Aligning Practice to Policies: Changing the Culture to Recognize and Reward Teaching at Research Universities.

Recent calls for improvement in undergraduate education within STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines are hampered by the methods used to evaluate teaching effectiveness. Faculty members at research universities are commonly assessed and promoted mainly on the basis of research success. To improve the quality of undergraduate teaching across all disciplines, not only STEM fields, requires creating an environment wherein continuous improvement of teaching is valued, assessed, and rewarded at various stages of a faculty member's career. This requires consistent application of policies that reflect well-established best practices for evaluating teaching at the department, college, and university levels. Evidence shows most teaching evaluation practices do not reflect stated policies, even when the policies specifically espouse teaching as a value. Thus, alignment of practice to policy is a major barrier to establishing a culture in which teaching is valued. Situated in the context of current national efforts to improve undergraduate STEM education, including the Association of American Universities Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative, this essay discusses four guiding principles for aligning practice with stated priorities in formal policies: 1) enhancing the role of deans and chairs; 2) effectively using the hiring process; 3) improving communication; and 4) improving the understanding of teaching as a scholarly activity. In addition, three specific examples of efforts to improve the practice of evaluating teaching are presented as examples: 1) Three Bucket Model of merit review at the University of California, Irvine; (2) Evaluation of Teaching Rubric, University of Kansas; and (3) Teaching Quality Framework, University of Colorado, Boulder. These examples provide flexible criteria to holistically evaluate and improve the quality of teaching across the diverse institutions comprising modern higher education.

NRQCD Confronts LHCb Data on Quarkonium Production within Jets.

We analyze the recent LHCb measurement of the distribution of the fraction of the transverse momentum, z(J/ψ), carried by the J/ψ within a jet. LHCb data are compared with analytic calculations using the fragmenting jet function (FJF) formalism for studying J/ψ in jets. Logarithms in the FJFs are resummed using Dokshitzer-Gribov-Lipatov-Altarelli-Parisi evolution. We also convolve hard QCD partonic cross sections, showered with pythia, with leading order nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics (NRQCD) fragmentation functions and obtain consistent results. Both approaches use madgraph to calculate the hard process that creates the jet initiating parton. These calculations give reasonable agreement with the z(J/ψ) distribution that was shown to be poorly described by default pythia simulations in the LHCb paper. We compare our predictions for the J/ψ distribution using various extractions of nonperturbative NRQCD long-distance matrix elements (LDMEs) in the literature. NRQCD calculations agree with LHCb data better than default pythia regardless of which fit to the LDMEs is used. LDMEs from fits that focus exclusively on high transverse momentum data from colliders are in good agreement with the LHCb measurement.

Finite size corrections to the radiation reaction force in classical electrodynamics.

We introduce an effective field theory approach that describes the motion of finite size objects under the influence of electromagnetic fields. We prove that leading order effects due to the finite radius R of a spherically symmetric charge is order R2 rather than order R in any physical model, as widely claimed in the literature. This scaling arises as a consequence of Poincaré and gauge symmetries, which can be shown to exclude linear corrections. We use the formalism to calculate the leading order finite size correction to the Abraham-Lorentz-Dirac force.

Resummed photon spectrum in radiative upsilon decays.

We present a theoretical prediction for the photon spectrum in radiative upsilon decay including the effects of resumming the end point region, E(gamma)-->M(upsilon)/2. Our approach is based on nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) and the soft-collinear effective theory. We find that our results give much better agreement with data than the leading order NRQCD prediction.

Increased yield of ttbb at Hadron Colliders in low-energy supersymmetry.

Light bottom squarks and gluinos have been invoked to explain the b quark pair production excess at the Fermilab Tevatron. We investigate the associated production of ttbb at hadron colliders in this scenario, and find that the rates for this process are enhanced over the standard model prediction. If light gluinos exist, it may be possible to detect them at the Tevatron, and they could easily be observed at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.