ABSTRACT The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) makes high angular resolution measurements of anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) at millimeter wavelengths. We describe ACTPol, an ...upgraded receiver for ACT, which uses feedhorn-coupled, polarization-sensitive detector arrays, a 3° field of view, 100 mK cryogenics with continuous cooling, and meta material antireflection coatings. ACTPol comprises three arrays with separate cryogenic optics: two arrays at a central frequency of 148 GHz and one array operating simultaneously at both 97 GHz and 148 GHz. The combined instrument sensitivity, angular resolution, and sky coverage are optimized for measuring angular power spectra, clusters via the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) and kinetic SZ signals, and CMB lensing due to large-scale structure. The receiver was commissioned with its first 148 GHz array in 2013, observed with both 148 GHz arrays in 2014, and has recently completed its first full season of operations with the full suite of three arrays. This paper provides an overview of the design and initial performance of the receiver and related systems.
Electromagnetic dipole moments of short-lived particles are sensitive to physics within and beyond the Standard Model of particle physics but have not been accessible experimentally to date. To ...perform such measurements it has been proposed to exploit the spin precession of channeled particles in bent crystals at the LHC. Progress that enables the first measurement of charm baryon dipole moments is reported. In particular, the design and characterization on beam of silicon and germanium bent crystal prototypes, the optimization of the experimental setup, and advanced analysis techniques are discussed. Sensitivity studies show that first measurements of Λc+ and Ξc+ baryon dipole moments can be performed in two years of data taking with an experimental setup positioned upstream of the LHCb detector.
We measured the properties of a novel combination of two Gas Electron Multipliers with a Micromegas for use as amplification devices in high-rate gaseous time projection chambers. The goal of this ...design is to minimize the buildup of space charge in the drift volume of such detectors in order to eliminate the standard gating grid and its resultant dead time, while preserving good tracking and particle identification performance. To characterize this micro-pattern gas detector configuration, we measured the positive ion back-flow and energy resolution at various element gains and electric fields, using a variety of gases, and additionally studied crosstalk effects and discharge rates. At a gain of 2000, this configuration achieves an ion back-flow below 0.4% and an energy resolution better than σ/E=12% for 55Fe X-rays.
We describe the Hybrid seeding, a stand-alone pattern recognition algorithm aiming at finding charged particle trajectories for the LHCb upgrade. A significant improvement to the charged particle ...reconstruction efficiency is accomplished by exploiting the knowledge of the LHCb magnetic field and the position of energy deposits in the scintillating fibre tracker detector. Moreover, we achieve a low fake rate and a small contribution to the overall timing budget of the LHCb real-time data processing.
We report the measurements of correlations between event-by-event fluctuations of amplitudes of anisotropic flow harmonics in nucleus-nucleus collisions, obtained for the first time using a new ...analysis method based on multiparticle cumulants in mixed harmonics. This novel method is robust against systematic biases originating from nonflow effects and by construction any dependence on symmetry planes is eliminated. We demonstrate that correlations of flow harmonics exhibit a better sensitivity to medium properties than the individual flow harmonics. The new measurements are performed in Pb-Pb collisions at the center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of sNNradical=2.76TeV by the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. The centrality dependence of correlation between event-by-event fluctuations of the elliptic v sub(2) and quadrangular v sub(4) flow harmonics, as well as of anticorrelation between v sub(2) and triangular v sub(3) flow harmonics are presented. The results cover two different regimes of the initial state configurations: geometry dominated (in midcentral collisions) and fluctuation dominated (in the most central collisions). Comparisons are made to predictions from Monte Carlo Glauber, viscous hydrodynamics, ampt, and hijing models. Together with the existing measurements of the individual flow harmonics the presented results provide further constraints on the initial conditions and the transport properties of the system produced in heavy-ion collisions.
We report on the first measurement of an excess in the yield of J/psi at very low transverse momentum (p sub(T)< 0.3 GeV/c) in peripheral hadronic Pb-Pb collisions at radicals sub(NN) = 2.76 TeV, ...performed by ALICE at the CERN LHC. Remarkably, the measured nuclear modification factor of J/psi in the rapidity range 2.5 < y < 4 reaches about 7 (2) in the p sub(T)range 0-0.3 GeV/c in the 70%-90% (50%-70%) centrality class. The J/psi production cross section associated with the observed excess is obtained under the hypothesis that coherent photoproduction of J/psi is the underlying physics mechanism. If confirmed, the observation of J/psi coherent photoproduction in Pb-Pb collisions at impact parameters smaller than twice the nuclear radius opens new theoretical and experimental challenges and opportunities. In particular, coherent photoproduction accompanying hadronic collisions may provide insight into the dynamics of photoproduction and nuclear reactions, as well as become a novel probe of the quark-gluon plasma.
The pseudorapidity density of charged particles, dN sub(ch)/deta, at midrapidity in Pb-Pb collisions has been measured at a center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of radicals sub(N)N= 5.02 TeV. For ...the 5% most central collisions, we measure a value of 1943 + or - 54. The rise in dN sub(ch)/deta as a function of radicals sub(N)Nis steeper than that observed in proton-proton collisions and follows the trend established by measurements at lower energy. The increase of dN sub(ch)/deta as a function of the average number of participant nucleons, <N sub(part)>, calculated in a Glauber model, is compared with the previous measurement at radicals sub(N)N= 2.76 TeV. A constant factor of about 1.2 describes the increase in dN sub(ch)/deta from radical sub(sNN) = 2.76 to 5.02 TeV for all centrality classes, within the measured range of 0%-80% centrality. The results are also compared to models based on different mechanisms for particle production in nuclear collisions.
We measured the properties of a novel combination of two Gas Electron Multipliers with a Micromegas for use as amplification devices in high-rate gaseous time projection chambers. The goal of this ...design is to minimize the buildup of space charge in the drift volume of such detectors in order to eliminate the standard gating grid and its resultant dead time, while preserving good tracking and particle identification performance. To characterize this micro-pattern gas detector configuration, we measured the positive ion back-flow and energy resolution at various element gains and electric fields, using a variety of gases, and additionally studied crosstalk effects and discharge rates. At a gain of 2000, this configuration achieves an ion back-flow below 0.4% and an energy resolution better than σ / E = 12 % for 55Fe X-rays.
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