n_TOF Collaboration(Guerrero, C. et al), Domingo-Pardo, C., Giubrone, G., & Tain, J. L. (2013). Performance of the neutron time-of-flight facility n_TOF at CERN. Eur. Phys. J. A, 49(2), 27–15pp.
Abstract: The neutron time-of-flight facility n_TOF features a white neutron source produced by spallation through 20 GeV/c protons impinging on a lead target. The facility, aiming primarily at the measurement of neutron-induced reaction cross sections, was operating at CERN between 2001 and 2004, and then underwent a major upgrade in 2008. This paper presents in detail all the characteristics of the new neutron beam in the currently available configurations, which correspond to two different collimation systems and two choices of neutron moderator. The characteristics discussed include the intensity and energy dependence of the neutron flux, the spatial profile of the beam, the in-beam background components and the energy resolution/broadening. The discussion of these features is based on dedicated measurements and Monte Carlo simulations, and includes estimations of the systematic uncertainties of the mentioned quantities.
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Cabello, J., Torres-Espallardo, I., Gillam, J. E., & Rafecas, M. (2013). PET Reconstruction From Truncated Projections Using Total-Variation Regularization for Hadron Therapy Monitoring. IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., 60(5), 3364–3372.
Abstract: Hadron therapy exploits the properties of ion beams to treat tumors by maximizing the dose released to the target and sparing healthy tissue. With hadron beams, the dose distribution shows a relatively low entrance dose which rises sharply at the end of the range, providing the characteristic Bragg peak that drops quickly thereafter. It is of critical importance in order not to damage surrounding healthy tissues and/or avoid targeting underdosage to know where the delivered dose profile ends-the location of the Bragg peak. During hadron therapy, short-lived beta(+)-emitters are produced along the beam path, their distribution being correlated with the delivered dose. Following positron annihilation, two photons are emitted, which can be detected using a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner. The low yield of emitters, their short half-life, and the wash out from the target region make the use of PET, even only a few minutes after hadron irradiation, a challenging application. In-beam PET represents a potential candidate to estimate the distribution of beta(+)-emitters during or immediately after irradiation, at the cost of truncation effects and degraded image quality due to the partial rings required of the PET scanner. Time-of-flight (ToF) information can potentially be used to compensate for truncation effects and to enhance image contrast. However, the highly demanding timing performance required in ToF-PET makes this option costly. Alternatively, the use of maximum-a-posteriori-expectation-maximization (MAP-EM), including total variation (TV) in the cost function, produces images with low noise, while preserving spatial resolution. In this paper, we compare data reconstructed with maximum-likelihood-expectation-maximization (ML-EM) and MAP-EM using TV as prior, and the impact of including ToF information, from data acquired with a complete and a partial-ring PET scanner, of simulated hadron beams interacting with a polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) target. The results show that MAP-EM, in the absence of ToF information, produces lower noise images and more similar data compared to the simulated beta(+) distributions than ML-EM with ToF information in the order of 200-600 ps. The investigation is extended to the combination of MAP-EM and ToF information to study the limit of performance using both approaches.
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Chen, H. X., & Oset, E. (2013). pi pi interaction in the rho channel in finite volume. Phys. Rev. D, 87(1), 016014–15pp.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate an efficient strategy that allows one to obtain pi pi phase shifts and rho meson properties from QCD lattice data with high precision. For this purpose we evaluate the levels of the pi pi system in the rho channel in finite volume using chiral unitary theory. We investigate the dependence on the pi mass and compare this with other approaches which use QCD lattice calculations and effective theories. We also illustrate the errors induced by using the conventional Luscher approach instead of a more accurate one that was recently developed that takes into account exactly the relativistic two-meson propagators. Finally, we make use of this latter approach to solve the inverse problem, getting pi pi phase shifts from “synthetic” lattice data, providing an optimal strategy and showing which accuracy is needed in these data to obtain the rho properties with a desired accuracy.
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Mateu, V., Stewart, I. W., & Thaler, J. (2013). Power corrections to event shapes with mass-dependent operators. Phys. Rev. D, 87(1), 014025–25pp.
