Hep-ph papers on Friday

There are seven papers on hep-ph today, so it may be interesting to look at them to have some idea about the representation of different topics among the phenomenologists. There are no SUSY papers on hep-ph today which might be correlated with the fact that the conference SUSY '06 is just underway.

Erhan Iltan studies phenomenology of models with extra dimensions. He has two large extra dimensions and imagines that the fermions are localized in one of them and the second Higgs field that is being added is localized in another dimension; this could actually bear some resemblance to the intersecting braneworlds. The exotic effects he or she wants to calculate are the electric dipole moments and the flavor lepton number violating decays. The paper has one of the longest titles in the history of science. ;-)

Jonathan Rosner reviews the recent progress in the precise measurements of spectra of hadrons, especially hadrons with heavy quarks, including heavy quark-antiquark bound states, but also glueballs and hybrids.

The UTfit collaboration offers a lot of nice colorful plots indicating the results of many experiments from the realm of B-physics i.e. physics of the bottom quark and its bound states that is the key for determining the precise values of the CKM matrix and the apparent fact that this matrix is the only source of CP violation. Various quantities for different quarks must satisfy certain constraints if the CKM description is accurate, and the authors check this "unitarity triangle fit", as measured at Fermilab, with the help of lattice QCD.

Lorenzo Magnea talks about angularities and other shapes. This is the part of QCD - soft gluon resummations etc. - that is relevant for many processes to be seen at the LHC collider. He derives a scaling rule using purely perturbative QCD methods. It's the kind of paper that Nina Byers would definitely need to consider in her encyclopedia of LHC Standard Model phenomenology.

White, Peschanski, and Thorne also study complex physics of strong interactions. Most of their calculations look like Feynman loop diagrams of cross sections for virtual photons and gluons (at the tree level, gluons don't interact with photons!) in which the loops are created from massive quarks. It is new work following the Soviet BFKL equation from the 1970s that is relevant for a full description of the deep inelastic scattering.

Gao, Zhang, and Chao calculate the decays of a charmed particle (Upsilon) to light quarks. They consider not only the color-singlet initial state but also a color-octet state. For color singlets, they find that the branching ration of Upsilon decaying into "photon quark anti-quark" is about 0.1% while for the octet the ratio is much higher, which could be relevant for verification of the color octet mechanism proposed in non-relativistic QCD.

Alejandro Rivero tries to find the approximate value of the Weinberg's weak mixing angle (in his case, 0.223 for the squared sine) in the Old Testament. Finally he finds the number in a 1924 timecapsule. There are also words such as "supersymmetry" or "Regge" in the paper. But sorry, Leucipo, I think that the content actually has nothing to do with physics, and it is numerology with the same likelihood of success as the probability that one finds a pound of gold in a generic restroom when one looks sufficiently deeply. ;-)