The Momentum Kick Model Description of the Near-Side Ridge and Jet Quenching
In central high-energy heavy-ion collisions, jets are produced in nucleon-nucleon collisions and they interact with the dense medium produced in the interacting region. Depending on the relative azimuthal angle relative to the trigger particle, observed high-pt jets can be classified as near-side jets or away-side jets. An away-side jet is associated with a broad cone of particles pointing azimuthally opposite to the trigger particle direction. The strong attenuation of the away-side jet in its passage through the produced dense matter is one of the many notable experimental observations in relativistic heavy-ion collisions and is a signature for the production of the strongly-coupled quark-gluon plasma [1, 2, 3, 4]. On the other hand, a near-side jet is characterized by the presence of associated particles within a narrow azimuthal angle along the trigger particle direction. It retains many of the characteristics of the associated fragmentation products as those of a jet in pp and peripheral heavy-ion collisions. The near-side jet occurs when the high-pt jet emerges near the surface of the produced parton medium.

title: Relativistic Hard-Scattering and Tsallis Fits to p T Spectra in pp Collisions at the LHC ∗
abstract: Motivated by the good Tsallis fits to the high-p T spectra in pp collisions at the LHC, we study the relativistic hard-scattering model and obtain an approximate analytical expression for the differential hard-scattering cross section at � � 0. The power-law behavior of the transverse spectra, in the form of d�/dp 2/1/p n, gives a power index n in the range of 4.5-5.5 for jet production as predicted by pQCD, after the dependencies of the structure functions and the running coupling constant are properly taken into account. The power indices for hadron production n are slightly greater than those for jet production.

title: Singularity structures in Coulomb-type potentials in two-body Dirac equations of constraint dynamics
abstract: Two-body Dirac equations (TBDE) of Dirac's relativistic constraint dynamics have been successfully applied to obtain a covariant nonperturbative description of QED and QCD bound states. Coulomb-type potentials in these applications lead naively in other approaches to singular relativistic corrections at short distances that require the introduction of either perturbative treatments or smoothing parameters. We examine the corresponding singular structures in the effective potentials of the relativistic Schroedinger equation obtained from the Pauli reduction of the TBDE. We find that the relativistic Schroedinger equation leads in fact to well-behaved wave function solutions when the full potential and couplings of the system are taken into account. The most unusual case is the coupled triplet system with S=1 and L={l_brace}(J-1),(J+1){r_brace}. Without the inclusion of the tensor coupling, the effective S-state potential would become attractively singular. We show how including the tensor coupling is essential in order that the wave functions be well-behaved at short distances. For example, the S-state wave function becomes simply proportional to the D-state wave function and dips sharply to zero at the origin, unlike the usual S-state wave functions. Furthermore, this behavior is similar in both QED and QCD, independent of the asymptotic freedom behavior of the assumed QCDmore » vector potential. Light- and heavy-quark meson states can be described well by using a simplified linear-plus-Coulomb-type QCD potential apportioned appropriately between world scalar and vector potentials. We use this potential to exhibit explicitly the origin of the large pi-rho splitting and effective chiral symmetry breaking. The TBDE formalism developed here may be used to study quarkonia in quark-gluon plasma environments.« less

title: Tsallis Fits to p_t Spectra for pp Collisions at LHC
abstract: Phenomenological Tsallis fits to the CMS and ATLAS transverse spectra of charged particles were found to extend for pT from 0.5 to 181 GeV in pp collisions at the LHC at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV, and for pT from 0.5 to 31 GeV at sqrt(s) = 0.9 TeV. The simplicity of the Tsallis parametrization and the large range of the fitting transverse momentum raise questions on the physical meaning of the degrees of freedom that enter into the Tsallis distribution or q-statistics

title: Anomalous Soft Photons associated with Hadron Production in String Fragmentation
abstract: The bosonized QCD2+QED2 system for quarks with two flavors contains QCD2 and QED2 bound states, with an isoscalar photon at about 25 MeV and an isovector (I = 1,I3 = 0) photon at about 44 MeV. Consequently, when a quark and an antiquark at the two ends of a string pulls apart from each other at high energies, hadrons and soft photons will be produced simultaneously in the fragmentation of the string. The production of the QED2 soft photons in association with hadrons may explain the anomalous soft photon data in hadron‐hadron collisions and e+‐e− annihilations at high energies.

