Brief physics survey with CMS in year one

The CMS detector is one of the two general purpose experiments that will study the collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is supposed to start its operation in 2007 at an instantaneous luminosity of 2 x 10^33 cm-2 s-1, which may well result in an integrated luminosity of 10 fb-1 after the first year of running. The corresponding physics reach of CMS is exemplified with the study of a few standard model channels (weak boson and top quark production) and with the searches for Higgs bosons.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, contribution to the Proceedings of the QCD 2003 Moriond conferenc

Transverse mass distributions of strange particles produced in Pb-Pb collisions at 158 A GeV/c

Experiment NA57 has collected high statistics, high purity samples of $K^0_s$, $\Lambda$, $\Xi$ and $\Omega$ produced in Pb-Pb collisions at 158 $A$ GeV/$c$. In this paper we present a study of the transverse mass spectra of these particles for a sample of events corresponding to about the most central 55% of the inelastic Pb-Pb cross section. We analyse the transverse mass distributions in the framework of the blast-wave model for the full sample under consideration and, for the first time at the SPS, as a function of the event centrality.Comment: Contribution to the International Workshop on QCD: QCD@Work 2003 - Conversano (Italy) 14-18 June 2003 (eConf C030614

Geometric phase and gauge theory structure in quantum computing

We discuss the presence of a geometrical phase in the evolution of a qubit state and its gauge structure. The time evolution operator is found to be the free energy operator, rather than the Hamiltonian operator.Comment: 5 pages, presented at Fifth International Workshop DICE2010: Space-Time-Matter - current issues in quantum mechanics and beyond, Castiglioncello (Tuscany), September 13-17, 201

A mentalist framework for linguistic and extralinguistic communication

We outline some components of a mentalist theory of human communicative competence. Communication in our species is an intentional and overt type of social interaction, based on each agent's capability of entertaining shared mental states and of acting so as to make certain mental states shared with the other. Communicative meaning is a matter of ascription: it is not an intrinsic property of a communicative act, but is instead created here and now as the shared construction of the interlocutors. We then discuss how communicative actions are superficially realized by our species, focusing in particular on the difference between linguistic and extralinguistic (that is, gestural) means of expression. Linguistic communication is the communicative use of a symbol system, whereas extralinguistic communication is the communicative use of a set of symbols. The difference turns out to be a matter of processing rather than of intrinsic structure

Nucleation in the chiral transition with an inhomogeneous background

We consider an approximation procedure to evaluate the finite-temperature one-loop fermionic density in the presence of a chiral background field which systematically incorporates effects from inhomogeneities in the chiral field through a derivative expansion. Modifications in the effective potential and their consequences for the bubble nucleation process are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. To appear in the proceedings of I Latin American Workshop on High Energy Phenomenology (LAWHEP 2005), Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1-3 Dec 200