In two long-duration balloon flights over Antarctica, the BESS-Polar collaboration has searched for antihelium in the cosmic radiation with higher sensitivity than any reported investigation. BESS- Polar I flew in 2004, observing for 8.5 days. BESS-Polar II flew in 2007-2008, observing for 24.5 days. No antihelium candidate was found in BESS-Polar I data among 8.4\times 10^6 |Z| = 2 nuclei from 1.0 to 20 GV or in BESS-Polar II data among 4.0\times 10^7 |Z| = 2 nuclei from 1.0 to 14 GV. Assuming antihelium to have the same spectral shape as helium, a 95% confidence upper limit of 6.9 \times 10^-8 was determined by combining all the BESS data, including the two BESS-Polar flights. With no assumed antihelium spectrum and a weighted average of the lowest antihelium efficiencies from 1.6 to 14 GV, an upper limit of 1.0 \times 10^-7 was determined for the combined BESS-Polar data. These are the most stringent limits obtained to date.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

The energy spectrum of cosmic-ray antiprotons (p's) from 0.17 to 3.5 GeV has been measured using 7886 p's detected by BESS-Polar II during a long-duration flight over Antarctica near solar minimum in December 2007 and January 2008. This shows good consistency with secondary p calculations. Cosmologically primary p's have been investigated by comparing measured and calculated p spectra. BESS-Polar II data show no evidence of primary p's from the evaporation of primordial black holes.

The BESS-Polar Collaboration measured the energy spectra of cosmic-ray protons and helium during two long-duration balloon flights over Antarctica in December 2004 and December 2007, at substantially different levels of solar modulation. Proton and helium spectra probe the origin and propagation history of cosmic rays in the galaxy, and are essential to calculations of the expected spectra of cosmic-ray antiprotons, positrons, and electrons from interactions of primary cosmicray nuclei with the interstellar gas, and to calculations of atmospheric muons and neutrinos. We report absolute spectra at the top of the atmosphere for cosmic-ray protons in the kinetic energy range 0.2-160 GeV and helium nuclei 0.15-80 GeV/nucleon. The corresponding magnetic rigidity ranges are 0.6-160 GV for protons and 1.1-160 GV for helium. These spectra are compared to measurements from previous BESS flights and from ATIC-2, PAMELA, and AMS-02. We also report the ratio of the proton and helium fluxes from 1.1 GV to 160 GV and compare to ratios from PAMELA and AMS-02.

We analyze quantum mechanical systems using the non-perturbative renormalization group (NPRG). The NPRG method enables us to calculate quantum corrections systematically and is very effective for studying non-perturbative dynamics. We start with anharmonic oscillators and proceed to asymmetric double well potentials, supersymmetric quantum mechanics and many particle systems.Comment: PTPTeX 20 pages, 27 eps figures, to be published in Prog.Theor.Phy

We discuss the propagation of wave packets through interacting environments. Such environments generally modify the dispersion relation or shape of the wave function. To study such effects in detail, we define the distribution function P X (T ), which describes the arrival time T of a packet at a detector located at point X. We calculate P X (T ) for wave packets traveling through a tunneling barrier and find that our results actually explain recent experiments. We compare our results with Nelson's stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics and resolve a paradox previously apparent in Nelson's viewpoint about the tunneling time.

We apply the effective potential analytic continuation (EPAC) method to the calculation of real time quantum correlation functions involving operators nonlinear in the position operatorq. For a harmonic system the EPAC method provides the exact correlation function at all temperature ranges, while the other quantum dynamics methods, the centroid molecular dynamics and the ring polymer molecular dynamics, become worse at lower temperature. For an asymmetric anharmonic system, the EPAC correlation function is in very good agreement with the exact one at t = 0.When the time increases from zero, the EPAC method gives good coincidence with the exact result at lower temperature. Finally, we propose a simplified version of the EPAC method to reduce the computational cost required for the calculation of the standard effective potential.

We analyze the dissipative quantum tunneling in the Caldeira-Leggett model by the nonperturbative renormalization-group method. We classify the dissipation effects by introducing the notion of effective cutoffs. We calculate the localization susceptibility to evaluate the critical dissipation for the quantum-classical transition. Our results are consistent with previous semiclassical arguments, but give considerably larger critical dissipation.

We propose a new quantum dynamics method called the effective potential analytic continuation (EPAC) to calculate the real time quantum correlation functions at finite temperature. The method is based on the effective action formalism which includes the standard effective potential. The basic notions of the EPAC are presented for a one-dimensional double well system in comparison with the centroid molecular dynamics (CMD) and the exact real time quantum correlation function. It is shown that both the EPAC and the CMD well reproduce the exact short time behavior, while at longer time their results deviate from the exact one. The CMD correlation function damps rapidly with time because of ensemble dephasing. The EPAC correlation function, however, can reproduce the long time oscillation inherent in the quantum double well systems. It is also shown that the EPAC correlation function can be improved toward the exact correlation function by means of the higher order derivative expansion of the effective action.