Simple examples of distinct Liouville-type symplectic structures

We discuss some examples of open manifolds which admit non-isomorphic symplectic structures of Liouville type.Comment: v2: one remark added, minor change

Braids and symplectic four-manifolds with abelian fundamental group

We explain how a version of Floer homology can be used as an invariant of symplectic manifolds with $b_1>0$. As a concrete example, we look at four-manifolds produced from braids by a surgery construction. The outcome shows that the invariant is nontrivial; however, it is an open question whether it is stronger than the known ones.Comment: 9 pages, LaTe

Model uncertainties in top-quark physics

The ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are studying the top quark in pp collisions at 7 and 8 TeV. Due to the large integrated luminosity, precision measurements of production cross-sections and properties are often limited by systematic uncertainties. An overview of the modeling uncertainties for simulated events is given in this report.Comment: Proceedings from the 7th International Workshop on Top Quark Physics, Cannes, Franc

AHCAL Energy Resolution

The CALICE collaboration has constructed highly granular hadronic and electromagnetic calorimeter prototypes to evaluate technologies for the use in detector systems at a future Linear Collider. The hadron calorimeter uses 7608 small scintillator cells individually read out with silicon photomultipliers. This high granularity opens up the possibility for precise three dimensional shower reconstruction and for software compensation techniques to improve the energy resolution of the detector. We discuss the calibration procedure for the analog hadronic calorimeter and present two software compensation methods based on reconstructed clusters, which were developed with simulations and are applied to hadronic test beam data.Comment: 5 pages, 8 figures, Linear Collider Workshop 2010 Conference Proceeding