Top quark physics at muon and other future colliders

The top quark will be extensively studied at future muon colliders. The threshold cross section can be measured precisely, and the small beam energy spread is especially effective at making the measurement useful. We report on all the activities of the top quark working group, including talks on top quark physics at other future colliders.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, Summary report of the Top Quark Working Group at the Workshop on Physics at the First Muon Collider and at the Front End of a Muon Collider, November 6-9, 1997, Fermi National Accelerator Laborator

Peripheral osteoma of the mandible in a cat

A six-year-old, male, castrated domestic shorthair cat was presented for evaluation of an oral mass. Full physical examination revealed a large hard mass arising from the lateral aspect of the caudal part of the left mandible. Abdominal ultrasound and thoracic computed tomography (CT) were performed to rule out metastatic disease. In addition, CT of the skull with intravenous contrast agent was performed. Histopathological examination of extra- oral biopsies confirmed the tentative diagnosis of peripheral osteoma. A three-dimensional printed skull was used in conjunction with the CT images to determine the detailed location and extent of the mass and to identify anatomical spatial relationships with important neurovascular structures. Surgical debulking of the osteoma was performed. The cat recovered uneventfully but the mass regrew nine months after debulking therapy, sooner than expected. Nevertheless, CT scan of the skull was suggestive for regrowth of the peripheral osteoma rather than for malignant transformation. The owners did not elect to pursue caudal mandibulectomy

Reference Distorted Prices

I show that when consumers (mis)perceive prices relative to reference prices, budgets turn out to be soft, prices tend to be lower and the average quality of goods sold decreases. These observations provide explanations for decentralized purchase decisions, for people being happy with a purchase even when they have paid their evaluation, and for why trade might affect high quality local firms 'unfairly'

Global Standards in Action: Insights from Anti-Money Laundering Regulation

As organizations have come under the increasing influence of global rules of all sorts, organization scholars have started studying the dynamics of global regulation. The purpose of this article is to identify and evaluate the contribution to this interdisciplinary field by the ‘Stockholm Centre for Organisational Research’. The latter’s key proposition is that while global regulation often consists of voluntary best practice rules it can nevertheless become highly influential under certain conditions. We assess how innovative this approach is using as a benchmark the state of the art in another field of relevance to the study of global regulation, i.e. ‘International Relations’. Our discussion is primarily theoretical but we draw on the case of global anti-money laundering regulation to illustrate our arguments and for inspirations of how to further elaborate the approach

Pro Se Aspects of Hampden County Housing Court: Helping People Help Themselves

Great changes in American life have occurred over the last score of years. With these changes has come an increasing public interest in the law and how it affects individual rights. This growing interest may account for alterations in the administration of the law and in the legal profession itself. Today, attorneys find themselves hard-pressed to stay abreast of the ever-broadening law, as each decision weaves greater detail and specificity into the older law. While the public continues to demand judicial resolutions to societal problems, the need for professional legal expertise in many routine legal matters is being questioned. It is often thought that laymen should be allowed to perform some of these tasks themselves. The legal profession itself is beginning to realize that some matters cost far more to handle than lawyers can properly charge. Often clients are better off doing some things for themselves, or having paralegals rather than lawyers perform the more routine services. Public pressures to enable individuals to handle simple legal matters without attorneys have led to an increasing use of the courts by unrepresented parties. The extension of prose adjudication into the realm of landlord-tenant problems partially explains the creation of courts like the Hampden County Housing Court. The Hampden County Housing Court began operation two years after the establishment of the Boston Housing Court. Hampden County tenants responsible for the court\u27s creation cited the need for a specialized housing court since the district courts could not adequately deal with housing problems on a timely basis due to its crowded schedule and because the right to appeal to the higher superior court was nondiscretionary. Additionally, the tenants felt that the juxtaposition of housing-related cases with the usual district court docket of more serious crimes would make housing matters appear relatively less important to the presiding judges. With the advent of the Boston Housing Court in 1971 at a superior court level, a forum was created where urban housing cases could be heard by judges in a specialized atmosphere and with the assistance of a specially trained staff. In Springfield, the Commonwealth\u27s second largest city, support for a second housing court was not widespread until fire destroyed a condemned, but still occupied house, taking the lives of two small children. The result was the bill creating the Hampden County Housing Court, the first housing court in the nation with county-wide jurisdiction able to deal with urban, suburban and rural housing cases. The atmosphere of a people\u27s court surrounded the housing court from its early stages, when the governor agreed to allow an ad hoc public committee to participate in interviewing and recommending candidates for both the judge and clerk of the new court. A Citizens Advisory Committee to the court was created as a result. These actions helped to create the impression that the rules followed in other courts need not necessarily apply in the Hampden County Housing Court. In addition, the Massachusetts Supreme Court in Commonwealth v. Haddad affirmed the right of a private citizen to enter complaints for a violation of the law, thus confirming the status of a citizen complainant in a criminal proceeding seeking to enforce the state sanitary code. This decision allowed the courts to take complaints from citizens when municipal officials failed to act. Of course, the conception of the housing court as a free-form court operating with different rules is false. Hampden County Housing Court operates under the same rules of criminal procedure as the district courts of the Commonwealth, and under the same civil rules and appellate rules as the superior courts of the Commonwealth with a few exceptions. The most important special rules concern the right to transfer any case within the county to the housing court simply by filing a transfer form and the right to accept a written report from a housing, building or other governmental inspector into evidence without requiring that the inspector be in court to give testimony. By giving the court concurrent jurisdiction with both district and superior courts, the advantages of both courts are gained. Additionally, equity powers which district courts lack, and the right of appeal to the Commonwealth\u27s Appeals Court which negates appeals for the sake of delay are realized. These few rule changes do not amount to a people\u27s court. Rather, they create an aura of service and openness to the people who use the courts and pay the salaries. In addition, two positive steps have been taken to help citizens more easily use the court

