Surfaces, depths and hypercubes: Meyerholdian scenography and the fourth dimension

An appreciation of Meyerhold’s engagement with theatrical space is fundamental to understanding his directorial and pedagogic practice. This article begins by establishing Meyerhold’s theoretical and practical engagement with theatre as a fundamentally scenographic process, arguing for a reconceptualisation of the director as ‘director-scenographer’. Focusing on the construction of depth and surface in Meyerholdian theatre, the article goes on to identify trends in the director’s approach to space, with an emphasis on the de-naturalisation of depth on stage. This denaturalisation is seen as taking three forms: the rejection of depth as a prerequisite in theatrical space, the acknowledgement of the two-dimensional surface as surface, and the restructuring of depth space into a series of restricted planes. The combination of these trends indicates a consistent and systematic process of experimentation in Meyerhold’s work. In addition, this emphasis on depth and surface, and the interaction between the two, also highlights the contextualisation of Meyerhold’s practice within the visual, philosophical and scientific culture of the early twentieth century, echoing the innovations in n-dimensional geometry and particularly, the model of the fourth spatial dimension seen in the work of Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky

Search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu channel in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

A search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu decay channel, where l = e or mu, in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV is presented. The data were collected at the LHC, with the CMS detector, and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 4.6 inverse femtobarns. No significant excess is observed above the background expectation, and upper limits are set on the Higgs boson production cross section. The presence of the standard model Higgs boson with a mass in the 270-440 GeV range is excluded at 95% confidence level.Comment: Submitted to JHE

Combined search for the quarks of a sequential fourth generation

Results are presented from a search for a fourth generation of quarks produced singly or in pairs in a data set corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5 inverse femtobarns recorded by the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2011. A novel strategy has been developed for a combined search for quarks of the up and down type in decay channels with at least one isolated muon or electron. Limits on the mass of the fourth-generation quarks and the relevant Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix elements are derived in the context of a simple extension of the standard model with a sequential fourth generation of fermions. The existence of mass-degenerate fourth-generation quarks with masses below 685 GeV is excluded at 95% confidence level for minimal off-diagonal mixing between the third- and the fourth-generation quarks. With a mass difference of 25 GeV between the quark masses, the obtained limit on the masses of the fourth-generation quarks shifts by about +/- 20 GeV. These results significantly reduce the allowed parameter space for a fourth generation of fermions.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO