Electron acceleration in the plasma beat‐wave experiment at Ecole Polytechnique
Recent results of a plasma Beat‐Wave acceleration experiment are presented. A plasma wave is created in a D2 plasma by the beating of a Nd‐YAG and a Nd‐YLF laser pulse. Electrons at energies of 3 MeV are injected into the plasma. Several hundred electrons accelerated up to 3.7 MeV are observed in correlation with a Thomson scattering signal. The dependence of the electron acceleration on the plasma density demonstrates the beat‐wave origin of the acceleration mechanism. This paper is mainly devoted to the description of the experimental set‐up. A particular attention was paid to efficient electron injection and to background noise suppression. A preliminary analysis of the results is also presented.

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

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

title: On the random vector potential model in two dimensions
abstract: The random vector potential model describes massless fermions coupled to a quenched random gauge field. We study its abelian and non-abelian versions. The abelian version can be completely solved using bosonization. We analyse the non-abelian model using its supersymmetric formulation and show, by a perturbative renormalization group computation, that it is asymptotically free at large distances. We also show that all the quenched chiral current correlation functions can be computed exactly, without using the replica trick or the supersymmetric formulation, but using an exact expression for the effective action for any sample of the random gauge field. These chiral correlation functions are purely algebraic.

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: On the Wess-Zumino-Witten models on the torus☆
abstract: We discuss the Ward identities of the Wess-Zumino-Witten models on Riemann surfaces and point out some ambiguities in the description of the zero modes of the currents. In the case of the torus, we show how to describe them and we write the Ward identities in such a way that they become complete. We examine in detail how the Ward identities are related to the Kubo-Martin-Schwinger condition. As an illustration of this formulation, we present a new proof of the Weyl-Kac character formula. The proof essentially relies on the mixed Virasoro × Kac-Moody Ward identities and explains the relation of the heat equation on the group manifold to the Weyl-Kac character formula.

title: Form factors, KdV and deformed hyperelliptic curves
abstract: We review and summarize recent works on the relation between form factors in integrable quantum field theory and deformation of geometrical data associated to hyper-elliptic curves. This relation, which is based on a deformation of the Riemann bilinear identity, in particular leads to the notion of null vectors in integrable field theory and to a new description of the KdV hierarchy.

title: The Gaussian Free Field and SLE4 on Doubly Connected Domains
abstract: The level lines of the Gaussian free field are known to be related to SLE4. It is shown how this relation allows to define chordal SLE4 processes on doubly connected domains, describing traces that are anchored on one of the two boundary components. The precise nature of the processes depends on the conformally invariant boundary conditions imposed on the second boundary component. Extensions of Schramm’s formula to doubly connected domains are given for the standard Dirichlet and Neumann conditions and a relation to first-exit problems for Brownian bridges is established. For the free field compactified at the self-dual radius, the extended symmetry leads to a class of conformally invariant boundary conditions parametrised by elements of SU(2). It is shown how to extend SLE4 to this setting. This allows for a derivation of new passage probabilities à la Schramm that interpolate continuously from Dirichlet to Neumann conditions.