SUSSING MERGER TREES: the influence of the halo finder
Merger tree codes are routinely used to follow the growth and merger of dark matter haloes in simulations of cosmic structure formation. Whereas in Srisawat et. al. we compared the trees built using a wide variety of such codes, here we study the influence of the underlying halo catalogue upon the resulting trees. We observe that the specifics of halo finding itself greatly influences the constructed merger trees. We find that the choices made to define the halo mass are of prime importance. For instance, amongst many potential options different finders select self-bound objects or spherical regions of defined overdensity, decide whether or not to include substructures within the mass returned and vary in their initial particle selection. The impact of these decisions is seen in tree length (the period of time a particularly halo can be traced back through the simulation), branching ratio (essentially the merger rate of subhaloes) and mass evolution. We therefore conclude that the choice of the underlying halo finder is more relevant to the process of building merger trees than the tree builder itself. We also report on some built-in features of specific merger tree codes that (sometimes) help to improve the quality of the merger trees produced.

title: Pseudoscalar Meson in Two Flavors QCD with the Optimal Domain-Wall Fermion
abstract: We perform hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) simulations of two flavors QCD with the optimal domain-wall fermion (ODWF), on the 16 3 × 32 lattice (with lattice spacing a ∼ 0.1 fm ), for eight sea-quark masses corresponding to pion masses in the range 228–565 MeV. We calculate the mass and the decay constant of the pseudoscalar meson, and compare our data with the chiral perturbation theory (ChPT). We find that our data is in good agreement with the sea-quark mass dependence predicted by the next-to-leading order (NLO) ChPT, and provides a determination of the low-energy constants l ¯ 3 and l ¯ 4 , the pion decay constant, the chiral condensate, and the average up and down quark mass.

title: Transverse momentum spectra of charged particles in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 900 GeV with ALICE at the LHC
abstract: The inclusive charged particle transverse momentum distribution is measured in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 900$~GeV at the LHC using the ALICE detector. The measurement is performed in the central pseudorapidity region $(|\eta|_{\rm INEL}=0.483\pm0.001$~(stat.)~$\pm0.007$~(syst.)~GeV/$c$ and $\left_{\rm NSD}=0.489\pm0.001$~(stat.)~$\pm0.007$~(syst.)~GeV/$c$, respectively. The data exhibit a slightly larger $\left$ than measurements in wider pseudorapidity intervals. The results are compared to simulations with the Monte Carlo event generators PYTHIA and PHOJET

title: Evidence of b-Jet Quenching in PbPb Collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76$ TeV

title: Inclusive $J/\psi$ production in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 2.76$ TeV
abstract: The ALICE Collaboration has measured inclusive J/psi production in pp collisions at a center of mass energy sqrt(s)=2.76 TeV at the LHC. The results presented in this Letter refer to the rapidity ranges |y|<0.9 and 2.5

title: Hard Probes in CMS
abstract: This paper reviews recent experimental results on hard probes in heavy-ion collisions from the CMS Collaboration. These studies include various energy loss phenomena (jet nuclear modification factors, tagged b-quark jets, di-jet and photon-jet energy imbalance); observables characterizing jet properties like jet fragmentation function and jet shapes; and measurements of high-pT charged hadrons from jet fragmentation (nuclear modification factors up to 100 GeV/c. All of the presented results utilize the high statistics PbPb data, about 150 μb−1, collected in late 2011 at the LHC.

title: Alignment of the ALICE inner tracking system with cosmic-ray tracks
abstract: ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) experiment devoted to investigating the strongly interacting matter created in nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC energies. The ALICE ITS, Inner Tracking System, consists of six cylindrical layers of silicon detectors with three different technologies; in the outward direction: two layers of pixel detectors, two layers each of drift, and strip detectors. The number of parameters to be determined in the spatial alignment of the 2198 sensor modules of the ITS is about 13,000. The target alignment precision is well below 10 mu m in some cases (pixels). The sources of alignment information include survey measurements, and the reconstructed tracks from cosmic rays and from proton-proton collisions. The main track-based alignment method uses the Millepede global approach. An iterative local method was developed and used as well. We present the results obtained for the ITS alignment using about 10(5) charged tracks from cosmic rays that have been collected during summer 2008, with the ALICE solenoidal magnet switched off.