Abstract: Compton cameras are gamma-ray imaging systems which have been proposed for a wide variety of applications such as medical imaging, nuclear decommissioning or homeland security. In the design and optimization of such a system Monte Carlo simulations play an essential role. In this work, we propose a generic module to perform Monte Carlo simulations and analyses of Compton Camera imaging which is included in the open-source GATE/Geant4 platform. Several digitization stages have been implemented within the module to mimic the performance of the most commonly employed detectors (e.g. monolithic blocks, pixelated scintillator crystals, strip detectors...). Time coincidence sorter and sequence coincidence reconstruction are also available in order to aim at providing modules to facilitate the comparison and reproduction of the data taken with different prototypes. All processing steps may be performed during the simulation (on-the-fly mode) or as a post-process of the output files (offline mode). The predictions of the module have been compared with experimental data in terms of energy spectra, angular resolution, efficiency and back-projection image reconstruction. Consistent results within a 3-sigma interval were obtained for the energy spectra except for low energies where small differences arise. The angular resolution measure for incident photons of 1275 keV was also in good agreement between both data sets with a value close to 13 degrees. Moreover, with the aim of demonstrating the versatility of such a tool the performance of two different Compton camera designs was evaluated and compared.

Abstract: Accurate power spectrum (or correlation function) covariance matrices are a crucial requirement for cosmological parameter estimation from large scale structure surveys. In order to minimize reliance on computationally expensive mock catalogs, it is important to have a solid analytic understanding of the different components that make up a covariance matrix. Considering the matter power spectrum covariance matrix, it has recently been found that there is a potentially dominant effect on mildly non-linear scales due to power in modes of size equal to and larger than the survey volume. This beat coupling effect has been derived analytically in perturbation theory and while it has been tested with simulations, some questions remain unanswered. Moreover, there is an additional effect of these large modes, which has so far not been included in analytic studies, namely the effect on the estimated average density which enters the power spectrum estimate. In this article, we work out analytic, perturbation theory based expressions including both the beat coupling and this local average effect and we show that while, when isolated, beat coupling indeed causes large excess covariance in agreement with the literature, in a realistic scenario this is compensated almost entirely by the local average effect, leaving only similar to 10% of the excess. We test our analytic expressions by comparison to a suite of large N-body simulations, using both full simulation boxes and subboxes thereof to study cases without beat coupling, with beat coupling and with both beat coupling and the local average effect. For the variances, we find excellent agreement with the analytic expressions for k < 0.2 hMpc(-1) at z = 0.5, while the correlation coefficients agree to beyond k = 0.4 hMpc(-1). As expected, the range of agreement increases towards higher redshift and decreases slightly towards z = 0. We finish by including the large-mode effects in a full covariance matrix description for arbitrary survey geometry and confirming its validity using simulations. This may be useful as a stepping stone towards building an actual galaxy (or other tracer's) power spectrum covariance matrix.

Abstract: Dark-matter particles that annihilate or decay can undergo complex sequences of processes, including strong and electromagnetic radiation, hadronisation, and hadron de-cays, before particles that are stable on astrophysical time scales are produced. Antiprotons produced in this way may leave footprints in experiments such as AMS-02. Several groups have reported an excess of events in the antiproton flux in the rigidity range of 10-20 GV. However, the theoretical modeling of baryon production is not straightforward and relies in part on phenomenological models in Monte Carlo event generators. In this work, we assess the impact of QCD uncertainties on the spectra of antiprotons from dark-matter annihila-tion. As a proof-of-principle, we show that for a two-parameter model that depends only on the thermally-averaged annihilation cross section ((o -v)) and the dark-matter mass (Mx), QCD uncertainties can affect the best-fit mass by up to ti 14% (with large uncertainties for large DM masses), depending on the choice of Mx and the annihilation channel (bb over bar or W+W-), and (o -v) by up to ti 10%. For comparison, changes to the underlying diffusion parameters are found to be within 1%-5%, and the results are also quite resilient to the choice of cosmic-ray propagation model. These findings indicate that QCD uncertainties need to be included in future DM analyses. To facilitate full-fledged analyses, we provide the spectra in tabulated form including QCD uncertainties and code snippets to perform mass interpolations and quick DM fits. The code can be found in this GitHub [1] repository.