Thesis Errata

Last updated 18-Oct-1999

A couple of major errors have been discovered in my thesis. One is that Tables D.16 and D.17 are incorrect -- in fact, they were incorrect three times! Another is an error in the column heading and in the values of one column in both Tables D.4 and D.5. There are also a few typos and other miscellaneous errors. In the interests of accuracy and ego, here are most of the known mistakes in the thesis:

Preface

Poem: The poem, Cosmic Gall by John Updike, is slightly mis-quoted. The third line should read And do not interact at all. Janet Conrad changed "do not" to "hardly" on one of her transparencies, and I copied that text into my thesis. Also, there should be a comma after the word "And" on the 12th line: And, scorning barriers of class...
The lesson: always go back to the source material!

Chapter One

Page 7: Equation 1.5: It should be (k - k'), not (k + k').
Page 9: Equation 1.13: The anti-neutrino subscript should be a neutrino subscript in both this equation and the following paragraph.
Page 11: Equation 1.22: The sign in the parenthetical term is wrong. It should be 1 + nu²/Q².
Page 11: Equation 1.23: Remove E_mu², put a "nu" before W₂, and put an "M" before W₁.
Page 12: Equation 1.28: The sign in the parenthetical term is wrong. It should be 1 + Q²/(2Mx)².
Pages 11 and 12: Equations 1.23, 1.27, and 1.29 have the same mistake: The y-coefficient of the last term should be y(1-y/2). It presently reads y(1-y²/2).
Page 14: Beginning paragraph, third sentence: "...they travel collinearly..."
Page 28: It was pointed out to me that it is useful to quote the range of the Q² variation used to determine the error due to the normalization and factorization scales. In Ref. [Vir92], k was varied between 0.1 and 4.0 to determine the shift in alpha_s, where the new Q² scale was taken to be k*Q². k was varied separately in the normalization and factorization scale analyses.

Chapter Two

Page 46: Second bulleted item: The SUPERLOs are attenuated by a factor of six, not a factor of ten.

Chapter Four

Page 92

Six lines down from top of page: the semi-colon should be a period.

Pages 89, 98, and 116

Equations 4.1, 4.13, and 4.80 all have the same error: We do not correct to a massless propagator (W mass = 0), we correct to an infinite-mass propagator. (Note: in the FORTRAN code, this is accomplished by not executing the propagator-effect code when we want to compute the correction.)

Page 113

Equation 4.55: The minus sign should be a plus sign:

ksi = x*(1 + m_c²/Q²)

Page 116

Equation 4.79: The second "squared" in the denominator should be outside the parenthesis. That is, the denominator should be (1+(Q²/m_W²))².

Chapter Six

Page 159: Near the top of the page, xF₃ is the average of xF₃(nu) and xF₃(nubar).
The "+" sign in the middle line of Equation 6.9 should be a "-" sign.
Page 169: It is Cynthia McNulty who's working on the alternate method of extracting structure functions.

Chapter Seven

Page 211

Equation 7.21: The coefficient of the first term should be x²/k³.

Page 215

Figure 7.3: The presentation of the xF₃ higher-twist (HT) results from Sidorov is incorrect. The D&W HT values (which are denoted by D₂) are determined by

xF₃(HT) = xF₃(QCD) * (1 + D₂/Q²)

whereas the values published by Sidorov come from:

xF₃(HT) = xF₃(QCD) + D₂/Q²

However, the conclusion of the comparison between D&W and the Sidorov measurement would not change even if the Figure were corrected: the D&W HT calculation is about twice as big as the measured HT correction.

Page 221

Tables 7.6 and 7.7 show a variation of Lambda_MS as a function of x and Q² cuts. At the time that the thesis was written, I had no explanation for the variation. Kataev, Parente, and Sidorov performed a NNLO QCD analysis of the CCFR data to higher orders of alpha_s; their results are in hep-ph/9809500. Among other results, they show that the variation shown in Tables 7.6 and 7.7 goes away if the NNLO and NNNLO QCD terms are included in the fit.

This is not really an error, but a recognition of new physics results.

Page 223

A theoretical error is missing from the error discussion: The value of Lambda_MSbar is almost unchanged by whether or not nuclear corrections are applied to the structure functions (see Section 8.1.2.1 for a discussion of the nuclear corrections). A nuclear correction affects the shape of the parton distribution functions, but not the slopes of the structure functions.

Page 244

Table 7.18: The values of Lambda for the Basic Fit line are incorrect for both Combined Error columns. The value of Lambda for the Combined Error is the same as the value in the corresponding Stat and Syst column.

Note for second paragraph on the page: See Section 1.2.4.5 (page 27) for a discussion of the QCD renormalization and factorization scales.

Chapter Eight

Page 251: In the caption to Figure 8.5, the reference to the SLAC E87 data is incorrect. It should have been: Bodek et al., PRL 50:1431 (1983).

Appendix D

Pages 339 through 346

Tables D.4 and D.5 have two major errors.

The first error is that the columns of the table are incorrectly labeled. The correct labels should be (reading across the top of the table, and allowing for the typesetting limitations of HTML):

x
Q2
F2
delta F2 (stat)
B/A nu 744
B/A nu 770
B/A nubar 744
B/A nubar 770

for D.4, and the corresponding xF3 labels for Table D.5.

The second error is that values of the column labeled "B/A nubar 744" (which should have been labeled "B/A nu 770") are incorrect (thanks to Michiel Botje for spotting that the values were the same as those in the previous column). The correct flux systematic error tables with correct column headings and the correct values are in the SF final results area for both F₂ and xF₃.

Pages 387 through 394

Tables D.16 and D.17 are incorrect. There were actually three mistakes on my part; the first was spotted by Arie Bodek, the second by Csaba Boros, and the third by Un-Ki Yang. If you're going to use these tables, make sure you get the ones created on or after 27-Sep-1999. The correct values for removing the physics model corrections used in the analysis are in the SF final results area and are available both for F₂ and xF₃.

xF₃ sea corrections table

At the request of Stefan Reiss at H1, a new corrections table has been added to the FTP site (and this was also corrected on 27-Sep-1999). It gives the ratio:

xF₃ (no s-c correction) / xF₃ (with s-c correction)

There is a separate correction listed for neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. In theory, if you multiply the published xF₃ by the columns in this table, you'll get xF₃(neutrino) and xF₃(anti-neutrino) separately. In practice, what you'll get is the strange sea as measured in the leading-order CCFR dimuon analysis. (Yes, the negative numbers in the anti-neutrino ratio are correct: at low x and low Q² xF₃(anti-neutrino) is negative.)

Appendix G

Page 440: In Figure G.4, the curve for the CCFR NLO dimuon analysis is incorrect. This was due to an oversight in Andrew Bazarko's thesis: in Figure 7.27 of that thesis, the plot labeled Q²=10 is actually for Q²=4. The plot in the ftp site for my thesis has been corrected and should be used instead of my Figure G.4.
Pages 438-440: It has been noted that the CCFR parton distribution functions shown in these plots are for an iron target, while the global fits are calculated for a proton target. No nuclear correction was applied to the CCFR PDFs for these plots.

Send e-mail to Bill Seligman