Noise, sign problems, and statistics.
We show how sign problems in simulations of many-body systems can manifest themselves in the form of heavy-tailed correlator distributions, similar to what is seen in electron propagation through disordered media. We propose an alternative statistical approach for extracting ground state energies in such systems, illustrating the method with a toy model and with lattice data for unitary fermions.

title: Listening to Noise
abstract: We show how sign problems in simulations of many-body systems can manifest themselves in the form of heavy-tailed correlator distributions, similar to what is seen in electron propagation through disordered media. We propose an alternative statistical approach for extracting ground state energies in such systems, illustrating the method with a toy model and with lattice data for unitary fermions and for baryons in QCD.

title: Conformality Lost
abstract: We consider zero-temperature transitions from conformal to non-conformal phases in quantum theories. We argue that there are three generic mechanisms for the loss of conformality in any number of dimensions: (i) fixed point goes to zero coupling, (ii) fixed point runs off to infinite coupling, or (iii) an IR fixed point annihilates with a UV fixed point and they both disappear into the complex plane. We give both relativistic and non-relativistic examples of the last case in various dimensions and show that the critical behavior of the mass gap behaves similarly to the correlation length in the finite temperature Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase transition in two dimensions, ξ ∼ exp(c/|T − Tc|). We speculate that the chiral phase transition in QCD at large number of fermion flavors belongs to this universality class, and attempt to identify the UV fixed point that annihilates with the Banks-Zaks fixed point at the lower end of the conformal window.

title: Extended study for unitary fermions on a lattice using the cumulant expansion technique
abstract: A recently developed lattice method for large numbers of strongly interacting nonrelativistic fermions exhibits a heavy tail in the distributions of correlators for large Euclidean time {\tau} and large number of fermions N, which only allows the measurement of ground state energies for a limited number of fermions using standard techniques. In such cases, it is suggested that measuring the log of the correlator is more efficient, and a cumulant expansion of this quantity can be exactly related to the correlation function. The cumulant expansion technique allows us to determine the ground state energies of up to 66 unpolarized unitary fermions on lattices as large as 72$\times$14^3, and up to 70 unpolarized unitary fermions trapped in a harmonic potential on lattices as large as 72$\times$64^3. We have also improved our lattice action with a Galilean invariant form for the four-fermion interaction, which results in predictive volume scaling of the lowest energy of three fermions in a periodic box and in good agreement of our results for N \leq 6 trapped unitary fermions with those from other benchmark calculations.

title: Large Nc volume reduction and chiral random matrix theory
abstract: Motivated by recent progress on the understanding of the Eguchi-Kawai (EK) volume equivalence and growing interest in conformal window, we simultaneously use the large-Nc volume reduction and Chiral Random Matrix Theory (chRMT) to study the chiral symmetry breaking of four dimensional SU(Nc) gauge theory with adjoint fermions in the large Nc limit. Although some cares are required because the chRMT limit and 't Hooft limit are not compatible in general, we show that the breakdown of the chiral symmetry can be detected in large-Nc gauge theories. As a first step, we mainly focus on the quenched approximation to establish the methodology. We first confirm that heavy adjoint fermions, introduced as the center symmetry preserver, work as expected and thanks to them the volume reduction holds. Using massless overlap fermion as a probe, we then calculate the low-lying Dirac spectrum for fermion in the adjoint representation to compare to that of chRMT, and find that chiral symmetry is indeed broken in the quenched theory.

title: Inclusive production of four charm hadrons in e+e- annihilation at B factories
abstract: Measurements by the Belle Collaboration of the exclusive production of two charmonia in e{sup +}e{sup -} annihilation differ substantially from theoretical predictions. Till now, no conclusive explanation for this remarkable discrepancy has been provided. Even the origin of the discrepancy is not identified, yet. We suggest that the measurement of four-charm events in Belle data must provide a strong constraint in identifying the origin of this large discrepancy. Our prediction of the cross section for e{sup +}e{sup -}{yields}cccc, in lowest order in strong coupling constant, at {radical}(s)=10.6 GeV is about 0.1 pb. If measured four-charm cross section is compatible with the prediction based on perturbative QCD, it is very likely that factorization of the hadronization process from perturbative part may be significantly violated or there exists a new production mechanism. If the cross section for the four-charm event is also larger than the prediction like that for the exclusive J/{psi}+{eta}{sub c} production, perturbative QCD expansion itself will be proved to be unreliable and loses predictive power.

