GRB110721A was observed by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope using its two instruments, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM). The burst consisted of one major ...emission episode which lasted for ~24.5 s (in the GBM) and had a peak flux of (5.7 + or - 0.2) x 10 super(?5) erg s super(?1) cm super(?2). The time-resolved emission spectrum is best modeled with a combination of a Band function and a blackbody spectrum. The peak energy of the Band component was initially 15 + or - 2 MeV, which is the highest value ever detected in a GRB. This measurement was made possible by combining GBM/BGO data with LAT Low Energy events to achieve continuous 10-100 MeV coverage. The peak energy later decreased as a power law in time with an index of -1.89 + or - 0.10. The temperature of the blackbody component also decreased, starting from ~80 keV, and the decay showed a significant break after ~2 s. The spectrum provides strong constraints on the standard synchrotron model, indicating that alternative mechanisms may give rise to the emission at these energies.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond pulses of radio emission of seemingly extragalactic origin. More than 50 FRBs have now been detected, with only one seen to repeat. Here we present a new FRB ...discovery, FRB 110214, which was detected in the high latitude portion of the High Time Resolution Universe South survey at the Parkes telescope. FRB 110214 has one of the lowest dispersion measures of any known FRB (DM = 168.9\(\pm\)0.5 pc cm\(^{-3}\)), and was detected in two beams of the Parkes multi-beam receiver. A triangulation of the burst origin on the sky identified three possible regions in the beam pattern where it may have originated, all in sidelobes of the primary detection beam. Depending on the true location of the burst the intrinsic fluence is estimated to fall in the range of 50 -- 2000 Jy ms, making FRB 110214 one of the highest-fluence FRBs detected with the Parkes telescope. No repeating pulses were seen in almost 100 hours of follow-up observations with the Parkes telescope down to a limiting fluence of 0.3 Jy ms for a 2-ms pulse. Similar low-DM, ultra-bright FRBs may be detected in telescope sidelobes in the future, making careful modeling of multi-beam instrument beam patterns of utmost importance for upcoming FRB surveys.
We present a search for flavor changing neutral currents via quark-gluon couplings in a sample of single top quark final states corresponding to 2.3 fb(-1) of integrated luminosity collected with the ...DO detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. We select events containing a single top quark candidates with an additional jet, and obtain separation between signal and background using Bayesian neural networks. We find consistency between background expectation and observed data, and set limits on flavor changing neutral current gluon couplings of the top quark to up quarks (tgu) and charm quarks (tgc). The cross section limits at the 95% C.L. are sigma(tgu) < 0.20 pb and sigma(tgc) < 0.27 pb. These correspond to limits on the top quark decay branching fractions of B(t -> gu) < 2.0 x 10(-4) and B(t -> gc) < 3.9 x 10(-3).
We present a measurement of direct photon pair production cross sections using 4.2 fb(-1) of data collected with the DO detector at the Fermilab Tevatron p (p) over bar Collider. We measure single ...differential cross sections as a function of the diphoton mass, the transverse momentum of the diphoton system, the azimuthal angle between the photons, and the polar scattering angle of the photons. In addition, we measure double differential cross sections considering the last three kinematic variables in three diphoton mass bins. The results are compared with different perturbative QCD predictions and event generators. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
We present a new measurement of the Z/gamma* transverse momentum distribution in the range 0-330 GeV, in proton-antiproton collisions at root s = 1.96 TeV. The measurement uses 0.97 fb(-1) of ...integrated luminosity recorded by the D0 experiment and is the first using the Z/gamma* -> mu(+)mu(-) + X channel at this center-of-mass energy. This is also the first measurement of the Z/gamma* transverse momentum distribution that presents the result at the level of particles entering the detector, minimizing dependence on theoretical models. As any momentum of the Z/gamma* in the plane transverse to the incoming beams must be balanced by some recoiling system, primarily the result of QCD radiation in the initial state, this variable is an excellent probe of the underlying process. Tests of the predictions of QCD calculations and current event generators show they have varied success in describing the data. Using this measurement as an input to theoretical predictions will allow for a better description of hadron collider data and hence it will increase experimental sensitivity to rare signals. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
We have performed a new search for radio pulsars in archival data of the intermediate and high Galactic latitude parts of the Southern High Time Resolution Universe pulsar survey. This is the first ...time the entire dataset has been searched for binary pulsars, an achievement enabled by GPU-accelerated dedispersion and periodicity search codes nearly 50 times faster than the previously used pipeline. Candidate selection was handled entirely by a Machine Learning algorithm, allowing for the assessment of 17.6 million candidates in a few person-days. We have also introduced an outlier detection algorithm for efficient radio-frequency interference (RFI) mitigation on folded data, a new approach that enabled the discovery of pulsars previously masked by RFI. We discuss implications for future searches, particularly the importance of expanding work on RFI mitigation to improve survey completeness. In total we discovered 23 previously unknown sources, including 6 millisecond pulsars and at least 4 pulsars in binary systems. We also found an elusive but credible redback candidate that we have yet to confirm.
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