International Journal of Modern Physics A

We review the status of bottom quark physics at the CDF experiment. The measurements reported are based on about 110 pb^-1 of data collected at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider operating at . In particular, we review results on B hadron lifetimes, measurements of the time dependence of oscillations, and a search for CP violation in decays. Prospects for future B physics at CDF in the next run of the Tevatron Collider, starting in the year 2000, are also presented.

The method of point-splitting regularization is applied on the two-dimensional (super)conformal field theory. This method is first used to regularize the fermionic conformal field theory and then the N=1 superconformal field theory. We obtain the correct central extensions for the conformal algebra and the N=1 superconformal algebra. We arrived at these results only after some nontrivial, but exact, cancelations among all the singular terms, as required by the consistency of the point-splitting method. In the course of our analysis, we rederive Wick's Theorem directly from the commutation equations of the fundamental fields.

A one-loop correction of the quasilocal energy in the Schwarzschild background, with flat space as a reference metric, is performed by means of a variational procedure in the Hamiltonian framework. We examine the graviton sector in momentum space, in the lowest possible state. An application to the black hole pair creation via the Casimir energy is presented. Implications on the foamlike scenario are discussed.

We consider various ways of treating the infrared divergence which appears in the dynamically generated fermion mass, when the transverse part of the photon propagator in N flavour QED₃ at finite temperature is included in the Matsubara formalism. This divergence is likely to be an artifact of taking into account only the leading order term in the expansion when we calculate the photon propagator and is handled here phenomenologically by means of an infrared cutoff. Inserting both the longitudinal and the transverse part of the photon propagator in the Schwinger–Dyson equation, we find the dependence of the dynamically generated fermion mass on the temperature and the cutoff parameters. It turns out that consistency with certain statistical physics arguments imposes conditions on the cutoff parameters. For parameters in the allowed range of values we find that the ratio r=2_*Mass(T=0)/critical temperature is approximately 6, consistent with previous calculations which neglected the transverse photon contribution.