Vicente Vento

The physics of glueballs

Glueballs are particles whose valence degrees of freedom are gluons and therefore in their description the gauge field plays a dominant role. We review recent results in the physics of glueballs with the aim set on phenomenology and discuss the possibility of finding them in conventional hadronic experiments and in the Quark Gluon Plasma. In order to describe their properties we resort to a variety of theoretical treatments which include, lattice QCD, constituent models, AdS/QCD methods, and QCD sum rules. The review is supposed to be an informed guide to the literature. Therefore, we do not discuss in detail technical developments but refer the reader to the appropriate references.

THE NUCLEON AS A TOPOLOGICAL CHIRAL SOLITON

Abstract We consider a version of the chiral bag model in which the interior quark sector is joined to an exterior meson sector through the requirement of continuity of the axial vector current at the bag surface. The negative energy quark sea plays a crucial role in this model, which reduces to the Skyrme soliton in the limit as the bag radius R→0. The “leakage” of baryon number and energy through the bag results in a remarkable insensitivity of these quantities to the bag radius. Although low-energy phenomenology should display a similar insensitivity, we suggest that a bag radius of 0.44 fm is advantageous on technical grounds. This choice of R should minimize the importance of gluon corrections, vacuum fluctuation effects, and inherent uncertainties in the effective lagrangian.

The Physics Programme Of The MoEDAL Experiment At The LHC

The MoEDAL experiment at Point 8 of the LHC ring is the seventh and newest LHC experiment. It is dedicated to the search for highly-ionizing particle avatars of physics beyond the Standard Model, extending significantly the discovery horizon of the LHC. A MoEDAL discovery would have revolutionary implications for our fundamental understanding of the Microcosm. MoEDAL is an unconventional and largely passive LHC detector comprised of the largest array of Nuclear Track Detector stacks ever deployed at an accelerator, surrounding the intersection region at Point 8 on the LHC ring. Another novel feature is the use of paramagnetic trapping volumes to capture both electrically and magnetically charged highly-ionizing particles predicted in new physics scenarios. It includes an array of TimePix pixel devices for monitoring highly-ionizing particle backgrounds. The main passive elements of the MoEDAL detector do not require a trigger system, electronic readout, or online computerized data acquisition. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the MoEDAL physics reach, which is largely complementary to the programs of the large multipurpose LHC detectors ATLAS and CMS.

Constituent quarks and parton distributions

Abstract The high energy parton distribution when evolved to a low energy scale appears to indicate that a valence picture of hadron structure arises. We have developed a formalism based on a laboratory partonic description which connects the parton distributions with the momentum distributions of a quark model. The formalism uses Next to Leading Order evolution and has been defined to produce the right support for the parton distributions. In this scheme we have analyzed the polarized and unpolarized data and shown that well-known Quark Models lead to a qualitative description of the data. However, if one aims at a quantitative agreement, these conventional low energy models have to be changed to include higher momentum and angular momentum components. Moreover, if the present gluon distributions, despite their indirect extraction, are taken to be an accurate description of nature, the need of primordial gluons or constituent quark substructure is an outcome of our calculation.

Quark model analysis of the Sivers function

We develop a formalism to evaluate the Sivers function. The approach is well suited for calculations which use constituent quark models to describe the structure of the nucleon. A nonrelativistic reduction of the scheme is performed and applied to the Isgur-Karl model of hadron structure. The results obtained are consistent with a sizable Sivers effect and the signs for the u and d flavor contributions turn out to be opposite. This pattern is in agreement with the one found analyzing, in the same model, the impact parameter dependent generalized parton distributions. The Burkardt sum rule turns out to be fulfilled to a large extent. We estimate the QCD evolution of our results from the momentum scale of the model to the experimental one and obtain reasonable agreement with the available data.

