Events from alpha interactions on the surfaces of germanium detectors are a major contribution to the background in germanium-based searches for neutrinoless double-beta decay. Surface events are ...subject to charge trapping, affecting their pulse shape and reconstructed energy. A study of alpha events on the passivated end-plate of a segmented true-coaxial n-type high-purity germanium detector is presented. Charge trapping is analysed in detail and an existing pulse-shape analysis technique to identify alpha events is verified with mirror pulses observed in the non-collecting channels of the segmented test detector. The observed radial dependence of charge trapping confirms previous results. A dependence of the probability of charge trapping on the crystal axes is observed for the first time. A first model to describe charge trapping effects within the framework of the simulation software
SolidStateDetectors.jl
is introduced. The influence of metalisation on events from low-energy gamma interactions close to the passivated surface is also presented.
For the first time, planar high-purity germanium detectors with thin amorphous germanium contacts were successfully operated directly in liquid nitrogen and liquid argon in a cryostat at the ...Max-Planck-Institut für Physics in Munich. The detectors were fabricated at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of South Dakota, using crystals grown at the University of South Dakota. They survived long-distance transportation and multiple thermal cycles in both cryogenic liquids and showed reasonable leakage currents and spectroscopic performance. Also discussed are the pros and cons of using thin amorphous semiconductor materials as an alternative contact technology in large-scale germanium experiments searching for physics beyond the Standard Model.
The wheat dwarf disease is among the most damaging diseases in cereals. Its aetiological agent is the Wheat dwarf virus (WDV), which is exclusively transmitted from plant to plant by leafhoppers from ...the genus Psammotettix (Hemiptera, Cicadellidae). The parameters linked to the WDV/Psammotettix pathosystem are still poorly understood. We studied Psammotettix individuals collected in wheat and barley fields in France and, as a comparison, from grassland at agroecological interface in West Slovenia. Species identity of males and females has been determined using multiple criteria. In the first step, the characterization of the collected individuals included recordings of vibrational signals used in mating behaviour and morphometric analyses. In addition, a 442 nt sequence of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxydase I (COI) gene was obtained for some individuals and compared to COI sequences of the Psammotettix leafhoppers available in public databases. In the cereal fields in France, P
sammotettix alienus was the most numerous species; however, it sometimes occurred together with Psammotettix confinis, while in the grasslands in Slovenia, the third syntopic species in Psammotettix community was Psammotettix helvolus. The temporal parameters of the P. alienus male calling song that were measured in this study were very similar to those measured in a previous study. The local biotic and/or abiotic parameters most likely influence the life history of Psammotettix leafhoppers, and the proportion of viruliferous individuals collected in cereal fields was 14.9%, while leafhoppers collected in Slovenia were virus-free. Taken together, results show that more detailed information on population structure of Psammotettix leafhoppers is crucial for providing an insight into the epidemiology of wheat dwarf disease.
A new measurement of inclusive-jet cross sections in the Breit frame in neutral current deep inelastic scattering using the ZEUS detector at the HERA collider is presented. The data were taken in the ...years 2004–2007 at a centre-of-mass energy of
318
GeV
and correspond to an integrated luminosity of
347
pb
-
1
. The jets were reconstructed using the
k
t
-algorithm in the Breit reference frame. They have been measured as a function of the squared momentum transfer,
Q
2
, and the transverse momentum of the jets in the Breit frame,
p
⊥
,
Breit
. The measured jet cross sections are compared to previous measurements and to perturbative QCD predictions. The measurement has been used in a next-to-next-to-leading-order QCD analysis to perform a simultaneous determination of parton distribution functions of the proton and the strong coupling, resulting in a value of
α
s
(
M
Z
2
)
=
0.1142
±
0.0017
(experimental/fit)
-
0.0007
+
0.0006
(model/parameterisation)
-
0.0004
+
0.0006
(scale)
, whose accuracy is improved compared to similar measurements. In addition, the running of the strong coupling is demonstrated using data obtained at different scales.
Combined HERA data on charm production in deep-inelastic scattering have previously been used to determine the charm-quark running mass mc(mc) in the MS‾ renormalisation scheme. Here, the same data ...are used as a function of the photon virtuality Q2 to evaluate the charm-quark running mass at different scales to one-loop order, in the context of a next-to-leading order QCD analysis. The scale dependence of the mass is found to be consistent with QCD expectations.
A
bstract
The production of beauty and charm quarks in
ep
interactions has been studied with the ZEUS detector at HERA for exchanged four-momentum squared 5
< Q
2
<
1000 GeV
2
using an integrated ...luminosity of 354 pb
−1
. The beauty and charm content in events with at least one jet have been extracted using the invariant mass of charged tracks associated with secondary vertices and the decay-length significance of these vertices. Differential cross sections as a function of
Q
2
, Bjorken
x
, jet trans- verse energy and pseudorapidity were measured and compared with next-to-leading-order QCD calculations. The beauty and charm contributions to the proton structure functions were extracted from the double-differential cross section as a function of
x
and
Q
2
. The running beauty-quark mass,
m
b
at the scale
m
b
, was determined from a QCD fit at next-to-leading order to HERA data for the first time and found to be
m
b
(
m
b
) = 4.07 ± 0.14 (fit)
− 0.07
+ 0.01
(mod.)
− 0.00
+ 0.05
(param.)
− 0.05
+ 0.08
(theo.) GeV.
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