Abstract: We discuss the formulation of free conformal higher spin theories with extended N = 2, 4, 8 supersymmetry in N-extended tensorial superspaces. The superfield higher spin equations can be obtained by quantizing a superparticle model in N-extended tensorial superspace. The N-extended higher spin supermultiplets just contain scalar and spinor fields in tensorial space so that, in contrast with the standard (super)space approach, no nontrivial generalizations of the Maxwell or Einstein equations to tensorial space appear when N > 2. For N = 4, 8, the higher spin-tensorial components of the extended tensorial superfields are expressed through additional scalar and spinor fields in tensorial space which obey the same free higher spin equations, but that are axion-like in the sense that they possess Peccei-Quinn-like symmetries.

Abstract: In emission tomography, iterative statistical methods are accepted as the reconstruction algorithms that achieve the best image quality. The accuracy of these methods relies partly on the quality of the system response matrix (SRM) that characterizes the scanner. The more physical phenomena included in the SRM, the higher the SRM quality, and therefore higher image quality is obtained from the reconstruction process. High-resolution small animal scanners contain as many as 10(3)-10(4) small crystal pairs, while the field of view (FOV) is divided into hundreds of thousands of small voxels. These two characteristics have a significant impact on the number of elements to be calculated in the SRM. Monte Carlo (MC) methods have gained popularity as a way of calculating the SRM, due to the increased accuracy achievable, at the cost of introducing some statistical noise and long simulation times. In the work presented here the SRM is calculated using MC methods exploiting the cylindrical symmetries of the scanner, significantly reducing the simulation time necessary to calculate a high statistical quality SRM and the storage space necessary. The use of cylindrical symmetries makes polar voxels a convenient basis function. Alternatively, spherically symmetric basis functions result in improved noise properties compared to cubic and polar basis functions. The quality of reconstructed images using polar voxels, spherically symmetric basis functions on a polar grid, cubic voxels and post-reconstruction filtered polar and cubic voxels is compared from a noise and spatial resolution perspective. This study demonstrates that polar voxels perform as well as cubic voxels, reducing the simulation time necessary to calculate the SRM and the disk space necessary to store it. Results showed that spherically symmetric functions outperform polar and cubic basis functions in terms of noise properties, at the cost of slightly degraded spatial resolution, larger SRM file size and longer reconstruction times. However, we demonstrate that post-reconstruction smoothing, usually applied in emission imaging to reduce the level of noise, can produce a spatial resolution degradation of similar to 50%, while spherically symmetric basis functions produce a degradation of only similar to 6%, compared to polar and cubic voxels, at the same noise level. Therefore, the image quality trade-off obtained with blobs is higher than that obtained with cubic or polar voxels.

Abstract: The ATLAS detector is used to search for excited leptons in the electromagnetic radiative decay channel l* -> l gamma. Results are presented based on the analysis of pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.05 fb(-1). No evidence for excited leptons is found, and limits are set on the compositeness scale Lambda as a function of the excited lepton mass m(l*). In the special case where Lambda = m(l*), excited electron and muon masses below 1.87 TeV and 1.75 TeV are excluded at 95% C.L., respectively.