Looking for magnetic monopoles at LHC with diphoton events

Magnetic monopoles have been a subject of interest since Dirac established the relation between the existence of monopoles and charge quantization. The intense experimental search carried thus far has not met with success. The Large Hadron Collider is reaching energies never achieved before allowing the search for exotic particles in the TeV mass range. In a continuing effort to discover these rare particles we propose here other ways to detect them. We study the observability of monopoles and monopolium, a monopole-antimonopole bound state, at the Large Hadron Collider in the γγ channel for monopole masses in the range 500–1000 GeV. We conclude that LHC is an ideal machine to discover monopoles with masses below 1TeV at present running energies and with 5 fb−1 of integrated luminosity.

Towards a unified picture of constituent and current quarks

Using a simple picture of the constituent quark as a composite system of point-like partons, we construct the parton distributions by a convolution between constituent quark momentum distributions and constituent quark structure functions. We evaluate the latter at a low hadronic scale with updated phenomenological information, and we build the momentum distributions using well-known quark models. The resulting parton distributions and structure functions are evolved to the experimental scale and good agreement with the available DIS data is achieved. When compared with a similar calculation using non-composite constituent quarks, the accord with experiment of the present calculation becomes impressive. We therefore conclude that DIS data are consistent with a low energy scenario dominated by composite, mainly non-relativistic constituents of the nucleon.Abstract Using a simple picture of the constituent quark as a composite system of point-like partons, we construct the parton distributions by a convolution between constituent quark momentum distributions and constituent quark structure functions. We evaluate the latter at a low hadronic scale with updated phenomenological information, and we build the momentum distributions using well-known quark models. The resulting parton distributions and structure functions are evolved to the experimental scale and good agreement with the available DIS data is achieved. When compared with a similar calculation using non-composite constituent quarks, the accord with experiment of the present calculation becomes impressive. We therefore conclude that DIS data are consistent with a low energy scenario dominated by composite, mainly non-relativistic constituents of the nucleon.

Vector mesons and dense Skyrmion matter

Abstract In our continuing effort to understand hadronic matter at high density, we have developed a unified field theoretic formalism for dense skyrmion matter using a single Lagrangian to describe simultaneously both matter and meson fluctuations and studied in-medium properties of hadrons. Dropping the quartic Skyrme term, we incorporate into our previous Lagrangian the vector mesons ρ and ω in a form which is consistent with the symmetries of QCD. The results that we have obtained, reported here, expose a hitherto unsuspected puzzle associated with the role the ω meson plays at short distance. Since the ω meson couples to baryon density, it leads to a pseudo-gap scenario for the chiral symmetry phase transition, which is at variance with standard scenario of QCD at the phase transition. We find that in the presence of the ω mesons, the scale-anomaly dilaton field is prevented from developing a vanishing vacuum expectation value at the chiral restoration, as a consequence of which the in-medium pion decay constant does not vanish. This seems to indicate that the ω degree of freedom obstructs the “vector manifestation” which is considered to be a generic feature of effective field theories matched to QCD.

Double parton correlations and constituent quark models: a light front approach to the valence sector

A bstractAn explicit evaluation of the double parton distribution functions (dPDFs), within a relativistic Light-Front approach to constituent quark models, is presented. dPDFs encode information on the correlations between two partons inside a target and represent the non-perturbative QCD ingredient for the description of double parton scattering in proton-proton collisions, a crucial issue in the search of new Physics at the LHC. Valence dPDFs are evaluated at the low scale of the model and the perturbative scale of the experiments is reached by means of QCD evolution. The present results show that the strong correlation effects present at the scale of the model are still sizable, in the valence region, at the experimental scale. At the low values of x presently studied at the LHC the correlations become less relevant, although they are still important for the spin-dependent contributions to unpolarized proton scattering.

Model calculations of the Sivers function satisfying the Burkardt Sum Rule

It is shown that, at variance with previous analyses, the MIT bag model can explain the available data of the Sivers function and satisfies the Burkardt sum rule to a few percent accuracy. The agreement is similar to the one recently found in the constituent quark model. Therefore, these two model calculations of the Sivers function are in agreement with the present experimental and theoretical wisdom.