MASS-SAT: Matter-Antimatter Space Spectrometer on Satellite
SummaryThe MASS-SAT Experiment (Matter-Antimatter Space Spectrometer on SATellite) presented here is conceived to search for an experimental answer to many open problems related to both Astrophysics and Physics, through the detection of positrons, antiprotons, nuclei and, overall, antinuclei if they exist. Among these problems there are the hypothesized presence of antigalaxies in the Universe (the matter-antimatter symmetry problem), the existence of black holes as possible antiproton sources (the Hawking effect), the existence of photinos as antiproton sources (related to the dark-matter problem), the understanding of the mechanism of cosmic-ray acceleration in the interstellar medium, the determination of the relative abundancies of isotopes in cosmic rays and many others. The choice of an orbit expecially appropriate for that (geostationary or polar orbit) as well as the choice of an apparatus composed only of solid-state detectors and permanent magnets (no gas and no liquid helium on board, avoiding complexity and the necessity of refilling) make it possible to conceive a long (4–5 years) period of data taking with unprecedented sensitivity in the low-energy region of the cosmic-ray spectrum. The MASS-SAT experiment shows itself as the prosecution of the MASS balloon-borne experiment and as the logical complement of the Astromag program on the Space Station Freedom.

title: A water Cherenkov calorimeter for long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments
abstract: We propose a water-based large homogeneous calorimeter as the next generation neutrino detector for ν factories and/or conventional ν beams. The Cherenkov light produced in water is sufficient to have good energy resolution, and the pattern recognition is realized by a modular water tank structure. Monte Carlo simulations show that the detector performance is excellent for identifying neutrino CC events while rejecting backgrounds.

title: Physics of tau and charm
abstract: The physics of tau and charm started in early 70's after J/$\psi$ and $\tau$ were discovered. Since then several dedicated accelerators and experiments were built with increasing luminosities and studies on light hadron spectroscopy, charmonium, electroweak and QCD were never interupted. New interests and surprises are not rare in this area. With the newly built BEPCII/BESIII, an even brighter future is foreseen.

title: The mass production and quality control of RPCs for the Daya Bay experiment
abstract: Resistive plate chambers will be used in the Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiment to help veto backgrounds created by cosmic-ray muons. The mass production of RPCs began in 2008 and by the end of 2009, 1600 RPCs (3500 m 2 ) had been produced and tested. This paper describes the production and quality control procedures, and quality assurance using cosmic-ray testing.

title: TUBE CHAMBERS FOR THE MUON FILTER OF THE L3 DETECTOR

title: Inclusive J production in Z0 decays
abstract: Inclusive J production in Z0 decays is observed via the leptonic decay mode J → l+l− (l = e,μ). We measure the branching ratio Br(Z0 → J + X) = (4.1 ± 0.7 (stat.) ± 0.3 (sys.)) × 10−3. We have calculated the fraction of the J mesons from b-hadron decay and find a branching ratio of Br(b → J + X)= (1.3±0.2(stat.)±0.2(sys.)) × 10−2. We determine the average fractional energy of bottom hadrons 〈XE > = 0.70±0.03 (stat.)+0.02−0.01 (sys.) using the momentum spectrum of the J mesons. From a study of the angle between the J and the most energetic jet, we set an upper limit on the branching ratio Br ( Z 0 → q q g ∗ ; g ∗ → J + X ) −4 at 90% confidence level.

title: K/pi Fluctuations at relativistic energies.
abstract: We report K/pi fluctuations from Au + Au collisions at sqrt[s(NN)]= 19.6, 62.4, 130, and 200 GeV using the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. K/pi fluctuations in central collisions show little dependence on incident energy and are on the same order as those from NA49 at the Super Proton Synchrotron in central Pb + Pb collisions at sqrt[s(NN)]=12.3 and 17.3 GeV. We report results for the collision centrality dependence of K/pi fluctuations and results for charge-separated fluctuations. We observe that the K/pi fluctuations scale with the charged particle multiplicity density.

