Small-mass effects in heavy-to-light form factors

We present the heavy-to-light form factors with two different non-vanishing masses at next-to-next-to-leading order and study its expansion in the small mass. The leading term of this small-mass expansion leads to a factorized expression for the form factor. The presence of a second mass results in a new feature, in that the soft contribution develops a factorization anomaly. This cancels with the corresponding anomaly in the collinear contribution. With the generalized factorization presented here, it is possible to obtain the leading small-mass terms for processes with large masses, such as muon-electron scattering, from the corresponding massless amplitude and the soft contribution.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 1 ancillary file, published versio

Controlled exchange interaction for quantum logic operations with spin qubits in coupled quantum dots

A two-electron system confined in two coupled semiconductor quantum dots is investigated as a candidate for performing quantum logic operations on spin qubits. We study different processes of swapping the electron spins by controlled switching on/off the exchange interaction. The resulting spin swap corresponds to an elementary operation in quantum information processing. We perform a direct time evolution simulations of the time-dependent Schroedinger equation. Our results show that -- in order to obtain the full interchange of spins -- the exchange interaction should change smoothly in time. The presence of jumps and spikes in the corresponding time characteristics leads to a considerable increase of the spin swap time. We propose several mechanisms to modify the exchange interaction by changing the confinement potential profile and discuss their advantages and disadvantages

A subtraction scheme for massive QED

We present an extension of the FKS subtraction scheme beyond next-to-leading order to deal with soft singularities in fully differential calculations within QED with massive fermions. After a detailed discussion of the next-to-next-to-leading order case, we show how to extend the scheme to even higher orders in perturbation theory. As an application we discuss the computation of the next-to-next-to-leading order QED corrections to the muon decay and present differential results with full electron mass dependence.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, published versio

Theory of Spin Hall conductivity in n-doped GaAs

We develop a theory of extrinsic spin currents in semiconductors, resulting from spin-orbit coupling at charged scatterers, which leads to skew scattering and side jump contributions to the spin Hall conductance. Applying the theory to bulk n-GaAs, without any free parameters, we find spin currents that are in reasonable agreement with recent experiments by Kato et al. [Science 306, 1910 (2004)].Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

A New Model-Independent Method for Extracting Spin-Dependent Cross Section Limits from Dark Matter Searches

A new method is proposed for extracting limits on spin-dependent WIMP-nucleon interaction cross sections from direct detection dark matter experiments. The new method has the advantage that the limits on individual WIMP-proton and WIMP-neutron cross sections for a given WIMP mass can be combined in a simple way to give a model-independent limit on the properties of WIMPs scattering from both protons and neutrons in the target nucleus. Extension of the technique to the case of a target material consisting of several different species of nuclei is discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 6 Encapsulated Postscript figure