Potential physics measurement with ALICE electromagnetic calorimeters
We present the two electromagnetic calorimeters of the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) experiment at LHC (Large Hadron Collider). One is the high-resolution PHOton Spectrometer (PHOS) made of lead tungsten crystals and the other is the ElectroMagnetic Calorimeter (EMCal), a Lead-Scintillator sampling calorimeter. They are dedicated to the measurement and identification of direct photons, light neutral mesons such as π 0 , η and ω ( 782 ) , and jets emitted in proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions at the LHC energies. The PHOS is capable of precisely detecting photons with momentum range between 0.1 GeV/c and 100 GeV/c and the EMCal can extend the prompt photon and light neutral meson momentum measurement beyond 200 GeV/c. The objective of the study is to explore the physics of strongly interacting QCD matter under extreme conditions of energy density.

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: 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.

title: QGP tomography with photon tagged jets in ALICE
abstract: γ+jet events provide a tomographic measurement of the medium formed in heavy ion collisions at LHC energies. Tagging events with a well identified high pT direct photon and measuring the correlation distribution of hadrons emitted oppositely to the photon in ALICE, allows us to determine, with a good approximation, both the jet fragmentation function and the back-to-back azimuthal alignment of the direct photon and the jet. Comparing these two observables measured in pp collisions with the ones measured in AA collisions will reveal the modifications of the jet structure induced by the medium formed in AA collisions and consequently will infer the medium properties.

title: High-pT particle correlations in pp collisions at LHC/ALICE*
abstract: Two-particle correlation triggered by high-pT particles allows us to study hard scattering phenomena when full jet reconstruction is challenging. An analysis of the first ALICE pp data where charged and neutral particles isolated or not are used as trigger particles is presented. The two-particle correlation between the trigger (t) and the associate (a) particles is studied as a function of the imbalance parameter and interpreted in terms of the jet fragmentation function.

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: 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: Topological Charge in Two Flavors QCD with Optimal Domain-Wall Fermion
abstract: We measure the topological charge of the gauge configurations generated by lattice simulations of 2 flavors QCD on a $ 16^3 \times 32 $ lattice, with Optimal Domain-Wall Fermion (ODWF) at $ N_s = 16 $ and plaquette gauge action at $ \beta = 5.90 $. Using the Adaptive Thick-Restart Lanczos algorithm, we project the low-lying modes of the 4D effective Dirac operator of ODWF, and obtain the topological charge and topological susceptibility. Our result of topological susceptibility agrees with the sea-quark mass dependence predicted by the chiral perturbation theory, and provides a determination of the chiral condensate.

title: Sussing merger trees: the Merger Trees Comparison Project
abstract: Merger trees follow the growth and merger of dark-matter haloes over cosmic history. As well as giving important insights into the growth of cosmic structure in their own right, they provide an essential backbone to semi-analytic models of galaxy formation. This paper is the first in a series to arise from the Sussing Merger Trees Workshop in which 10 different tree-building algorithms were applied to the same set of halo catalogues and their results compared. Although many of these codes were similar in nature, all algorithms produced distinct results. Our main conclusions are that a useful merger-tree code should possess the following features: (i) the use of particle IDs to match haloes between snapshots; (ii) the ability to skip at least one, and preferably more, snapshots in order to recover subhaloes that are temporarily lost during merging; (iii) the ability to cope with (and ideally smooth out) large, temporary fluctuations in halo mass. Finally, to enable different groups to communicate effectively, we defined a common terminology that we used when discussing merger trees and we encourage others to adopt the same language. We also specified a minimal output format to record the results.

title: GPU-Based Conjugate Gradient Solver for Lattice QCD with Domain-Wall Fermions
abstract: We present the first GPU-based conjugate gradient (CG) solver for lattice QCD with domain-wall fermions (DWF). It is well-known that CG is the most time-consuming part in the Hybrid Monte Carlo simulation of unquenched lattice QCD, which becomes even more computational demanding for lattice QCD with exact chiral symmetry. We have designed a CG solver for the general 5-dimensional DWF operator on NVIDIA CUDA architecture with mixed-precision, using the defect correction as well as the reliable updates algorithms. We optimize our computation by even-odd preconditioning in the 4D space-time lattice, plus several innovative techniques for CUDA kernels. For NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285/480, our CG solver attains 180/233 Gflops (sustained).

title: Topological susceptibility in two flavors lattice QCD with the optimal domain-wall fermion
abstract: We determine the topological susceptibility of the gauge configurations generated by lattice simulations using two flavors of optimal domain-wall fermion on the 16 3 × 32 lattice with length 16 in the fifth dimension, at the lattice spacing a ≃ 0.1 fm . Using the adaptive thick-restart Lanczos algorithm, we project the low-lying eigenmodes of the overlap Dirac operator, and obtain the topological charge of each configuration, for eight ensembles with pion masses in the range 220–550 MeV. From the topological charge, we compute the topological susceptibility and the second normalized cumulant. Our result of the topological susceptibility agrees with the sea-quark mass dependence predicted by the chiral perturbation theory and provides a determination of the chiral condensate, Σ MS ¯ ( 2 GeV ) = [ 259 ( 6 ) ( 7 ) MeV ] 3 , and the pion decay constant F π = 92 ( 12 ) ( 2 ) MeV .