Abstract: Baryon-to-meson Transition Distribution Amplitudes (TDAs) encoding valuable new information on hadron structure appear as building blocks in the collinear factorized description for several types of hard exclusive reactions. In this paper, we address the possibility of accessing nucleon-to-pion (pi N) TDAs from (p) over barp -> e(+)e(-)pi(0) reaction with the future PANDA detector at the FAIR facility. At high center-of-mass energy and high invariant mass squared of the lepton pair q(2), the amplitude of the signal channel (p) over barp -> e(+)e(-)pi(0) admits a QCD factorized description in terms of pi N TDAs and nucleon Distribution Amplitudes (DAs) in the forward aid backward kinematic regimes. Assuming the validity of this factorized description, we perform feasibility studies for measuring (p) over barp -> e(+)e(-)pi(0) with the PANDA detector. Detailed simulations on signal reconstruction efficiency as well as on rejection of the most severe background channel, i.e. (p) over barp -> pi(+)pi(-)pi(0) were performed for the center-of-mass energy squared s = 5 GeV2 and s = 10 GeV2, in the kinematic regions 3.0 < q(2) < 4.3 GeV2 and 5 < q(2) < 9 GeV2, respectively, with a neutral pion scattered in the forward or backward cone vertical bar cos theta(pi 0)vertical bar > 0.5 in the proton-antiproton center-of-mass frame. Results of the simulation show that the particle identification capabilities of the PANDA detector will allow to achieve a background rejection factor of 5 . 10(7) (1 . 10(7)) at low (high) q(2) for s = 5 GeV2, and of 1 . 10(8) (6 . 10(6)) at low (high) q(2) for s = 10 GeV2, while keeping the signal reconstruction efficiency at around 40%. At both energies, a clean lepton signal can be reconstructed with the expected statistics corresponding to 2 of integrated luminosity. The cross sections obtained from the simulations are used to show that a test of QCD collinear factorization can be done at the lowest order by measuring scaling laws and angular distributions. The future measurement of the signal channel cross section with PANDA will provide a new test of the perturbative QCD description of a novel class of hard exclusive reactions and will open the possibility of experimentally accessing pi N TDAs.

Abstract: A measurement of the cross-section for Z-boson production in the forward region of pp collisions at 8 TeV centre-of-mass energy is presented. The measurement is based on a sample of Z -> e(+)e(-) decays reconstructed using the LHCb detector, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.0 fb(-1). The acceptance is defined by the requirements 2.0 < eta < 4.5 and p(T) > 20 GeV for the pseudorapidities and transverse momenta of the leptons. Their invariant mass is required to lie in the range 60-120 GeV. The cross-section is determined to be sigma(pp -> Z -> e(+)e(-)) = 93.81 +/- 0.41(stat) +/- 1.48(syst) +/- 1.14(lumi) pb, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second reflects all systematic effects apart from that arising from the luminosity, which is given as the third uncertainty. Differential cross-sections are presented as functions of the Z-boson rapidity and of the angular variable phi*, which is related to the Z-boson transverse momentum.

Abstract: We demonstrate how to realize within supergravity a novel chaotic-type inflationary scenario driven by the radial parts of a conjugate pair of Higgs superfields causing the spontaneous breaking of a grand unified gauge symmetry at a scale assuming the value of the supersymmetric grand unification scale. The superpotential is uniquely determined at the renormalizable level by the gauge symmetry and a continuous R symmetry. We select two types of Kahler potentials, which respect these symmetries as well as an approximate shift symmetry. In particular, they include in a logarithm a dominant shift-symmetric term proportional to a parameter c together with a small term violating this symmetry and characterized by a parameter c(+). In both cases, imposing a lower bound on c, inflation can be attained with subplanckian values of the original inflaton, while the corresponding effective theory respects perturbative unitarity for r +/- = c(+)/c_ <= 1. These inflationary models do not lead to overproduction of cosmic defects, are largely independent of the one-loop radiative corrections and accommodate, for natural values of r +/-, observable gravitational waves consistently with all the current observational data. The inflaton mass is mostly confined in the range (3.7 – 8.1) x 10(10) GeV.