Lead Them to Water and Pay Them to Drink: An Experiment with Services and Incentives for College Achievement

High rates of attrition, delayed completion, and poor achievement are growing concerns at colleges and universities in North America. This paper reports on a randomized field experiment involving two strategies designed to improve these outcomes among first-year undergraduates at a large Canadian university. One treatment group was offered peer advising and organized study group services. Another was offered substantial merit-scholarships for solid, but not necessarily top, first year grades. A third treatment group combined both interventions. Service take-up rates were much higher for students offered both services and scholarships than for those offered services alone. Females also used services more than males. No program had an effect on grades for males. However, first-term grades were significantly higher for females in the two scholarship treatment groups. These effects faded somewhat by year's end, but remain significant for females who planned to take enough courses to qualify for a scholarship. There also appears to have been an effect on retention for females offered both scholarships and services. This effect is large enough to generate an overall increase in retention. On balance, the results suggest that a combination of services and incentives is more promising than either alone.

Vector and scalar charmonium resonances with lattice QCD

We perform an exploratory lattice QCD simulation of $D \bar D$ scattering, aimed at determining the masses as well as the decay widths of charmonium resonances above open charm threshold. Neglecting coupling to other channels, the resulting phase shift for $D \bar D$ scattering in p-wave yields the well-known vector resonance $\psi(3770)$. For $m_\pi = 156$ MeV, the extracted resonance mass and the decay width agree with experiment within large statistical uncertainty. The scalar charmonium resonances present a puzzle, since only the ground state $\chi_{c0}(1P)$ is well understood, while there is no commonly accepted candidate for its first excitation. We simulate $D \bar D$ scattering in s-wave in order to shed light on this puzzle. The resulting phase shift supports the existence of a yet-unobserved narrow resonance with a mass slightly below 4 GeV. A scenario with this narrow resonance and a pole at $\chi_{c0}(1P)$ agrees with the energy-dependence of our phase shift. Further lattice QCD simulations and experimental efforts are needed to resolve the puzzle of the excited scalar charmonia.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures, updated to match published versio

QCD with Two Light Dynamical Chirally Improved Quarks: Baryons

We present a study of baryon ground states and low lying excitations of non-strange and strange baryons. The results are based on seven gauge field ensembles with two dynamical light Chirally Improved (CI) quarks corresponding to pion masses between 255 and 596 MeV and a strange valence quark with mass fixed by the Omega baryon. The lattice spacing varies between 0.1324 and 0.1398 fm. Given in lattice units, the bulk of our results are for size 16^3\times 32, for two ensembles with light pion masses (255 and 330 MeV) we also use 24^3\times 48 lattices and perform an infinite volume extrapolation. We derive energy levels for the spin 1/2 and 3/2 channels for both parities. In general, our results in the infinite volume limit compare well with experiment. We analyze the flavor symmetry content by identifying the singlet/octet/decuplet contributions of the resulting eigenstates. The ground states compositions agree with quark model expectations. In some cases the excited states, however, disagree and we discuss possible reasons.Comment: 22 pages, 27 figure

Imaging through turbulence with a quadrature-phase optical interferometer

We present an improved technique for imaging through turbulence at visible wavelengths using a rotation shearing pupil-plane interferometer, intended for astronomical and terrestrial imaging applications. While previous astronomical rotation shearing interferometers have made only visibility modulus measurements, this interferometer makes four simultaneous measurements on each interferometric baseline, with phase differences of π/2 between each measurement, allowing complex visibility measurements (modulus and phase) across the entire input pupil in a single exposure. This technique offers excellent wavefront resolution, allowing operation at visible wavelengths on large apertures, is potentially immune to amplitude fluctuations (scintillation), and may offer superior calibration capabilities to other imaging techniques. The interferometer has been tested in the laboratory under weakly aberrating conditions and at Palomar Observatory under ordinary astronomical observing conditions. This research is based partly on observations obtained at the Hale Telescope

Axial resonances a1(1260), b1(1235) and their decays from the lattice

The light axial-vector resonances $a_1(1260)$ and $b_1(1235)$ are explored in Nf=2 lattice QCD by simulating the corresponding scattering channels $\rho\pi$ and $\omega\pi$. Interpolating fields $\bar{q} q$ and $\rho\pi$ or $\omega\pi$ are used to extract the s-wave phase shifts for the first time. The $\rho$ and $\omega$ are treated as stable and we argue that this is justified in the considered energy range and for our parameters $m_\pi\simeq 266~$MeV and $L\simeq 2~$fm. We neglect other channels that would be open when using physical masses in continuum. Assuming a resonance interpretation a Breit-Wigner fit to the phase shift gives the $a_1(1260)$ resonance mass $m_{a1}^{res}=1.435(53)(^{+0}_{-109})$ GeV compared to $m_{a1}^{exp}=1.230(40)$ GeV. The $a_1$ width $\Gamma_{a1}(s)=g^2 p/s$ is parametrized in terms of the coupling and we obtain $g_{a_1\rho\pi}=1.71(39)$ GeV compared to $g_{a_1\rho\pi}^{exp}=1.35(30)$ GeV derived from $\Gamma_{a1}^{exp}=425(175)$ MeV. In the $b_1$ channel, we find energy levels related to $\pi(0)\omega(0)$ and $b_1(1235)$, and the lowest level is found at $E_1 \gtrsim m_\omega+m_\pi$ but is within uncertainty also compatible with an attractive interaction. Assuming the coupling $g_{b_1\omega\pi}$ extracted from the experimental width we estimate $m_{b_1}^{res}=1.414(36)(^{+0}_{-83})$.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, updated to match published versio