Summary of Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics Sessions

Astrophysics is gaining increased attention from the particle and nuclear physics communities, as budget cuts, delays, and cancellations limit opportunities for breakthrough research at accelerator laboratories. Observations of cosmic rays (protons and nuclei), gamma rays and neutrinos present a variety of puzzles whose eventual solution will shed light on many issues ranging from the nature of fundamental interactions at extreme energies to the mechanisms of astrophysical sources. Several important detectors are just beginning full-scale operation and others are beginning construction.Comment: Rapporteur Talk at Intersections Conference, St. Petersburg, FL, 6/9

Recoilless resonant neutrino experiment and origin of neutrino oscillations

We demonstrate that an experiment with recoilless resonant emission and absorption of tritium antineutrinos could have an important impact on our understanding of the origin of neutrino oscillations.Comment: The report at the Workshop on Next Generation Nucleon Decay and Neutrino Detectors, NNN06, September 21-23, 2006, University of Washington, Seattle, US

Cosmic physics data analysis program

A data analysis program was carried out to investigate the intensity, propagation, and origin of primary Cosmic Ray Galactic electrons. Scanning was carried out on two new balloon flight experiments as well as the border area of previous experiments. The identification and evaluation of the energies of the primary electrons were carried out. A new analysis of these data were incorporated into an overall evaluation of the roll of electrons in the problem of the origin of cosmic rays. Recent measurements indicate that the earth may be within the expanding Geminga supernova shock wave which is expected to have a major effect upon the propagation and the energy spectrum of galactic electrons. Calculations with the Geminga model indicate that the cut-off energy may be very close to the observed highest energy electrons in our analysis

LabView Interface for School-Network DAQ Card

A low-cost DAQ card has been developed for school-network cosmic ray detector projects, providing digitized data from photomultiplier tubes via a standard serial interface. To facilitate analysis of these data and to provide students with a starting point for custom readout systems, a model interface has been developed using the National Instruments LabVIEW(R) system. This user-friendly interface allows one to initialize the trigger coincidence conditions for data-taking runs and to monitor incoming or pre-recorded data sets with updating singles- and coincidence-rate plots and other user-selectable histograms.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures. Presented as Paper NS26-119 at IEEE-NSS 2003, Portland, OR, by R. J. Wilke