title: Inflationary power asymmetry from primordial domain walls
abstract: We study the asymmetric primordial fluctuations in a model of inflation in which translational invariance is broken by a domain wall. We calculate the corrections to the power spectrum of curvature perturbations; they are anisotropic and contain dipole, quadrupole, and higher multipoles with non-trivial scale-dependent amplitudes. Inspired by observations of these multipole asymmetries in terms of two-point correlations and variance in real space, we demonstrate that this model can explain the observed anomalous power asymmetry of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky, including its characteristic feature that the dipole dominates over higher multipoles. We test the viability of the model and place approximate constraints on its parameters by using observational values of dipole, quadrupole, and octopole amplitudes of the asymmetry measured by a local-variance estimator. We find that a configuration of the model in which the CMB sphere does not intersect the domain wall during inflation provides a good fit to the data. We further derive analytic expressions for the corrections to the CMB temperature covariance matrix, or angular power spectra, which can be used in future statistical analysis of the model in spherical harmonic space.

title: Descope of the ALIA mission
abstract: The present work reports on a feasibility study commissioned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences of China to explore various possible mission options to detect gravitational waves in space alternative to that of the eLISA/LISA mission concept. Based on the relative merits assigned to science and technological viability, a few representative mission options descoped from the ALIA mission are considered. A semi-analytic Monte Carlo simulation is carried out to understand the cosmic black hole merger histories and the possible scientific merits of the mission options in probing the light seed black holes and their coevolution with galaxies in early Universe. The study indicates that, by choosing the armlength of the interferometer to be three million kilometers and shifting the sensitivity floor to around one-hundredth Hz, together with a very moderate improvement on the position noise budget, there are certain mission options capable of exploring light seed, intermediate mass black hole binaries at high redshift that are not readily accessible to eLISA/LISA, and yet the technological requirements seem to within reach in the next few decades for China.

title: Production of long-strip multi-gap resistive plate chamber module for the STAR-MTD system
abstract: A new Long-strip Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chamber (LMRPC) prototype with 5 gas gaps has been developed for the Muon Telescope Detector (MTD) of the STAR experiment at RHIC in order to reduce the working High Voltage (HV) of previous design. Technical specifications related to the final infrastructure present in the experiment have motivated this effort. Its performance has been measured with cosmic rays. The efficiency of this prototype can reach 98% and the time resolution is around 95 ps. It shows a good uniformity among strips. The noise level is less than 0.2 Hz/cm2. The signal transmission and crosstalk of the modules was measured with a vector network analyzer, showing a good match with simulations within the amplifier bandwidth. A new cosmic-ray test system with long scintillators has been developed to accelerate the Quality Control (QC) process during the mass production of STAR-MTD. A selection of perpendicular cosmic-ray events for more accurate evaluation of the time resolution is achieved. The time resolution with this method is better, albeit with larger error, than the result obtained without any selection. A new spacer is used, resulting in a much reduced streamer ratio at comparable fields. Thirty-two modules have been built with the new spacer by the middle of April of 2012. They have been tested and they all have passed the QC.

title: Planck priors for dark energy surveys
abstract: Although cosmic microwave background anisotropy data alone cannot constrain simultaneously the spatial curvature and the equation of state of dark energy, CMB data provide a valuable addition to other experimental results. However computing a full CMB power spectrum with a Boltzmann code is quite slow; for instance if we want to work with many dark energy and/or modified gravity models, or would like to optimize experiments where many different configurations need to be tested, it is possible to adopt a quicker and more efficient approach. In this paper we consider the compression of the projected Planck cosmic microwave background data into four parameters, R (scaled distance to last scattering surface), l{sub a} (angular scale of sound horizon at last scattering), {omega}{sub b}h{sup 2} (baryon density fraction) and n{sub s} (powerlaw index of primordial matter power spectrum), all of which can be computed quickly. We show that, although this compression loses information compared to the full likelihood, such information loss becomes negligible when more data is added. We also demonstrate that the method can be used for canonical scalar-field dark energy independently of the parametrization of the equation of state, and discuss how this method should be used for other kindsmore » of dark energy models.« less