"The Standard Model" of particle physics is a description of the fundamental particles, the quarks and leptons, and the forces between them. The Standard Model also explains the origin of mass, which predicts the existence of the Higgs boson, the last undetected particle in the Standard Model. This thesis presents a search for the Standard Model Higgs boson in the "H ->bb" decay channel in 1.96 TeV proton-antiproton collisions. This search is based on the data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.3/fb collected by the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. To improve this search sensitivity, sophisticated multivariate techniques are employed. Through the use of these techniques, the analysis achieves an observed (expected) 95% confidence level upper limit of 5.26 (3.98) times the theoretically expected production cross section for the Standard Model Higgs boson with a mass of 115 GeV/c^2. This result represents a substantial improvement in sensitivity over the previous result, the increase in sensitivity is 26%.

Jim Baggott explores how our understanding of the nature of matter, and its fundamental property of mass, has developed, from the ancient Greek view of indivisible atoms to quantum mechanics, dark matter, the Higgs field, and beyond. He shows how the stuff of the universe is proving more elusive and uncertain than we ever imagined.

Everything around us is made of 'stuff', from planets, to books, to our own bodies. Whatever it is, we call it matter or material substance. It is solid; it has mass. But what is matter, exactly? We are taught in school that matter is not continuous, but discrete. As a few of the philosophers of ancient Greece once speculated, nearly two and a half thousand years ago, matter comes in 'lumps', and science has relentlessly peeled away successive layers of matter to reveal its ultimate constituents. Surely, we can't keep doing this indefinitely. We imagine that we should eventually run up against some kind of ultimately fundamental, indivisible type of stuff, the building blocks from which everything in the Universe is made. The English physicist Paul Dirac called this 'the dream of philosophers'. But science has discovered that the foundations of our Universe are not as solid or as certain and dependable as we might have once imagined. They are instead built from ghosts and phantoms, of a peculiar quantum kind. And, at some point on this exciting journey of scientific discovery, we lost our grip on the reassuringly familiar concept of mass. How did this happen? How did the answers to our questions become so complicated and so difficult to comprehend? In Mass Jim Baggott explains how we come to find ourselves here, confronted by a very different understanding of the nature of matter, the origin of mass, and its implications for our understanding of the material world. Ranging from the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, and their theories of atoms and void, to the development of quantum field theory and the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle, he explores our changing understanding of the nature of matter, and the fundamental related concept of mass.

The Kobayashi-Maskawa Institute for the Origin of Particles and the Universe (KMI) was founded at Nagoya University in 2010 under the directorship of T Maskawa, in celebration of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for M Kobayashi and T Maskawa, both who are alumni of Nagoya University. In commemoration of the new KMI building in 2011, the KMI Inauguration Conference (KMIIN) was organized to discuss perspectives of various fields OCo both theoretical and experimental studies of particle physics and astrophysics OCo as the main objectives of the KMI activity.This proceedings contains a welcome address by T Maskawa conveying his hopes for KMI to create new revolutionary directions in the spirit of Shoichi Sakata, a great mentor of both Maskawa and Kobayashi. Invited speakers, world-leading scientists in the fields, and the young scientists at KMI contributed to this volume containing theoretical studies of strongly coupled gauge theories in view of LHC phenomenology, string theory approach and lattice studies as well as hot/dense QCD system, and also super-symmetric GUT models, etc., together with experimental studies of LHC physics, B physics, neutrino physics and the related astrophysics and cosmology. The volume yields a unique synergy of particle physics and astrophysics, closely related to the main activity of KMI encompassing particle theory (including lattice computer simulations), particle physics experiments, cosmology, and astrophysics observations."

Did they come from space, from Egypt, from the Americas? From other ancient civilizations? These are some of today's most fanciful claims about the first settlers of the islands of the Pacific. But none of them correctly answer the question: Where did the Polynesians come from? This book is a thoughtful and devastating critique of such "new" learning, and a careful and accessible survey of modern archaeological, anthropological, genetic, and linguistics findings about the origins of Pacific Islanders. Professor Howe also examines the two-hundred-year-old history of Western ideas about Polynesian origins in the context of ever-changing fads and intellectual fashions.

Ultraviolet Astronomy and the Quest for the Origin of Life addresses the use of astronomical observations in the ultraviolet range to better understand the generation of complex, life-precursor molecules. The origin of RNA is still under debate but seems to be related to the generation of pools of complex organic molecules submitted to heavy cycles of solution in water and drying. This book investigates whether these cycles require a planetary surface or may occur in space by examining both the theoretical and observational aspects of the role of UV radiation in the origin of life. This book offers the latest advances in these studies for astronomers, astrobiologists and planetary scientists. Addresses both the theoretical and observational aspects of the role of Ultraviolet (UV) radiation in the origin of life Builds on the requirements to produce prebiotic molecules in space and the implications for the origin of RNA Investigates the use of ultraviolet observations related to planetary system formation, the evolution of young planetary disks, and the interaction of stars with planetary atmospheres