The status of proton decay is described, including general motivations for baryon number violation, and the present and future experimental situation. Grand unification with and without supersymmetry is considered, including possible evidence from coupling constant unification and implications for proton decay and neutrino mass. 1 Motivations Baryon number is almost certainly not absolutely con...

Baryon fluctuations exceeding Poisson expectations can signal a nearly first order phase transition at RHIC. We show how these fluctuations can be measured, and apply a dissipative-hydrodynamic formulation used in condensed matter physics to simulate their evolution. If the phase transition from quark matter to hadron gas is first order, matter at the appropriate temperatures and densities can ...

Article history: Received 30 January 2008 Accepted 19 August 2008 Available online 28 August 2008 Editor: W. Haxton PACS: 21.45.Bc 26.20.Cd 26.65.+t The proton–proton fusion reaction, pp → de+ν , is studied in pionless effective field theory (EFT) with di-baryon fields up to next-to leading order. With the aid of the di-baryon fields, the effective range corrections are naturally resummed up to...

We study junctions consisting of confining strings in N = 1 supersymmetric large N gauge theories by means of the gauge/gravity correspondence. We realize them as D-brane configurations in infrared geometries of the Klebanov-Strassler (KS) and the Maldacena-Núñez (MN) solutions. After discussing kinematics associated with the balance of tensions, we compute energies of baryon vertices numerical...

Experimental results for identified hadron spectra in AA collisions at RHIC are reviewed. Jet suppression in central AuAu collisions at 200 GeV is seen in leading meson and baryon spectra at high pt. Enhanced baryon production at intermediate pT (2 < pt < 5 GeV/c) is related to quark content but not its mass. In d+Au collisions Cronin enhancement is observed with larger magnitude for baryons th...