Branching fraction and form-factor shape measurements of exclusive charmless semileptonic B decays, and determination of |V_{ub}|
We report the results of a study of the exclusive charmless semileptonic decays, B0→π-l+ν, B+→π0l+ν, B+→ωl+ν, B+→ηl+ν, and B+→η′l+ν (l=e or μ) undertaken with approximately 462×106 BB pairs collected at the Υ(4S) resonance with the BABAR detector. The analysis uses events in which the signal B decays are reconstructed with a loose neutrino reconstruction technique. We obtain partial branching fractions in several bins of q2, the square of the momentum transferred to the lepton-neutrino pair, for B0→π-l+ν, B+→π0l+ν, B+→ωl+ν, and B+→ηl+ν. From these distributions, we extract the form-factor shapes f+(q2) and the total branching fractions B(B0→π-l+ν)=(1.45±0.04stat±0.06syst)×10-4 (combined π- and π0 decay channels assuming isospin symmetry), B(B+→ωl+ν)=(1.19±0.16stat±0.09syst)×10-4 and B(B+→ηl+ν)=(0.38±0.05stat±0.05syst)×10-4. We also measure B(B+→η′l+ν)=(0.24±0.08stat±0.03syst)×10-4. We obtain values for the magnitude of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix element |Vub| by direct comparison with three different QCD calculations in restricted q2 ranges of B→πl+ν decays. From a simultaneous fit to the experimental data over the full q2 range and the FNAL/MILC lattice QCD predictions, we obtain |Vub|=(3.25±0.31)×10-3, where the error is the combined experimental and theoretical uncertainty.

title: Improved Measurement of CP Violation in Neutral B Decays to c cs

title: Branching fraction for $B^{+} \to \pi^0 \ell^{+} \nu$, measured in $\upsilon_{4S} \to B \bar{B}$ events tagged by $B^{-} \to D^0 \ell^{-}$ anti-v ($X$) decays

title: Measurement of the CKM matrix element $|V_{ub}|$ with $B \to \rho e \nu$ decays

title: Operation of the Cherenkov detector DIRC of BABAR at high luminosity
abstract: The DIRC (acronym for Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov (light)) is the ring imaging Cherenkov detector of the BABAR detector at the PEP-II ring of SLAC. It provides the identification of pions, kaons and protons for momenta up to 4 GeV/c with high efficiency. This is needed to reconstruct CP-violating B-decay final states and to provide B-meson flavour tagging for time dependent asymmetry measurements. The DIRC radiators consists of long rectangular bars made of synthetic fused silica and the photon detector is a water tank equipped with an array of 10.752 conventional photomultipliers. At the end of the year 2000 BABAR has recorded about 22 million B~B pairs reaching the design luminosity of L=3/spl middot/10/sup 33//cm/sup 2/s. The ability to keep the beam background level low at highest collision rates and the long term reliability of the DIRC components during continuous data taking are requirements of BABAR to accomplish its physics program.

title: Measurements of branching fractions and CP-violating asymmetries in B-meson decays to the charmless two-body states K0 pi+, anti-K0 K+, and K0 anti-K0

title: Scrutinizing the Cosmological Constant Problem and a possible resolution
abstract: We suggest a new perspective on the Cosmological Constant Problem by scrutinizing its standard formulation. In classical and quantum mechanics without gravity, there is no definition of the zero point of energy. Furthermore, the Casimir effect only measures how the vacuum energy {\it changes} as one varies a geometric modulus. This leads us to propose that the physical vacuum energy in a Friedman-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker expanding universe only depends on the time variation of the scale factor $a(t)$. Equivalently, requiring that empty Minkowski space is gravitationally stable is a principle that fixes the ambiguity in the zero point energy. On the other hand, if there is a meaningful bare cosmological constant, this prescription should be viewed as a fine-tuning. 
We describe two different choices of vacuum, one of which is consistent with the current universe consisting only of matter and vacuum energy. The resulting vacuum energy density $\rhovac$ is constant in time and approximately $k_c^2 H_0^2$, where $k_c$ is a momentum cut-off and $H_0$ is the current Hubble constant; for a cut-off close to the Planck scale, values of $\rhovac$ in agreement with astrophysical measurements are obtained. Another choice of vacuum is more relevant to the early universe consisting of only radiation and vacuum energy, and we suggest it as a possible model of inflation.

title: Quantization of solitons and the restricted sine-Gordon model
abstract: We show how to compute form factors, matrix elements of local fields, in the restricted sine-Gordon model, at the reflectionless points, by quantizing solitons. We introduce (quantum) separated variables in which the Hamiltonians are expressed in terms of (quantum) τ-functions. We explicitly describe the soliton wave functions, and we explain how the restriction is related to an unusual hermitian structure. We also present a semi-classical analysis which enlightens the fact that the restricted sine-Gordon model corresponds to an analytical continuation of the sine-Gordon model, intermediate between sine-Gordon and KdV.

title: Bosonic Kac-Moody string theories
abstract: We study the BRS cohomology of a bosonic string propagating on a group manifold, and we extract its algebraic structure. We also show how one-loop modular invariance can be obtained by combining the left and the right sectors.

title: Spin-Charge Separation and the Spin Quantum Hall Effect
abstract: We use quantum field theory methods to study the network model for the spin quantum hall transition. When the couplings are fine tuned in a certain way, the spin and charge degrees of freedom, corresponding to the su-percurrent algebras su(2) 0 and osp(2|2) −2 respectively, completely decouple. This simpler theory is exactly solvable and some critical exponents are computed and shown to agree with the recent predictions based on percolation. The general network model is shown to be in a different universality class by identifying the attractive direction of the renormalization group flow.

title: The Large N Random phase sine-Gordon model
abstract: At large distances and in the low-temperature phase, the quenched correlation functions in the 2d random phase sine-Gordon model have been argued to be of the form: , with = (T − Tc). However, renormalization group computations predict B ≠ 0, while variational approaches (which are supposed to be exact for models with a large number of components) give B = 0. We introduce a large-N version of the random phase sine-Gordon model. Using non-Abelian bosonization and renormalization group techniques, we show that the correlation functions of our models have the above form but with a coefficient B suppressed by a factor 1/N3 compared to A.