NEXT Collaboration(Henriques, C. A. O. et al), Gomez-Cadenas, J. J., Alvarez, V., Benlloch-Rodriguez, J., Botas, A., Carcel, S., et al. (2017). Secondary scintillation yield of xenon with sub-percent levels of CO2 additive for rare-event detection. Phys. Lett. B, 773, 663–671.
Abstract: Xe-CO2 mixtures are important alternatives to pure xenon in Time Projection Chambers (TPC) based on secondary scintillation (electroluminescence) signal amplification with applications in the important field of rare event detection such as directional dark matter, double electron capture and double beta decay detection. The addition of CO2 to pure xenon at the level of 0.05-0.1% can reduce significantly the scale of electron diffusion from 10 mm/root m to 2.5 mm/root m, with high impact on the discrimination of the events through pattern recognition of the topology of primary ionization trails. We have measured the electroluminescence (EL) yield of Xe-CO2 mixtures, with sub-percent CO2 concentrations. We demonstrate that the EL production is still high in these mixtures, 70% and 35% relative to that produced in pure xenon, for CO2 concentrations around 0.05% and 0.1%, respectively. The contribution of the statistical fluctuations in EL production to the energy resolution increases with increasing CO2 concentration, being smaller than the contribution of the Fano factor for concentrations below 0.1% CO2.
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Bejarano, C., Lobo, F. S. N., Olmo, G. J., & Rubiera-Garcia, D. (2017). Palatini wormholes and energy conditions from the prism of general relativity. Eur. Phys. J. C, 77(11), 776–13pp.
Abstract: Wormholes are hypothetical shortcuts in space-time that in general relativity unavoidably violate all of the pointwise energy conditions. In this paper, we consider several wormhole spacetimes that, as opposed to the standard designer procedure frequently employed in the literature, arise directly from gravitational actions including additional terms resulting from contractions of the Ricci tensor with the metric, and which are formulated assuming independence between metric and connection (Palatini approach). We reinterpret such wormhole solutions under the prism of General Relativity and study the matter sources that thread them. We discuss the size of violation of the energy conditions in different cases and how this is related to the same spacetimes when viewed from the modified gravity side.
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ATLAS Collaboration(Aaboud, M. et al), Alvarez Piqueras, D., Barranco Navarro, L., Cabrera Urban, S., Castillo Gimenez, V., Cerda Alberich, L., et al. (2017). Performance of the ATLAS track reconstruction algorithms in dense environments in LHC Run 2. Eur. Phys. J. C, 77(10), 673–30pp.
Abstract: With the increase in energy of the Large Hadron Collider to a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV for Run 2, events with dense environments, such as in the cores of highenergy jets, became a focus for new physics searches as well as measurements of the Standard Model. These environments are characterized by charged-particle separations of the order of the tracking detectors sensor granularity. Basic track quantities are compared between 3.2 fb(-1) of data collected by the ATLAS experiment and simulation of protonproton collisions producing high-transverse-momentum jets at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The impact of chargedparticle separations and multiplicities on the track reconstruction performance is discussed. The track reconstruction efficiency in the cores of jets with transverse momenta between 200 and 1600 GeV is quantified using a novel, datadriven, method. The method uses the energy loss, dE/ dx, to identify pixel clusters originating from two charged particles. Of the charged particles creating these clusters, themeasured fraction that fail to be reconstructed is 0.061 +/- 0.006 (stat.) +/- 0.014 (syst.) and 0.093 +/- 0.017 (stat.) +/- 0.021 (syst.) for jet transverse momenta of 200-400GeV and 1400-1600GeV, respectively.
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Escrihuela, F. J., Forero, D. V., Miranda, O. G., Tortola, M., & Valle, J. W. F. (2017). Probing CP violation with non-unitary mixing in long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments: DUNE as a case study. New J. Phys., 19, 093005–14pp.
Abstract: When neutrino masses arise from the exchange of neutral heavy leptons, as in most seesaw schemes, the effective lepton mixing matrix N describing neutrino propagation is non-unitary, hence neutrinos are not exactly orthonormal. New CP violation phases appear in N that could be confused with the standard phase delta(CP) characterizing the three neutrino paradigm. We study the potential of the long-baseline neutrino experiment DUNE in probing CP violation induced by the standard CP phase in the presence of non-unitarity. In order to accomplish this we develop our previous formalism, so as to take into account the neutrino interactions with the medium, important in long baseline experiments such as DUNE. We find that the expected CP sensitivity of DUNE is somewhat degraded with respect to that characterizing the standard unitary case. However the effect is weaker than might have been expected thanks mainly to the wide neutrino beam. We also investigate the sensitivity of DUNE to the parameters characterizing non-unitarity. In this case we find that there is no improvement expected with respect to the current situation, unless the near detector setup is revamped.
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Aguilar-Saavedra, J. A., Boudreau, J., Escobar, C., & Mueller, J. (2017). The fully differential top decay distribution. Eur. Phys. J. C, 77(3), 200–8pp.
Abstract: We write down the four-dimensional fully differential decay distribution for the top quark decay t -> Wb -> l nu b. We discuss how its eight physical parameters can be measured, either with a global fit or with the use of selected one-dimensional distributions and asymmetries. We give expressions for the top decay amplitudes for a general tbW interaction, and show how the untangled measurement of the two components of the fraction of longitudinal W bosons – those with b quark helicities of 1/2 and -1/2, respectively – could improve the precision of a global fit to the tbW vertex.
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