The LPM effect in sequential bremsstrahlung 2: factorization

The splitting processes of bremsstrahlung and pair production in a medium are coherent over large distances in the very high energy limit, which leads to a suppression known as the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect. In this paper, we continue analysis of the case when the coherence lengths of two consecutive splitting processes overlap (which is important for understanding corrections to standard treatments of the LPM effect in QCD), avoiding soft-gluon approximations. In particular, this paper analyzes the subtle problem of how to precisely separate overlapping double splitting (e.g.\ overlapping double bremsstrahlung) from the case of consecutive, independent bremsstrahlung (which is the case that would be implemented in a Monte Carlo simulation based solely on single splitting rates). As an example of the method, we consider the rate of real double gluon bremsstrahlung from an initial gluon with various simplifying assumptions (thick media; $\hat q$ approximation; large $N_c$; and neglect for the moment of processes involving 4-gluon vertices) and explicitly compute the correction $\Delta\,d\Gamma/dx\,dy$ due to overlapping formation times.Comment: 59 pages, 37 figures. The major changes from v1: new section I.A.4 added to give kinetic theory analogy to better explain the importance of the subtraction defining Delta[d(Gamma)/dx dy]; new appendix F added to compare/contrast with issues raised by Blaizot, Dominguez, Iancu, and Mehtar-Tani [22

The LPM effect in sequential bremsstrahlung: dimensional regularization

The splitting processes of bremsstrahlung and pair production in a medium are coherent over large distances in the very high energy limit, which leads to a suppression known as the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect. Of recent interest is the case when the coherence lengths of two consecutive splitting processes overlap (which is important for understanding corrections to standard treatments of the LPM effect in QCD). In previous papers, we have developed methods for computing such corrections without making soft-gluon approximations. However, our methods require consistent treatment of canceling ultraviolet (UV) divergences associated with coincident emission times, even for processes with tree-level amplitudes. In this paper, we show how to use dimensional regularization to properly handle the UV contributions. We also present a simple diagnostic test that any consistent UV regularization method for this problem needs to pass.Comment: 59 pages, 8 figures [main change from v1: addition of the new appendix B summarizing more about use of the i*epsilon prescription in earlier work

Selected highlights from the study of mesons

We provide a brief review of recent progress in the study of mesons using QCD's Dyson-Schwinger equations. Along the way we touch on aspects of confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking but in the main focus upon: exact results for pseudoscalar mesons, including aspects of the eta-eta' problem; a realisation that the so-called vacuum condensates are actually an intrinsic, localised property of hadrons; an essentially nonperturbative procedure for constructing a symmetry-preserving Bethe-Salpeter kernel, which has enabled a demonstration that dressed-quarks possess momentum-dependent anomalous chromo- and electromagnetic moments that are large at infrared momenta, and resolution of a longstanding problem in understanding the mass-splitting between rho- and a1-mesons such that they are now readily seen to be parity partners in the meson spectrum; features of electromagnetic form factors connected with charged and neutral pions; and computation and explanation of valence-quark distribution functions in pseudoscalar mesons. We argue that in solving QCD, a constructive feedback between theory and extant and forthcoming experiments will enable constraints to be placed on the infrared behaviour of QCD's beta-function, the nonperturbative quantity at the core of hadron physics.Comment: 28 pages, 15 figures, 2 tables. Version to appear in the Chinese Journal of Physic

Asymptotic normality of maximum likelihood and its variational approximation for stochastic blockmodels

Variational methods for parameter estimation are an active research area, potentially offering computationally tractable heuristics with theoretical performance bounds. We build on recent work that applies such methods to network data, and establish asymptotic normality rates for parameter estimates of stochastic blockmodel data, by either maximum likelihood or variational estimation. The result also applies to various sub-models of the stochastic blockmodel found in the literature.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOS1124 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org