Abstract: We introduce an operator depending on the "transverse velocity'' r that describes the effect of hadron masses on the leading 1/Q power correction to event-shape observables. Here, Q is the scale of the hard collision. This work builds on earlier studies of mass effects by Salam and Wicke [J. High Energy Phys. 05 (2001) 061] and of operators by Lee and Sterman [Phys. Rev. D 75, 014022 (2007)]. Despite the fact that different event shapes have different hadron mass dependence, we provide a simple method to identify universality classes of event shapes whose power corrections depend on a common nonperturbative parameter. We also develop an operator basis to show that at a fixed value of Q, the power corrections for many classic observables can be determined by two independent nonperturbative matrix elements at the 10% level. We compute the anomalous dimension of the transverse velocity operator, which is multiplicative in r and causes the power correction to exhibit nontrivial dependence on Q. The existence of universality classes and the relevance of anomalous dimensions are reproduced by the hadronization models in Pythia 8 and Herwig++, though the two programs differ in the values of their low-energy matrix elements.
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LHCb Collaboration(Aaij, R. et al), Oyanguren, A., & Ruiz Valls, P. (2013). Precision measurement of D meson mass differences. J. High Energy Phys., 06(6), 065–17pp.
Abstract: Using three- and four-body decays of D mesons produced in semileptonic b-hadron decays, precision measurements of D meson mass differences are made together with a measurement of the D-0 mass. The measurements are based on a dataset corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.0 fb(-1) collected in pp collisions at 7 TeV. Using the decay D-0 -> K+K-K-pi(+), the D-0 mass is measured to be M(D-0) = 1864.75 +/- 0.15 (stat) +/- 0.11 (syst) MeV/c(2). The mass differences M(D+) – M(D-0) = 4.76 +/- 0.12 (stat) +/- 0.07 (syst) MeV/c(2), M(D-s(+)) – M(D+) = 98.68 +/- 0.03 (stat) +/- 0.04 (syst) MeV/c(2) are measured using the D-0 -> K+K-pi(+)pi(-) and D-(s)(+) -> K+K-pi(+) modes.
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LHCb Collaboration(Aaij, R. et al), Oyanguren, A., & Ruiz Valls, P. (2013). Precision measurement of the B-s(0)-(B)over-bar(s)(0) oscillation frequency with the decay B-s(0) -> D-s(-)pi(+). New J. Phys., 15, 053021–15pp.
Abstract: A key ingredient to searches for physics beyond the Standard Model in B-s(0) mixing phenomena is the measurement of the B-s(0)-(B) over bar (0)(s) oscillation frequency, which is equivalent to the mass difference Delta m(s) of the B-s(0) mass eigenstates. Using the world's largest B-s(0) meson sample accumulated in a dataset, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.0 fb(-1), collected by the LHCb experiment at the CERN LHC in 2011, a measurement of Delta m(s) is presented. A total of about 34 000 B-s(0) -> D-s(-)pi(+) signal decays are reconstructed, with an average decay time resolution of 44 fs. The oscillation frequency is measured to be Delta m(s) = 17.768 +/- 0.023 (stat) +/- 0.006 (syst) ps(-1), which is the most precise measurement to date.
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BABAR Collaboration(Lees, J. P. et al), Martinez-Vidal, F., Oyanguren, A., & Villanueva-Perez, P. (2013). Precision measurement of the e(+)e(-) -> K+K-(gamma) cross section with the initial-state radiation method at BABAR. Phys. Rev. D, 88(3), 032013–28pp.
Abstract: A precise measurement of the cross section for the process e(+)e(-) -> K+K-(gamma) from threshold to an energy of 5 GeV is obtained with the initial-state radiation (ISR) method using 232 fb(-1) of data collected with the BABAR detector at e(+)e(-) center-of-mass energies near 10.6 GeV. The measurement uses the effective ISR luminosity determined from the e(+)e(-) -> mu(+)mu(-)(gamma)gamma(ISR) process with the same data set. The corresponding lowest-order contribution to the hadronic vacuum polarization term in the muon magnetic anomaly is found to be a(mu)(KK,LO) = (22.93 +/- 0.18(stat) +/- 0.22(syst)) x 10(-10). The charged kaon form factor is extracted and compared to previous results. Its magnitude at large energy significantly exceeds the asymptotic QCD prediction, while the measured slope is consistent with the prediction.
