By exploiting the database of early-type galaxies (ETGs) members of the WINGS survey of nearby clusters, we address here the long debated question of the origin and shape of the Fundamental Plane (FP). Our data suggest that different physical mechani
sms concur in shaping and tilting the FP with respect to the virial plane (VP) expectation. In particular, an hybrid solution in which the structure of galaxies and their stellar population are the main contributors to the FP tilt seems to be favoured. We find that the bulk of the tilt should be attributed to structural non-homology, while stellar population effects play an important but less crucial role. Our data indicate that the differential FP tilt between the V and K-band is due to a sort of entanglement between structural and stellar population effects, for which the inward steepening of color profiles (V-K) tends to increase at increasing the stellar mass of ETGs. The same analysis applied to the ATLAS3D and SDSS data in common with WINGS (WSDSS throughout the paper) confirms our results, the only remarkable difference being the less important role of the stellar mass-to-light-ratio in determining the FP tilt. The ATLAS3D data also suggest that the tilt depends as well on the dark matter (DM) fraction and on the rotational contribution to the kinetic energy (Vrot/sigma). We show that the global properties of the FP can be understood in terms of the underlying correlation among mass, structure and stellar population of ETGs, for which, at increasing the stellar mass, ETGs become (on average) older and more centrally concentrated. Finally, we show that a Malmquist-like selection effect may mimic a differential evolution of the mass-to-light ratio for galaxies of different masses. This should be taken into account in the studies investigating the amount of the so called downsizing phenomenon.
We investigate the impact of theoretical uncertainties on the accuracy of measurements involving hadronic jets. The analysis is performed using events with a Z boson and a single jet observed in $pbar{p}$ collisions at $sqrt{s}$ = 1.96 TeV in 4.6 $ma
thrm{fb^{-1}}$ of data from the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). The transverse momenta (pt) of the jet and the boson should balance each other due to momentum conservation in the plane transverse to the direction of the $p$ and $bar{p}$ beams. We evaluate the dependence of the measured pt-balance on theoretical uncertainties associated with initial and final state radiation, choice of renormalization and factorization scales, parton distribution functions, jet-parton matching, calculations of matrix elements, and parton showering. We find that the uncertainty caused by parton showering at large angles is the largest amongst the listed uncertainties. The proposed method can be re-applied at the LHC experiments to investigate and evaluate the uncertainties on the predicted jet energies. The distributions produced at the CDF environment are intended for comparison to those from modern event generators and new tunes of parton showering.
We present preliminary results on a search for squarks and gluinos in proton-antiproton collisions with a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV and based on about 2.0 fb-1 of data collected by the CDF detector in the Tevatron Run II. Events with multiple
jets of hadrons and large missing transverse energy in the final state are studied within the framework of minimal supergravity (mSUGRA) and assuming R-parity conservation. The results are compared to Standard Model predictions and limits on gluino and squark masses are extracted. A specific search for the supersymmetric partner of the bottom quark produced from gluino decays is carried out using a sample of events with missing transverse energy and two or more jets, at least one of them b-tagged. Good agreement is found between data and Standard Model predictions, and limits on gluino and sbottom masses are extracted.
