Massive relic gravitational waves from f(R) theories of gravity: production and potential detection

The production of a stochastic background of relic gravitational waves is well known in various works in the literature, where, by using the so called adiabatically-amplified zero-point fluctuations process, it has been shown how the standard inflationary scenario for the early universe can in principle provide a distinctive spectrum of relic gravitational waves. In this paper, it is shown that, in general, f(R) theories of gravity produce a third massive polarization of gravitational waves and the primordial production of this polarization is analyzed adapting the adiabatically-amplified zero-point fluctuations process at this case. In this way, previous results, where only particular cases of f(R) theories have been analyzed, will be generalized. The presence of the mass could also have important applications in cosmology, because the fact that gravitational waves can have mass could give a contribution to the dark matter of the Universe. An upper bound for these relic gravitational waves, which arises from the WMAP constrains, is also mentioned. At the end of the paper, the potential detection of such massive gravitational waves using interferometers like Virgo and LIGO is discussed.     

Systematic event generator tuning for the LHC

In this article we describe Professor, a new program for tuning model parameters of Monte Carlo event generators to experimental data by parameterising the per-bin generator response to parameter variations and numerically optimising the parameterised behaviour. Simulated experimental analysis data is obtained using the Rivet analysis toolkit. This paper presents the Professor procedure and implementation, illustrated with the application of the method to tunes of the Pythia 6 event generator to data from the LEP/SLD and Tevatron experiments. These tunes are substantial improvements on existing standard choices, and are recommended as base tunes for LHC experiments, to be themselves systematically improved upon when early LHC data is available.     

On the Photophysical Properties of New Luminol Derivatives and their Synthetic Phthalimide Precursors

The photophysical properties of a series of structurally related 4-aminophthalimides and the corresponding 5-aminophthalic hydrazides (luminols) are reported. Absorption, steady-state, and time-resolved fluorescence spectra of luminols exhibited substitution, solvent, and pH dependence. Singlet lifetimes have been determined by time-resolved laser flash spectroscopy. UV spectra in gas phase and DMSO solution were calculated by TD-DFT which revealed the existence of two low-energy excited singlet states with strong pH-sensitivity.