Analysis of DNA sequence variation within marine species using Beta-coalescents

We apply recently developed inference methods based on general coalescent processes to DNA sequence data obtained from various marine species. Several of these species are believed to exhibit so-called shallow gene genealogies, potentially due to extreme reproductive behaviour, e.g. via Hedgecock's "reproduction sweepstakes". Besides the data analysis, in particular the inference of mutation rates and the estimation of the (real) time to the most recent common ancestor, we briefly address the question whether the genealogies might be adequately described by so-called Beta coalescents (as opposed to Kingman's coalescent), allowing multiple mergers of genealogies. The choice of the underlying coalescent model for the genealogy has drastic implications for the estimation of the above quantities, in particular the real-time embedding of the genealogy.Comment: 15 pages, 16 figure

Dipole operator constraints on composite Higgs models

Flavour- and CP-violating electromagnetic or chromomagnetic dipole operators in the quark sector are generated in a large class of new physics models and are strongly constrained by measurements of the neutron electric dipole moment and observables sensitive to flavour-changing neutral currents, such as the $B\to X_s\gamma$ branching ratio and $\epsilon'/\epsilon$. After a model-independent discussion of the relevant constraints, we analyze these effects in models with partial compositeness, where the quarks get their masses by mixing with vector-like composite fermions. These scenarios can be seen as the low-energy limit of composite Higgs or warped extra dimensional models. We study different choices for the electroweak representations of the composite fermions motivated by electroweak precision tests as well as different flavour structures, including flavour anarchy and $U(3)^3$ or $U(2)^3$ flavour symmetries in the strong sector. In models with "wrong-chirality" Yukawa couplings, we find a strong bound from the neutron electric dipole moment, irrespective of the flavour structure. In the case of flavour anarchy, we also find strong bounds from flavour-violating dipoles, while these constraints are mild in the flavour-symmetric models.Comment: 30 pages, 2 figures, 11 tables. v3: Misprints in table 8 corrected. Numerics and conclusions unchange

Effective Theory for a Heavy Scalar Coupled to the SM via Vector-Like Quarks

We illustrate the application of the recently developed SCET$_{\rm BSM}$ framework in the context of a specific model, in which the Standard Model (SM) is supplemented by a heavy scalar $S$ and three generations of heavy, vector-like quarks $\Psi$. We construct the appropriate effective field theory for two-body decays of $S$ into SM particles. We explicitly compute the Wilson coefficients of the SCET$_{\rm BSM}$ operators appearing at leading and next-to-leading order (NLO) in an expansion in powers of $v/M_S$, as well as for a subset of operators arising at NNLO, retaining the full dependence on the ratio $M_S/M_\Psi$. For the phenomenologically most relevant decay channels of the heavy scalar, we study the impact of resummation effects of Sudakov logarithms on the decay rates.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Short-Distance Expansion of Heavy-Light Currents at Order 1/m

The short-distance expansion of the heavy-light currents $\bar q\,\gamma^\mu Q$ and $\bar q\,\gamma^\mu\gamma_5\,Q$ is constructed to order $1/m_Q$, and to next-to-leading order in renormalization-group improved perturbation theory. It is shown that the $10\times 10$ anomalous dimension matrix, which describes the scale dependence of the dimension-four effective current operators in the heavy quark effective theory, is to a large extent determined by the equations of motion, heavy quark symmetry, and reparameterization invariance. The next-to-leading order expressions for the Wilson coefficients at order $1/m_Q$ depend on only five unknown two-loop anomalous dimensions, among them that of the chromo-magnetic operator.Comment: 22 pages LaTeX, SLAC-PUB-634

Chow-Witt rings of Grassmannians

We complement our previous computation of the Chow-Witt rings of classifying spaces of special linear groups by an analogous computation for the general linear groups. This case involves discussion of non-trivial dualities. The computation proceeds along the lines of the classical computation of the integral cohomology of ${\rm BO}(n)$ with local coefficients, as done by Cadek. The computations of Chow-Witt rings of classifying spaces of ${\rm GL}_n$ are then used to compute the Chow-Witt rings of the finite Grassmannians. As before, the formulas are close parallels of the formulas describing integral cohomology rings of real Grassmannians.Comment: Significant revision, streamlined proofs, 34