situates undocumented migrants in the history of the American revolutionary period. The lawbreaking of both groups produced constructive legal and social change. For example, the masses of American revolutionaries and many of their leading men fought to rid the colonies of hereditary aristocracy. Colonists had come to cherish the proto-meritocracy that had bloomed on colonial shores and rankled at local evidence of aristocratic privilege, like the Crown’s grant of landed estates to absentee English aristocrats. Today’s equivalent hereditary aristocracy is the citizenry of wealthy democracies like the United States. Hereditary citizens use immigration restrictions to reserve the wealth and privilege of rich-world citizenship for themselves and invited guests. The undocumented peacefully challenge this status quo by migrating and remaining in the United States without permission, securing citizenship for their American-born children, and protesting that “no one is illegal.” In these ways the undocumented seize some of the aristocratic privileges of American citizenship and fight for others. For this and other reasons, the undocumented are contemporary heirs to the revolutionary moment—the true tea partiers of the twenty-first century

Directly Measuring the Tensor Structure of the Scalar Coupling to Gauge Bosons

Kinematic distributions in the decays of the newly discovered resonance to four leptons can provide a direct measurement of the tensor structure of the particle's couplings to gauge bosons. Even if the particle is shown to be a parity even scalar, measuring this tensor structure is a necessary step in determining if this particle is responsible for giving mass to the Z. We consider a Standard Model like coupling as well as coupling via a dimension five operator to either ZZ or Z\gamma. We show that using full kinematic information from each event allows discrimination between renormalizable and higher dimensional coupling to ZZ at the 95% confidence level with O(50) signal events, and coupling to Z\gamma can be distinguished with as few as 20 signal events. This shows that these measurements can be useful even with this year's LHC data.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; typos corrected, references adde

The Virtual Diphoton Excess

Interpreting the excesses around 750 GeV in the diphoton spectra to be the signal of a new heavy scalar decaying to photons, we point out the possibility of looking for correlated signals with virtual photons. In particular, we emphasize that the effective operator that generates the diphoton decay will also generate decays to two leptons and a photon, as well as to four leptons, independently of the new resonance couplings to $Z\gamma$ and $ZZ$. Depending on the relative sizes of these effective couplings, we show that the virtual diphoton component can make up a sizable, and sometimes dominant, contribution to the total $2\ell \gamma$ and $4\ell$ partial widths. We also discuss modifications to current experimental cuts in order to maximize the sensitivity to these virtual photon effects. Finally, we briefly comment on prospects for channels involving other Standard Model fermions as well as more exotic decay possibilities of the putative resonance.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures; v2 figure 2 and references adde

High School–University Collaborations for Latinx Student Success: Navigating the Political Reality

Latinx students are a growing population in postsecondary education but attain degrees at a pace behind their non-Latinx peers. This research examines a partnership between a research university (RU) and career and technical education (CTE) high school, Hillside Technical High School (HTHS). Through a 2-year ethnographic case study, we found that different logistics and cultural values were primary contributors to the bifurcated pathway between high school and college. These pathways were most successfully connected through strategies such as flexibility, personal relationships, and incorporation of community resources as well as viewing the students as resources. Our study suggests a need to reframe partnerships in recognition of the assets that students bring to these e orts, while also creating opportunities for additional faculty support and community involvement

Golden Probe of the Top Yukuwa

We perform a preliminary study of the ability of the Higgs decay to four leptons to shed light on the top quark Yukawa couplings. In particular we examine whether the $h\to 4\ell$ `golden channel' is sensitive to the $CP$ properties of the top quark couplings to the Higgs boson. We show that kinematic distributions are sensitive to interference of the next-to-leading order electroweak corrections with the tree level $ZZ$ contribution. This translates into a sensitivity to the top quark Yukawa couplings such that meaningful constraints on their $CP$ properties can begin to be obtained once $\sim 300$ fb$^{-1}$ of data has been collected at $\sim 14$ TeV, with significant improvements at higher luminosity or with a higher energy hadron collider. This makes the $h\to4\ell$ channel a useful probe of the top quark Yukawa couplings that is qualitatively different from already established searches in $h\to V\gamma$ two body decays, $tth$, and $gg\to h$. We also briefly discuss other potential possibilities for probing the top Yukawa $CP$ properties in $h\to2\ell\gamma$ and $\ell^+\ell^-\to h Z, h\gamma$.Comment: references and footnote adde