Particle theory

Abstract:

The calculation of cross-sections at Next-to-Leading order in QCD involves the integration over the final state phase space in order to cancel the infra-red divergences. For the calculation of cross sections for jet observables in deep-inelastic scattering or at hadron-hadron colliders this integration requires the Monte Carlo generation of a large number of event weights, and must be repeated for any calculation with a different choice of parton densities within the proton or different choice of factorisation or renormalisation scale. This makes the full calculation with many of the available parton density function error sets, or any iterative fit of the parton densities themselves, prohibitive in terms of the processing time required. A method for the a posteriori inclusion of the parton densities in the calculation is presented. In this method, the Monte Carlo weights from the integration over the hard-subprocess phase space are stored in a look-up table so that the full calculation need be performed only once, after which the cross section can be obtained with any parton density set by a fast convolution with the stored weights. A detailed example from inclusive jet production at the LHC is presented. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence.

Abstract:

The question of the transition to global isotropy from our anisotropic local Universe is studied using the Union 2 catalogue of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). We construct a "residual" statistic sensitive to systematic shifts in their brightness in different directions and use this to search in different redshift bins for a preferred direction on the sky in which the SNe Ia are brighter or fainter relative to the 'standard' LCDM cosmology. At low redshift (z<0.05) we find that an isotropic model such as LCDM is barely consistent with the SNe Ia data at 2-3 sigma. A complementary maximum likelihood analysis of peculiar velocities confirms this finding -- there is a bulk flow of around 260 km/sec at z \sim 0.06, which disagrees with LCDM at 1-2 sigma. Since the Shapley concentration is believed to be largely responsible for this bulk flow, we make a detailed study of the infall region: the SNe Ia falling away from the Local Group towards Shapley are indeed significantly dimmer than those falling towards us and on to Shapley. Convergence to the CMB rest frame must occur well beyond Shapley (z>0.06) so the low redshift bulk flow can systematically bias any reconstruction of the expansion history of the Universe. At high redshifts z>0.15 the agreement between the SNe Ia data and the isotropic LCDM model does improve, however, the sparseness and low quality of the data means that LCDM cannot be singled out as the preferred cosmological model.

Abstract:

Minimal string theory has a number of FZZT brane boundary states; one for each Cardy state of the minimal model. It was conjectured by Seiberg and Shih that all branes in a minimal string theory could be expressed as a linear combination of the brane associated to the identity operator of the minimal model with complex shifts in the boundary cosmological constant. Subsequently it was found that this identification of FZZT branes does not hold exactly for some cylinder amplitudes but was spoiled by terms that are associated with vanishing worldsheet area and are therefore non-universal. In this paper we investigate this claim systematically, using both Liouville and matrix model methods, beyond the planar limit. We find that the aforementioned identification of FZZT branes is spoiled by terms that do not admit an interpretation as non-universal terms. Furthermore, the spoiling terms as computed using the matrix model are found to be in agreement with those coming from Liouville theory, which also suggests that these terms have universal meaning. Finally, we also investigate the identification of FZZT branes by replacing the boundary state with a sum of local operators. We find in this case that the brane associated with the identity operator appears to be special as it is the only one to correctly reproduce the correlation numbers for bulk operators on the torus.