With the completion of Run~I of the CERN Large Hadron Collider, particle physics has entered a new era. The production of unprecedented numbers of heavy-flavoured hadrons in high energy proton-proton collisions allows detailed studies of flavour-chan
ging processes. The increasingly precise measurements allow to probe the Standard Model with a new level of accuracy. Rare $b$ hadron decays provide some of the most promising approaches for such tests, since there are several observables which can be cleanly interpreted from a theoretical viewpoint. In this article, the status and prospects in this field are reviewed, with a focus on precision measurements and null tests.
These are the proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Flavor Symmetries and Consequences in Accelerators and Cosmology, held 30 June 2012 - 4 July 2012, Dortmund, Germany.
We study squark flavour violation in the anomaly mediated supersymmetry broken (AMSB) minimal supersymmetric standard model. Analytical expressions for the three-generational squark mass matrices are derived. We show that the anomaly-induced soft bre
aking terms have a decreasing amount of squark flavour violation when running from the GUT to the weak scale. Taking into account inter-generational squark mixing, we work out non-trivial constraints from B -> Xs gamma and Bs -> mu mu, which complement each other, as well as B -> tau nu decays. We further identify a region of parameter space where the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon and the B -> Xs gamma branching ratio are simultaneously accommodated. Since anomaly mediation is of the minimal flavour-violating type, the generic flavour predictions for this class of models apply, including a CKM-induced (and hence small) Bs-Bsbar-mixing phase.
The influence of time delay in systems of two coupled excitable neurons is studied in the framework of the FitzHugh-Nagumo model. Time-delay can occur in the coupling between neurons or in a self-feedback loop. The stochastic synchronization of insta
ntaneously coupled neurons under the influence of white noise can be deliberately controlled by local time-delayed feedback. By appropriate choice of the delay time synchronization can be either enhanced or suppressed. In delay-coupled neurons, antiphase oscillations can be induced for sufficiently large delay and coupling strength. The additional application of time-delayed self-feedback leads to complex scenarios of synchronized in-phase or antiphase oscillations, bursting patterns, or amplitude death.
We study the nonlinear dynamics of two delay-coupled neural systems each modelled by excitable dynamics of FitzHugh-Nagumo type and demonstrate that bistability between the stable fixed point and limit cycle oscillations occurs for sufficiently large
delay times and coupling strength. As the mechanism for these delay-induced oscillations we identify a saddle-node bifurcation of limit cycles.