title: Potential Models and Lattice Gauge Current-Current Correlators
abstract: We compare current-current correlators in lattice gauge calculations with correlators in different potential models for a pseudoscalar charmonium in the quark-gluon plasma. An important ingredient in the evaluation of the current-current correlator in the potential model is the basic principle that, out of the set of continuum states, only resonance states and Gamow states with lifetimes of sufficient magnitudes can propagate as composite objects and can contribute to the current-current correlator. When the contributions from the bound states and continuum states are properly treated, the potential model current-current correlators obtained with the potential proposed by Wong [ (2005)] are consistent with the lattice gauge correlators. The proposed potential model thus gains support to be a useful tool to complement lattice gauge calculations for the study of QQ{bar} states at high temperatures.

title: A novel algorithm for computing quark propagators for lattice hadron spectroscopy
abstract: We report on our progress in computing the excitation spectrum in Lattice QCD. We focus on the isospin 0, 1 and 2 channels using the stochastic LapH algorithm for the quark propagators. For the isospin-0 channel, a new glueball operator constructed from the stochastic LapH operator is included in the variational basis along with the isoscalar meson and pi-pi operators. A representative signal for each channel is presented and the feasibility of extending the calculations to larger lattices is discussed.

title: Excited isovector mesons using the stochastic LapH method
abstract: The spectrum of excited isovector mesons is studied using a 32^3 x 256 anisotropic lattice with u,d quark masses set to give a pion mass near 240 MeV. Results in the bosonic isovector nonstrange symmetry channels of zero total momentum are presented using correlation matrices of unprecedented size. In addition to spatially-extended single-meson operators, large numbers of two-meson operators are used, involving a wide variety of light isovector, isoscalar, and strange meson operators of varying relative momenta. All needed Wick contractions are efficiently evaluated using a stochastic method of treating the low-lying modes of quark propagation that exploits Laplacian Heaviside quark-field smearing. Level identification is discussed.

title: Group-theoretical construction of finite-momentum and multi-particle operators for lattice hadron spectroscopy
abstract: Determining the spectrum of hadronic excitations from Monte Carlo simulations requires the use of interpolating operators that couple to multi-particle states. Recent algorithmic advances have made the inclusion of multi-hadron operators in spectroscopy calculations a practical reality. In this talk, a procedure for constructing a set of multi-hadron interpolators that project onto the states of interest is described. To aid in the interpretation of simulation data, operators are designed to transform irreducibly under the lattice symmetry group. The identification of a set of optimal single-hadron interpolators for states with non-zero momenta is an essential intermediate step in this analysis.

title: Can the nearly conformal sextet gauge model hide the Higgs impostor
abstract: New results are reported from large scale lattice simulations of a frequently discussed strongly interacting gauge theory with a fermion flavor doublet in the two-index symmetric (sextet) representation of the SU(3) color gauge group. We find that the chiral condensate and the mass spectrum of the sextet model are consistent with chiral symmetry breaking in the limit of vanishing fermion mass. In contrast, sextet fermion mass deformations of spectral properties are not consistent with leading conformal scaling behavior near the critical surface of a conformal theory. A recent paper could not resolve the conformal fixed point of the gauge coupling from the slowly walking scenario of a very small nearly vanishing β -function (DeGrand et al.  ). It is argued that overall consistency with our new results is resolved if the sextet model is close to the conformal window, staying outside with a very small non-vanishing β -function. The model would exhibit then the simplest composite Higgs mechanism leaving open the possibility of a light scalar state with quantum numbers of the Higgs impostor. It would emerge as the pseudo-Goldstone dilaton state from spontaneous symmetry breaking of scale invariance. We will argue that even without association with the dilaton, the scalar Higgs-like state can be light very close to the conformal window. A new Higgs project of sextet lattice simulations is outlined to resolve these important questions.

title: Conformal finite size scaling of twelve fermion flavors
abstract: Extended simulation results and their analysis are reported in a strongly coupled gauge theory with twelve fermion flavors in the fundamental SU(3) color representation. The conformality of the model is probed using mass deformed conformal finite size scaling (FSS) theory driven by the fermion mass anomalous dimension. Two independent conformal FSS fitting procedures are used in the analysis. The first one deploys physics motivated scaling functions, complemented by a second fitting procedure with spline based general B-forms for the scaling functions. The results at fixed gauge coupling show unresolved problems with the conformal hypothesis.