B physics at CDF - the Beauty of hadron collisions

The CDF experiment at the Tevatron p-pbar collider established that extensive and detailed exploration of the b-quark dynamics is possible in hadron collisions, with results competitive and supplementary to those from e+e- colliders. This provides an unique, rich, and highly rewarding program that is currently reaching full maturity. I report a few recent world-leading results on rare decays, CP-violation in Bs mixing, and b-> s penguin decays.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures. Write-up of the proceedings of the "Third Workshop on Theory, Phenomenology and Experiments in Heavy Flavour Physics" (Capri2010

Convergence to the Critical Attractor at Infinite and Tangent Bifurcation Points

The dynamics of the convergence to the critical attractor for the logistic map is investigated. At the border of chaos, when the Liapunov exponent is zero, the use of the non-extensive statistical mechanics formalism allows to define a weak sensitivity or insensitivity to initial conditions. Using this formalism we analyse how a set of initial conditions spread all over the phase space converges to the critical attractor in the case of infinite bifurcation and tangent bifurcation points. We show that the phenomena is governed in both cases by a power-law regime but the critical exponents depend on the type of bifurcation and may also depend on the numerical experiment set-up. Differences and similarities between the two cases are also discussed.Comment: 5 figures, accepted for publication in Int. J. of Bifurcation and Chaos (July 2006

A novel measurement of Bs0B^0_s and Ds−D^-_s lifetimes using semileptonic decays at LHCb

I report new, world-leading LHCb results on heavy meson lifetimes. We use a novel approach that suppresses the shortcomings typically associated with reconstruction of semileptonic decays, allowing for precise measurements of lifetimes and other properties in collider experiments. We achieve a 15% and a $2\times$ improvement over current best determinations of the flavor-specific $B^0_s$ lifetime and $D^-_s$ lifetime, respectively.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures. Talk presented at the APS Division of Particles and Fields Meeting (DPF 2017), July 31-August 4, 2017, Fermilab. C17073

Entrepreneurial becoming: an educational pathway out of poverty

This paper reports a longitudinal analysis of 20 necessity driven micro-entrepreneurs operating in Beira, Central Mozambique, who received funding and training from the same NGO to establish or grow their business activities and reports the development of these entrepreneurs in terms of their acquired entrepreneurial potential for long-term success. The results indicate there is a process of entrepreneurial becoming that is not just about access to finance but especially learning and, when successful, this process supports the transformation of survival micro-enterprises into entrepreneurial micro-businesses. The concept of ‘becoming’ contains an implicit temporal dimension. Becoming suggests a transformation over time: a change from what one is already. In this study, we witness a significant change in understanding how a business needs to operate, in recognizing opportunities, thinking more creatively, and building self-confidence

CDF Hot Topics

After an introduction on the peculiarities of flavor-physics measurements at a hadron collider, and on the upgraded Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF II), I show recent results on two-body B0 and B0s decays into charged, pseudo-scalar, charmless mesons or into muons, to illustrate how the flavor physics program at CDF is competitive with (in B0 decays) and complementary (in B0s decays) to B-factories. Results shown include the new measurement of the CP-violating asymmetry in B0-->K+pi- decays, the first measurement of the time-evolution of B0s-->K+K- decays, and the world best limits on the decay rates of rare B0/B0s-->mu+mu- modes.Comment: write-up for the proceedings of the "Flavor Physics & CP Violation Conference, Vancouver, 2006". 9 pages, 10 figures, to be published in the Electronic Conference Proceedings Archiv