McDonnell v. United States: Defining “Official Action” in Public Corruption Law

McDonnell v. United States involved the former Governor of Virginia leveraging the power of his position to help a wealthy constituent gain access to top state decision makers in exchange for valuable gifts and loans. The Government argued that conduct like setting up phone calls and meetings, as well as hosting receptions on behalf of the constituent was sufficient to constitute an “official act” under public corruption laws. Governor McDonnell argued for a narrower interpretation of “official act,” claiming that his conduct was akin to run of the mill things public officials do every day to benefit their constituents. The Court sided with Governor McDonnell and adopted a narrow interpretation of “official act,” excluding the conduct of setting up of meetings or phone calls and hosting receptions standing alone. This paper argues that this was a reasonable decision by the Court, but the new rule may not serve as a perfect remedy to solve the problem of public corruption

Dimension-8 Operators in the Standard Model Effective Field Theory

We present a complete basis of dimension-8 operators in the Standard Model Effective Field Theory. Attention is paid to operators that vanish in the absence of flavor structure. The 44,807 operators are encoded in 1,029 Lagrangian terms. We also briefly discuss a few aspects of phenomenology involving dimension-8 operators, including light-by-light scattering and electroweak precision data.Comment: 50 pages, 21 tables; v4: added missing contribution to matching in Eq. (5.19). T parameter calculation unchange

Semiclassical Approach to Heterogeneous Vacuum Decay

We derive the decay rate of an unstable phase of a quantum field theory in the presence of an impurity in the thin-wall approximation. This derivation is based on the how the impurity changes the (flat spacetime) geometry relative to case of pure false vacuum. Two examples are given that show how to estimate some of the additional parameters that enter into this heterogeneous decay rate. This formalism is then applied to the Higgs vacuum of the Standard Model (SM), where baryonic matter acts as an impurity in the electroweak Higgs vacuum. We find that the probability for heterogeneous vacuum decay to occur is suppressed with respect to the homogeneous case. That is to say, the conclusions drawn from the homogeneous case are not modified by the inclusion of baryonic matter in the calculation. On the other hand, we show that Beyond the Standard Model physics with a characteristic scale comparable to the scale that governs the homogeneous decay rate in the SM, can in principle lead to an enhanced decay rate.Comment: v3: version published in JHEP, very minor changes from v

Bottom-Quark Forward-Backward Asymmetry in the Standard Model and Beyond

We computed the bottom-quark forward-backward asymmetry at the Tevatron in the Standard Model and for several new physics scenarios. Near the $Z$-pole, the SM bottom asymmetry is dominated by tree level exchanges of electroweak gauge bosons. While above the $Z$-pole, next-to-leading order QCD dominates the SM asymmetry as was the case with the top quark forward-backward asymmetry. Light new physics, $M_{NP} \precsim 150$ GeV, can cause significant deviations from the SM prediction for the bottom asymmetry. The bottom asymmetry can be used to distinguish between competing NP explanations of the top asymmetry based on how the NP interferes with s-channel gluon and $Z$ exchange.Comment: v3: Bug found in FeynRules 1.6.1 (not present in current version, 2.0.24) One plot corrected. Conclusions unaffecte