Abstract: We perform the baseline and energy optimization of the Neutrino Factory including the latest simulation results on the magnetized iron detector (MIND). We also consider the impact of tau decays, generated by v(mu) -> v(tau) or v(e) -> v(tau) appearance, on the mass hierarchy, CP violation, and theta(13) discovery reaches, which we find to be negligible for the considered detector. For the baseline-energy optimization for small sin(2) 2 theta(13), we qualitatively recover the results with earlier simulations of the MIND detector. We find optimal baselines of about 2 500km to 5 000km for the CP violation measurement, where now values of E-mu as low as about 12 GeV may be possible. However, for large sin(2) 2 theta(13), we demonstrate that the lower threshold and the backgrounds reconstructed at lower energies allow in fact for muon energies as low as 5 GeV at considerably shorter baselines, such as FNAL-Homestake. This implies that with the latest MIND analysis, low-and high-energy versions of the Neutrino Factory are just two different versions of the same experiment optimized for different parts of the parameter space. Apart from a green-field study of the updated detector performance, we discuss specific implementations for the two-baseline Neutrino Factory, where the considered detector sites are taken to be currently discussed underground laboratories. We find that reasonable setups can be found for the Neutrino Factory source in Asia, Europe, and North America, and that a triangular-shaped storage ring is possible in all cases based on geometrical arguments only.

Abstract: According to heavy-meson chiral perturbation theory, the vector form factor f+(q(2)) of exclusive semileptonic decay B -> pi l nu is closely related, at least in the soft-pion region ( i.e., q(2) similar to (m(B) – m(pi))(2)), to the strong coupling g(B*B pi) or the normalized coupling (g)over-cap. Combining the precisely measured q2 spectrum of B -> pi l nu decay by the BABAR and Belle collaborations with several parametrizations of the form factor f +(q(2)), we can extract these couplings from the residue of the form factor at the B* pole, which relies on an extrapolation of the form factor from the semileptonic region to the unphysical point q(2) = m(B*)(2). Comparing the extracted values with the other experimental and theoretical estimates, we can test these various form-factor parametrizations, which differ from each other by the amount of physical information embedded in. It is found that the extracted values based on the Becirevic-Kaidalov, Ball-Zwicky and Bourrely-Caprini-Lellouch parametrizations are consistent with each other and roughly in agreement with the other theoretical and lattice estimates, while the Boyd-Grinstein-Lebed ansatz, featured by a spurious, unwanted pole at the threshold of the cut, gives a neatly larger value.

Abstract: We study the underlying event in proton-antiproton collisions by examining the behavior of charged particles produced in association with a large transverse momentum jet (similar to 2: 2 fb(-1)) or with a Drell-Yan lepton pair (similar to 2.7 fb(-1)) in the Z-boson mass region [70 < M(pair) < 110 GeV/c(2)] as measured by CDF at 1.96 TeV center-of-mass energy. We use the direction of the lepton pair or the leading jet in each event to define regions of eta-phi space that are sensitive to the modeling of the underlying event. The data are corrected to the particle level to remove detector effects and are then compared with several QCD Monte Carlo models.