title: Causality problem in a holographic-dark-energy model
abstract: In the model of holographic dark energy, there is a notorious problem of circular reasoning between the introduction of future event horizon and the accelerating expansion of the universe. We examine the problem after dividing it into two parts, the causality problem of the equation of motion and the circular logic on the use of the future event horizon. We specify and isolate the root of the two problems as a boundary condition from the causal equation of motion, which can be determined from the initial data of the universe. We show that the causality will be kept if we define it based on our recognizability and the circular-logic problem can be reduced to imposing an initial condition. We additionally find that the model constant of the holographic dark energy is close to unity from the present data of the universe.

title: Color-octet mechanism in the inclusive D-wave charmonium productions in B decays
abstract: The inclusive D-wave charmonium production rates in B decays are considered in the Bodwin-Braaten-Lepage (BBL) approach. We find that the color-octet subprocesses B → cc(3S1(8) or 3PJ(80) + s, d, followed by the transition cc(3S1(8), or 3PJ(8)) → 3DJ, strongly dominate over any other subprocess, due to the large Wilson coefficient for the ΔB = 1 effective lagrangian. Assuming that the numerical values of the matrix elements 〈0|O3DJ(3S1(8))|0〉 and 〈0|O3DJ(3PJ(8))|0〉 are the same order of magnitudes with the 〈0|Oψ′ (3S1(8))|0〉, we find that the 1,3D2 can be observed B-factories.

title: Exclusive heavy quarkonium + γ production from e+e-annihilation into a virtual photon
abstract: We compute the cross section for exclusive production of a photon associated with a heavy quarkonium H of charge-conjugation parity C=+1 from e{sup +}e{sup -} annihilation into a virtual photon at the center-of-momentum energy {radical}(s)=10.58 GeV. The nonrelativistic QCD factorization formulas for the differential and total cross sections are obtained at leading order in the strong coupling and in the relative velocity of the heavy quark in the quarkonium rest frame. The predicted cross sections for the S-wave spin-singlet cases are about 80 fb and 50 fb for H={eta}{sub c} and {eta}{sub c}(2S), respectively. Among P-wave spin-triplet charmonia, {chi}{sub c1} has a particularly large cross section of about 14 fb. The cross sections for bottomonium states {eta}{sub b} and {chi}{sub bJ} are about 3 fb. A rough estimate of the background reveals that the signal significances for charmonium processes are sufficiently large enough to be detected with ease with the integrated luminosities available at the present B factories.

title: Search for strong gravity signatures in same-sign dimuon final states using the ATLAS detector at the LHC
abstract: A search for microscopic black holes has been performed in a same-sign dimuon final state using 1.3 fb(-1) of proton-proton collision data collected with the ATLAS detector at a centre of mass energy of 7 TeV at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The data are found to be consistent with the expectation from the Standard Model and the results are used to derive exclusion contours in the context of a low scale gravity model.

title: Characterisation and mitigation of beam-induced backgrounds observed in the ATLAS detector during the 2011 proton-proton run
abstract: This paper presents a summary of beam-induced backgrounds observed in the ATLAS detector and discusses methods to tag and remove background contaminated events in data. Trigger-rate based monitoring of beam-related backgrounds is presented. The correlations of backgrounds with machine conditions, such as residual pressure in the beam-pipe, are discussed. Results from dedicated beam-background simulations are shown, and their qualitative agreement with data is evaluated. Data taken during the passage of unpaired, i.e. non-colliding, proton bunches is used to obtain background-enriched data samples. These are used to identify characteristic features of beam-induced backgrounds, which then are exploited to develop dedicated background tagging tools. These tools, based on observables in the Pixel detector, the muon spectrometer and the calorimeters, are described in detail and their efficiencies are evaluated. Finally an example of an application of these techniques to a monojet analysis is given, which demonstrates the importance of such event cleaning techniques for some new physics searches.