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Franca, U., Lineros, R. A., Palacio, J., & Pastor, S. (2013). Probing interactions within the dark matter sector via extra radiation contributions. Phys. Rev. D, 87(12), 123521–6pp.
Abstract: The nature of dark matter is one of the most thrilling riddles for both cosmology and particle physics nowadays. While in the typical models the dark sector is composed only by weakly interacting massive particles, an arguably more natural scenario would include a whole set of gauge interactions which are invisible for the standard model but that are in contact with the dark matter. We present a method to constrain the number of massless gauge bosons and other relativistic particles that might be present in the dark sector using current and future cosmic microwave background data, and provide upper bounds on the size of the dark sector. We use the fact that the dark matter abundance depends on the strength of the interactions with both sectors, which allows one to relate the freeze-out temperature of the dark matter with the temperature of this cosmic background of dark gauge bosons. This relation can then be used to calculate how sizable is the impact of the relativistic dark sector in the number of degrees of freedom of the early Universe, providing an interesting and testable connection between cosmological data and direct/indirect detection experiments. The recent Planck data, in combination with other cosmic microwave background experiments and baryonic acoustic oscillations data, constrains the number of relativistic dark gauge bosons, when the freeze-out temperature of the dark matter is larger than the top mass, to be N less than or similar to 14 for the simplest scenarios, while those limits are slightly relaxed for the combination with the Hubble constant measurements to N less than or similar to 20. Future releases of Planck data are expected to reduce the uncertainty by approximately a factor of 3, which will reduce significantly the parameter space of allowed models.
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Ghosh, P., Lopez-Fogliani, D. E., Mitsou, V. A., Muñoz, C., & Ruiz de Austri, R. (2013). Probing the mu-from-nu supersymmetric standard model with displaced multileptons from the decay of a Higgs boson at the LHC. Phys. Rev. D, 88(1), 015009–6pp.
Abstract: The "mu from nu'' supersymmetric standard model (mu nu SSM) cures the μproblem and concurrently reproduces measured neutrino data by using a set of usual right-handed neutrino superfields. Recently, the LHC has revealed the first scalar boson which naturally makes it tempting to test μnu SSM in the light of this new discovery. We show that this new scalar, while decaying to a pair of unstable long-lived neutralinos, can lead to a distinct signal with nonprompt multileptons. With concomitant collider analysis we show that this signal provides an intriguing signature of the model, pronounced with light neutralinos. Evidence of this signal is well envisaged with sophisticated displaced vertex analysis, which deserves experimental attention.
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BABAR Collaboration(Lees, J. P. et al), Martinez-Vidal, F., Oyanguren, A., & Villanueva-Perez, P. (2013). Production of charged pions, kaons, and protons in e(+)e(-) annihilations into hadrons at root s=10.54 GeV. Phys. Rev. D, 88(3), 032011–26pp.
Abstract: Inclusive production cross sections of pi(+/-), K-+/- and p/(p) over bar per hadronic e(+)e(-) annihilation event are measured at a center-of-mass energy of 10.54 GeV, using a relatively small sample of very high quality data from the BABAR experiment at the PEP-II B-factory at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The drift chamber and Cherenkov detector provide clean samples of identified pi(+/-), K-+/-, and p/(p) over bar over a wide range of momenta. Since the center-of-mass energy is below the threshold to produce a B (B) over bar pair, with B a bottom-quark meson, these data represent a pure e(+)e(-) -> q (q) over bar sample with four quark flavors, and are used to test QCD predictions and hadronization models. Combined with measurements at other energies, in particular at the Z(0) resonance, they also provide precise constraints on the scaling properties of the hadronization process over a wide energy range.
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