Narrow Results

The 1992–1995 running of the Fermilab Tevatron (the so-called Run I) ended with many important physics goals accomplished, including the discovery of the top quark, and the anticipation of many further questions to be answered in the future. After many upgrades to the detector and to the accelerator complex, Run II began in April 2001. First results obtained by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration from the analysis of early Tevatron Run II data are reported here. They fall into two categories: a number of measurements have been performed with the primary goal of establishing detector performance and physics potential. Another set of measurements make use of completely new capabilities of the upgraded detector, thus allowing for competitive results with a modest amount of integrated luminosity.

Measurements of double-spin asymmetries for single-inclusive heavy flavor production and for heavy quark correlations are expected to provide valuable information about the spin structure of the nucleon, in particular, the elusive gluon polarization. We discuss progress towards a versatile parton-level Monte-Carlo code for the production and decay of heavy quarks in longitudinally polarized hadron-hadron and photon-hadron collisions at next-to-leading order accuracy of QCD. Phenomenological studies are presented for BNL-RHIC and COMPASS.

We examined the single production of fourth family b' quarks at the Large Hadron electron Collider (LHeC). We have analyzed the background and the signal processes for the mass range 300–700 GeV. We find the discovery region for the optimal bounds of V_qb' matrix elements.

Since nine years, experiments have been observing a host of exotic states decaying into heavy quarkonia. The interpretation of most of them still remains uncertain and, in some cases, controversial, notwithstanding a considerable progress has been made on the quality of the experimental information available and a number of ideas and models have been put forward to explain the observations.

In this mini-review we will summarize the measurements, with the most recent updates and list the useful ones yet to be done. We will discuss the problem of the spin of the X, which could hide some major surprise on its interpretation, and review some more phenomenological issues debated in the field.

In this paper, we review the precision determination of the bottom and top quark masses from the total pair-production cross-section near threshold. The theory prediction of the cross-section includes QCD corrections up to third-order. We further discuss the combined impact of Higgs corrections, the QED Coulomb potential, non-resonant production, and P-wave production on the extraction of top quark properties.