The increasing frequency of emergencies urges the need for a detailed and thorough knowledge of the landscape. The first hours after a disaster are not only chaotic and problematic, but also decisive ...to successfully save lives and reduce damage to the building stock. One of the most important factors in any emergency response is to get an adequate awareness of the real situation, what is only possible after a thorough analysis of all the available information obtained through the Italian protocol Topography Applied to Rescue. To this purpose geomatic tools are perfectly suited to create, manage and dynamically enrich an organized archive of data to have a quick and functional access to information useful for several types of analysis, helping to develop solutions to manage the emergency and improving the success of rescue operations. Moreover, during an emergency like an earthquake, the conventional inspection to assess the damage status of buildings requires special tools and a lot of time. Therefore, given the large number of buildings requiring safety measures and rehabilitation, efficient use of limited resources such as time and equipment, as well as the safety of the involved personnel are important aspects. The applications shown in the paper are intended to underline how the above-mentioned objective, in particular the rehabilitation interventions of the built heritage, can be achieved through the use of data acquired from UAV platform integrated with geographic data stored in GIS platforms.
In this work the MOSAIC (“MOdular System for Acquisition, Interface and Control”) board, designed for the readout and testing of the pixel modules for the silicon tracker upgrade of the ALICE (A ...Large Ion Collider Experiment) experiment at teh CERN LHC, is described. It is based on an Artix7 Field Programmable Gate Array device by Xilinx and is compliant with the six unit “Versa Modular Eurocard” standard (6U-VME) for easy housing in a standard VMEbus crate from which it takes only power supplies and cooling.
The Silicon Pixel Detector (SPD) forms the two innermost layers of the Inner Tracking System (ITS) of the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC. The SPD consists of 120 detector modules (half-staves) on ...two barrel layers with 107 pixel cells and a total silicon surface of 0.2
m
2. The SPD is severely constrained in terms of material budget, dimension and volume of the whole system.
The SPD design, the main system components and the current status of the project are overviewed. The automated equipment and the procedure for the assembly of the half-staves are illustrated. The results of the data analysis of a test beam performed with single assemblies at the SPS in 2003 are reported. It is shown that efficiency and spatial resolution are in good agreement with the design specifications and satisfy the ALICE requirements.
Purpose: To keep the normal tissue complication probability (NTCP) as low as possible, real‐time imaging of the irradiation process is highly desirable to detect and correct any deviation from the ...treatment plan. Using a simple detector setup, the one‐dimensional annihilation vertex distribution was reconstructed by evaluating the tracks of charged pions resulting from antiproton annihilation in a water phantom.Methods and materials: A spare ladder of 10 silicon pixel detector chips, normally used as part of the vertex detector in the ALICE experiment at CERN, was used. Each chip has 256 × 320 pixels with 50 μm width and 425 μm height, and a thickness of 200 μm. It was mounted unconventionally, allowing charged particles, especially pions, to traverse it more or less tangentially to the front surface, depending on their place of generation. By interacting with a line of pixels, they leave tracks with a specific length and slope, which are used to back‐calculate their origin. FLUKA 2008.3c.0 was used to simulate this set‐up and to generate Monte Carlo data to improve the understanding and analysis of real events collected during a run with 500 MeV/c antiprotons at the antiproton decelerator facility at CERN. Results: Reconstruction of the annihilation vertex was achieved with a resolution of 4 cm in the axial direction, limited by the present detector mounting. Based on Monte Carlo simulations, alternative detector orientations and optimized detector geometries are proposed. Conclusion: The principal applicability of the described method was demonstrated. Further investigation needs to be done to improve on the resolution. Rotating the detector by 90 degrees seems beneficial, but might introduce too much material so that the pions interact significantly, disabling a track reconstruction.
The Silicon Pixel Detector (SPD) is the innermost detector of the ALICE experimental apparatus. ALICE is the CERN LHC experiment dedicated to the study of ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions, ...furthermore ALICE will contribute to the proton–proton physics programme.
The SPD is based on hybrid SPDs assembled in 120 modules (half-staves). The half-staves are mounted on 10 low-mass carbon fibre sectors arranged in two barrel layers placed at 3.9 and 7.6
cm from the colliding beams. The total SPD silicon surface is 0.2
m
2.
The SPD assembly procedure and the current status of the construction are overviewed.
Placenta growth factor (PlGF) is a key regulator of pathological angiogenesis and its overexpression has been linked to neoplastic progression. To assess whether PlGF could have a role in malignant ...mesothelioma (MM), we analyzed the expression of PlGF, VEGF, and their cognate receptors (VEGF-R1 and VEGF-R2) and co-receptors (neuropilin-1 and neuropilin-2) in MM cell lines as well as in resected MM tissues, hyperplastic/reactive mesothelium and normal mesothelium. MM cell cultures expressed both ligands and the associated receptors to a variable extent and released different amounts of PlGF. As assessed by immunohistochemistry, PlGF expression was switched on in hyperplastic/reactive compared to normal mesothelium. Moreover, 74 and 94% of MM tissues overexpressed PlGF and VEGF-R1, respectively (p<0.05 MM vs normal mesothelium). Administration of recombinant PlGF-2 did not elicit a significant stimulation of MM cell growth, while it was associated with a transient phosphorylation of Akt, suggesting that PlGF-2 could activate downstream effectors of proliferative and cytoprotective signals via VEGF-R1 in MM cells. Indeed, the administration of an anti-PlGF antibody was found to cause a significant reduction of MM cell survival. In conclusion, our data demonstrate that, by acting as a survival factor, PlGF can play a role which goes beyond the stimulation of angiogenesis in MM. This evidence could help the rational design of new therapeutic interventions for this aggressive tumor.
The ALICE silicon pixel detector readout electronics Krivda, M.; Bán, J.; Burns, M. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
05/2010, Volume:
617, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The ALICE silicon pixel detector (SPD) constitutes the two innermost layers of the ALICE inner tracking system (ALICE Collaboration, 1999)
1. The SPD is built with 120 detector modules (half-staves) ...and contains about 10 million pixels in total. The half-staves are connected to the off-detector electronics, housed in a control room 100
m away, via bidirectional optical links. The stream of data from the front-end electronics is processed in 20 VME readout modules, called routers, based on FPGAs. Three 2-channel link-receiver daughter cards, also based on FPGAs, are plugged in each router. Each link-receiver card receives data via the optical link from two half-staves, applies the zero suppression and passes them to the router to be processed and sent to the ALICE–DAQ system through the detector data link (DDL). The SPD control, configuration and data monitoring are performed using the VME interface embedded in the router.
Performance of the ALICE SPD cooling system Francescon, A; Rinella, G Aglieri; Altini, V ...
Journal of physics. Conference series,
01/2012, Volume:
395, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The new generation of silicon detectors for particle physics requires very reduced mass and high resistance to radiations with very limited access to the detector for maintenance. The Silicon Pixel ...Detector (SPD) is one of the 18 detectors of the ALICE (A Large Io Collider Experiment) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It constitute the two innermost layers of the Inner Tracking System (ITS) and it is the closest detector to th interaction point. An evaporative cooling system, based on C4F10 evaporation at 1.9 bar, was chosen to extrac the 1.35 kW power dissipated by the on-detector electronics. The whole system wa extensively tested and commissioned before its installation inside the ALICE experimenta area. Since then we had to deal with a decrease of the flow in some lines of the system tha imposed severe restrictions on the detector operation. Recently, a test bench has been built in order to carry out a series of tests to reproduce the misbehaviour of the system and investigat proper actions to cure the problem. The performance of the systems and the most interesting results of the above mentioned test will be presented.
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