Observations of Milky Way Dwarf Spheroidal galaxies with the Fermi-LAT detector and constraints on Dark Matter models

We report on the observations of 14 dwarf spheroidal galaxies with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope taken during the first 11 months of survey mode operations. The Fermi telescope provides a new opportunity to test particle dark matter models through the expected gamma-ray emission produced by pair annihilation of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Local Group dwarf spheroidal galaxies, the largest galactic substructures predicted by the cold dark matter scenario, are attractive targets for such indirect searches for dark matter because they are nearby and among the most extreme dark matter dominated environments. No significant gamma-ray emission was detected above 100 MeV from the candidate dwarf galaxies. We determine upper limits to the gamma-ray flux assuming both power-law spectra and representative spectra from WIMP annihilation. The resulting integral flux above 100 MeV is constrained to be at a level below around 10^-9 photons cm^-2 s^-1. Using recent stellar kinematic data, the gamma-ray flux limits are combined with improved determinations of the dark matter density profile in 8 of the 14 candidate dwarfs to place limits on the pair annihilation cross-section of WIMPs in several widely studied extensions of the standard model. With the present data, we are able to rule out large parts of the parameter space where the thermal relic density is below the observed cosmological dark matter density and WIMPs (neutralinos here) are dominantly produced non-thermally, e.g. in models where supersymmetry breaking occurs via anomaly mediation. The gamma-ray limits presented here also constrain some WIMP models proposed to explain the Fermi and PAMELA e^+e^- data, including low-mass wino-like neutralinos and models with TeV masses pair-annihilating into muon-antimuon pairs. (Abridged)Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, accepted to ApJ, Corresponding authors: J. Cohen-Tanugi, C. Farnier, T.E. Jeltema, E. Nuss, and S. Profum

Detection of 16 Gamma-Ray Pulsars Through Blind Frequency Searches Using the Fermi LAT

Pulsars are rapidly-rotating, highly-magnetized neutron stars emitting radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum. Although there are more than 1800 known radio pulsars, until recently, only seven were observed to pulse in gamma rays and these were all discovered at other wavelengths. The Fermi Large Area Telescope makes it possible to pinpoint neutron stars through their gamma-ray pulsations. We report the detection of 16 gamma-ray pulsars in blind frequency searches using the LAT. Most of these pulsars are coincident with previously unidentified gamma-ray sources, and many are associated with supernova remnants. Direct detection of gamma-ray pulsars enables studies of emission mechanisms, population statistics and the energetics of pulsar wind nebulae and supernova remnants.Comment: Corresponding authors: Michael Dormody, Paul S. Ray, Pablo M. Saz Parkinson, Marcus Ziegle

Fermi-LAT Discovery of Extended Gamma-ray Emission in the Direction of Supernova Remnant W51C

The discovery of bright gamma-ray emission coincident with supernova remnant (SNR) W51C is reported using the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. W51C is a middle-aged remnant (~10^4 yr) with intense radio synchrotron emission in its shell and known to be interacting with a molecular cloud. The gamma-ray emission is spatially extended, broadly consistent with the radio and X-ray extent of SNR W51C. The energy spectrum in the 0.2-50 GeV band exhibits steepening toward high energies. The luminosity is greater than 1x10^{36} erg/s given the distance constraint of D>5.5 kpc, which makes this object one of the most luminous gamma-ray sources in our Galaxy. The observed gamma-rays can be explained reasonably by a combination of efficient acceleration of nuclear cosmic rays at supernova shocks and shock-cloud interactions. The decay of neutral pi-mesons produced in hadronic collisions provides a plausible explanation for the gamma-ray emission. The product of the average gas density and the total energy content of the accelerated protons amounts to 5x10^{51}(D/6kpc)^2 erg/cm^3. Electron density constraints from the radio and X-ray bands render it difficult to explain the LAT signal as due to inverse Compton scattering. The Fermi LAT source coincident with SNR W51C sheds new light on the origin of Galactic cosmic rays.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Accepted for ApJ Letters. Contact authors: Y. Uchiyama, S. Funk., H. Tajima, T. Tanak