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Peris, J. B., Davis, P., Cuevas, J. M., Nebot, M., & Sanjuan, R. (2010). Distribution of Fitness Effects Caused by Single-Nucleotide Substitutions in Bacteriophage f1. Genetics, 185(2), 603–U308.
Abstract: Empirical knowledge of the fitness effects of mutations is important for understanding many evolutionary processes, yet this knowledge is often hampered by several sources of measurement error and bias. Most of these problems can be solved using site-directed mutagenesis to engineer single mutations, an approach particularly suited for viruses due to their small genomes. Here, we used this technique to measure the fitness effect of 100 single-nucleotide substitutions in the bacteriophage f1, a filamentous single-strand DNA virus. We found that approximately one-fifth of all mutations are lethal. Viable ones reduced fitness by 11% on average and were accurately described by a log-normal distribution. More than 90% of synonymous substitutions were selectively neutral, while those affecting intergenic regions reduced fitness by 14% on average. Mutations leading to amino acid substitutions had an overall mean deleterious effect of 37%, which increased to 45% for those changing the amino acid polarity. Interestingly, mutations affecting early steps of the infection cycle tended to be more deleterious than those affecting late steps. Finally, we observed at least two beneficial mutations. Our results confirm that high mutational sensitivity is a general property of viruses with small genomes, including RNA and single-strand DNA viruses infecting animals, plants, and bacteria.
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Aguilar, A. C., Binosi, D., & Papavassiliou, J. (2010). QCD effective charges from lattice data. J. High Energy Phys., 07(7), 002–24pp.
Abstract: We use recent lattice data on the gluon and ghost propagators, as well as the Kugo-Ojima function, in order to extract the non-perturbative behavior of two particular definitions of the QCD effective charge, one based on the pinch technique construction, and one obtained from the standard ghost-gluon vertex. The construction relies crucially on the definition of two dimensionful quantities, which are invariant under the renormalization group, and are built out of very particular combinations of the aforementioned Green's functions. The main non-perturbative feature of both effective charges, encoded in the infrared finiteness of the gluon propagator and ghost dressing function used in their definition, is the freezing at a common finite (non-vanishing) value, in agreement with a plethora of theoretical and phenomenological expectations. We discuss the sizable discrepancy between the freezing values obtained from the present lattice analysis and the corresponding estimates derived from several phenomenological studies, and attribute its origin to the difference in the gauges employed. A particular toy calculation suggests that the modifications induced to the non-perturbative gluon propagator by the gauge choice may indeed account for the observed deviation of the freezing values.
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CDF Collaboration(Aaltonen, T. et al), & Cabrera, S. (2010). Measurement of the Ratio sigma(t(t)over-bar)/sigma(Z/gamma*-> ll) and Precise Extraction of the t(t)over-bar Cross Section. Phys. Rev. Lett., 105(1), 012001–7pp.
Abstract: We report a measurement of the ratio of the t (t) over bar to Z/gamma* production cross sections in root s = 1.96 TeV p (p) over bar collisions using data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of up to 4.6 fb(-1), collected by the CDF II detector. The t (t) over bar cross section ratio is measured using two complementary methods, a b-jet tagging measurement and a topological approach. By multiplying the ratios by the well-known theoretical Z/gamma* -> ll cross section predicted by the standard model, the extracted t (t) over bar cross sections are effectively insensitive to the uncertainty on luminosity. A best linear unbiased estimate is used to combine both measurements with the result sigma(t (t) over bar) = 7.70 +/- 0.52 pb, for a top-quark mass of 172.5 GeV/c(2).
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Bordes, J., Chan, H. M., & Tsun, T. S. (2010). A solution to the strong CP problem transforming the theta angle to the KM CP-violating phase. Int. J. Mod. Phys. A, 25(32), 5897–5911.
Abstract: It is shown that in the scheme with a rotating fermion mass matrix (i.e. one with a scale-dependent orientation in generation space) suggested earlier for explaining fermion mixing and mass hierarchy, the theta angle term in the QCD action of topological origin can be eliminated by chiral transformations, while giving still nonzero masses to all quarks. Instead, the effects of such transformations get transmitted by the rotation to the CKM matrix as the KM phase giving, for theta of order unity, a Jarlskog invariant typically of order 10(-5), as experimentally observed. Strong and weak CP violations appear then as just two facets of the same phenomenon.
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Martin Camalich, J., Geng, L. S., & Vicente Vacas, M. J. (2010). Lowest-lying baryon masses in covariant SU(3)-flavor chiral perturbation theory. Phys. Rev. D, 82(7), 074504–7pp.
Abstract: We present an analysis of the baryon-octet and -decuplet masses using covariant SU(3)-flavor chiral perturbation theory up to next-to-leading order. Besides the description of the physical masses we address the problem of the lattice QCD extrapolation. Using the PACS-CS Collaboration data we show that a good description of the lattice points can be achieved at next-to-leading order with the covariant loop amplitudes and phenomenologically determined values for the meson-baryon couplings. Moreover, the extrapolation to the physical point up to this order is found to be better than the linear one given at leading-order by the Gell-Mann-Okubo approach. The importance that a reliable combination of lattice QCD and chiral perturbation theory may have for hadron phenomenology is emphasized with the prediction of the pion-baryon and strange-baryon sigma terms.
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