ATLAS Collaboration(Aaboud, M. et al), Alvarez Piqueras, D., Barranco Navarro, L., Cabrera Urban, S., Castillo Gimenez, V., Cerda Alberich, L., et al. (2017). Measurements of integrated and differential cross sections for isolated photon pair production in pp collisions at root s=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector. Phys. Rev. D, 95(11), 112005–27pp.
Abstract: A measurement of the production cross section for two isolated photons in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of root s = 8 TeV is presented. The results are based on an integrated luminosity of 20.2 fb(-1) recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The measurement considers photons with pseudorapidities satisfying vertical bar eta(gamma)vertical bar< 1.37 or 1.56 <vertical bar eta(gamma)vertical bar< 2.37 and transverse energies of respectively E-T,1(gamma) > 40 GeV and E-T,2(gamma) > 30 GeV for the two leading photons ordered in transverse energy produced in the interaction. The background due to hadronic jets and electrons is subtracted using data-driven techniques. The fiducial cross sections are corrected for detector effects and measured differentially as a function of six kinematic observables. The measured cross section integrated within the fiducial volume is 16.8 +/- 0.8 pb. The data are compared to fixed-order QCD calculations at next-to-leading-order and next-to-next-to-leading-order accuracy as well as next-to-leading-order computations including resummation of initial-state gluon radiation at next-to-next-to-leading logarithm or matched to a parton shower, with relative uncertainties varying from 5% to 20%.
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ANTARES Collaboration(Albert, A. et al), Barrios-Marti, J., Hernandez-Rey, J. J., Illuminati, G., Lotze, M., Tönnis, C., et al. (2017). Search for dark matter annihilation in the earth using the ANTARES neutrino telescope. Phys. Dark Universe, 16, 41–48.
Abstract: A search for a neutrino signal from WIMP pair annihilations in the centre of the Earth has been performed with the data collected with the ANTARES neutrino telescope from 2007 to 2012. The event selection criteria have been developed and tuned to maximise the sensitivity of the experiment to such a neutrino signal. No significant excess of neutrinos over the expected background has been observed. Upper limits at 90% C.L. on the WIMP annihilation rate in the Earth and the spin independent scattering cross-section of WIMPs to nucleons sigma(SI)(p) were calculated for WIMP pair annihilations into either iota(+) iota(-), W+W-, b (b) over bar or the non-SUSY v mu(v) over bar as a function of the WIMP mass (between 25 GeV/c(2) and 1000 GeV/c(2)) and as a function of the thermally averaged annihilation cross section times velocity <sigma A(v)>(Earth) of the WIMPs in the centre of the Earth. For masses of the WIMP close to the mass of iron nuclei (50 GeV/c(2)), the obtained limits on sigma(SI)(p) are more stringent than those obtained by other indirect searches.
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Song, T., Berrehrah, H., Torres-Rincon, J. M., Tolos, L., Cabrera, D., Cassing, W., et al. (2017). Single electrons from heavy-flavor mesons in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Phys. Rev. C, 96(1), 014905–18pp.
Abstract: We study the single electron spectra from D- and B-meson semileptonic decays in Au + Au collisions at root s(NN) = 200, 62.4, and 19.2 GeV by employing the parton-hadron-string dynamics (PHSD) transport approach that has been shown to reasonably describe the charm dynamics at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and Large Hadron Collider energies on a microscopic level. In this approach the initial charm and bottom quarks are produced by using the PYTHIA event generator which is tuned to reproduce the fixed-order next-to-leading logarithm calculations for charm and bottom production. The produced charm and bottom quarks interact with off-shell (massive) partons in the quark-gluon plasma with scattering cross sections which are calculated in the dynamical quasiparticle model that is matched to reproduce the equation of state of the partonic system above the deconfinement temperature T-c. At energy densities close to the critical energy density (approximate to 0.5 GeV/fm(3)) the charm and bottom quarks are hadronized intoD and B mesons through either coalescence or fragmentation. After hadronization the D and B mesons interact with the light hadrons by employing the scattering cross sections from an effective Lagrangian. The final D and B mesons then produce single electrons through semileptonic decay. We find that the PHSD approach well describes the nuclear modification factor R-AA and elliptic flow upsilon(2) of single electrons in d + Au and Au + Au collisions at root s(NN) = 200 GeV and the elliptic flow in Au + Au reactions at root s(NN) = 62.4 GeV from the PHENIX Collaboration, however, the large RAA at root s(NN) = 62.4 GeV is not described at all. Furthermore, we make predictions for the RAA of D mesons and of single electrons at the lower energy of root s(NN) = 19.2 GeV. Additionally, the medium modification of the azimuthal angle phi between a heavy quark and a heavy antiquark is studied. We find that the transverse flow enhances the azimuthal angular distributions close to phi = 0 because the heavy flavors strongly interact with nuclear medium in relativistic heavy-ion collisions and almost flow with the bulk matter.
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Motohashi, H., & Hu, W. (2017). Generalized slow roll in the unified effective field theory of inflation. Phys. Rev. D, 96(2), 023502–17pp.
Abstract: We provide a compact and unified treatment of power spectrum observables for the effective field theory (EFT) of inflation with the complete set of operators that lead to second-order equations of motion in metric perturbations in both space and time derivatives, including Horndeski and Gleyzes-Langlois-Piazza-Vernizzi theories. We relate the EFT operators in ADM form to the four additional free functions of time in the scalar and tensor equations. Using the generalized slow-roll formalism, we show that each power spectrum can be described by an integral over a single source that is a function of its respective sound horizon. With this correspondence, existing model independent constraints on the source function can be simply reinterpreted in the more general inflationary context. By expanding these sources around an optimized freeze-out epoch, we also provide characterizations of these spectra in terms of five slow-roll hierarchies whose leading-order forms are compact and accurate as long as EFT coefficients vary only on time scales greater than an e-fold. We also clarify the relationship between the unitary gauge observables employed in the EFT and the comoving gauge observables of the postinflationary universe.
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Chatterjee, S. S., Pasquini, P., & Valle, J. W. F. (2017). Resolving the atmospheric octant by an improved measurement of the reactor angle. Phys. Rev. D, 96(1), 011303–6pp.
Abstract: Taking into account the current global information on neutrino oscillation parameters we forecast the capabilities of future long-baseline experiments such as DUNE and T2HK in settling the atmospheric octant puzzle. We find that a good measurement of the reactor angle theta(13) plays a key role in fixing the octant of the atmospheric angle theta(23) with such future accelerator neutrino studies.
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