Simulation and Efficiency Studies of Optical Photon Transportation and Detection with Plastic Antineutrino Detector Modules

In this work, the simulation of optical photons is carried out in an antineutrino detector module consisting of a plastic scintillator connected to light guides and photomultipliers on both ends, which is considered to be used for remote reactor monitoring in the field of nuclear safety. Using Monte Carlo (MC) based GEANT4 simulation, numerous parameters influencing the light collection and thereby the energy resolution of the antineutrino detector module are studied: e.g., degrees of scintillator surface roughness, reflector type, and its ap- plying method onto scintillator and light guide surface, the reflectivity of the reflector, light guide geometries and diameter of the photocathode. The impact of each parameter is inves- tigated by looking at the detected spectrum, i.e. the number photoelectrons per depositing energy. In addition, the average light collection efficiency of the detector module and its spatial variation are calculated for each simulation setup. According to the simulation re- sults, it is found that photocathode size, light guide shape, reflectivity of reflecting material and wrapping method show a significant impact on the light collection efficiency while scin- tillator surface polishing level and the choose of reflector type show relatively less impact. This study demonstrates that these parameters are very important in the design of plastic scintillator included antineutrino detectors to improve the energy resolution efficiency

Simulation of waviness in neutron guides

As the trend of neutron guide designs points towards longer and more complex guides, imperfections such as waviness becomes increasingly important. Simulations of guide waviness has so far been limited by a lack of reasonable waviness models. We here present a stochastic description of waviness and its implementation in the McStas simulation package. The effect of this new implementation is compared to the guide simulations without waviness and the simple, yet unphysical, waviness model implemented in McStas 1.12c and 2.0

Study of heat and mass transfer applications in the field of engineering by using OpenFOAM

The aim of the project is to study OpenFOAM software and establish a well-based guide of standard and complex heat and mass transfer applications in engineering. OpenFOAM is a free, open source CFD software package. By being open, OpenFOAM offers users complete freedom to customise and extend its existing functionality. On the other hand, OpenFOAM offers a quick start user guide and there also is little available documentation and several examples. Thus, the project intends to: - Prepare an introductory and complete user guide to OpenFOAM with solved standard heat and mass transfer applications to the beginners, specially bachelor students ‐ Numerical simulation of complex heat and mass transfer applications in engineering with OpenFOAM in two‐ and three‐dimensional problems ‐ Practice in developing engineering projects by combining technical work with economic and environmental aspectsThe main tasks to be carried out in this project will be to: - Edit problems solved with OpenFOAM including explanations and detailed considerations in order to prepare a guide for new learners, specially bachelor students - Work in the study and analysis of heat and mass transfer simulations involving real engineering problems - Determine feasibility of the engineering project to be carried out - Study the socio-economics aspects in fluid dynamics applications solved by numerical simulation and fields of interest - Results analysi

The numerical simulation tool for the MAORY multiconjugate adaptive optics system

The Multiconjugate Adaptive Optics RelaY (MAORY) is and Adaptive Optics module to be mounted on the ESO European-Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). It is a hybrid Natural and Laser Guide System that will perform the correction of the atmospheric turbulence volume above the telescope feeding the Multi-AO Imaging Camera for Deep Observations Near Infrared spectro-imager (MICADO). We developed an end-to-end Monte- Carlo adaptive optics simulation tool to investigate the performance of a the MAORY and the calibration, acquisition, operation strategies. MAORY will implement Multiconjugate Adaptive Optics combining Laser Guide Stars (LGS) and Natural Guide Stars (NGS) measurements. The simulation tool implements the various aspect of the MAORY in an end to end fashion. The code has been developed using IDL and uses libraries in C++ and CUDA for efficiency improvements. Here we recall the code architecture, we describe the modeled instrument components and the control strategies implemented in the code.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, Proceeding 9909 310 of the conference SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2016, 26 June 1 July 2016 Edinburgh, Scotland, U

USERS' GUIDE TO THE MINNESOTA REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT SIMULATION LABORATORY

This manual is a users' guide to the Minnesota Regional Development Simulation Laboratory, called SIMLAB.Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Stacked Thompson Bandits

We introduce Stacked Thompson Bandits (STB) for efficiently generating plans that are likely to satisfy a given bounded temporal logic requirement. STB uses a simulation for evaluation of plans, and takes a Bayesian approach to using the resulting information to guide its search. In particular, we show that stacking multiarmed bandits and using Thompson sampling to guide the action selection process for each bandit enables STB to generate plans that satisfy requirements with a high probability while only searching a fraction of the search space.Comment: Accepted at SEsCPS @ ICSE 201

Impact of Sodium Layer variations on the performance of the E-ELT MCAO module

Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics systems based on sodium Laser Guide Stars may exploit Natural Guide Stars to solve intrinsic limitations of artificial beacons (tip-tilt indetermination and anisoplanatism) and to mitigate the impact of the sodium layer structure and variability. The sodium layer may also have transverse structures leading to differential effects among Laser Guide Stars. Starting from the analysis of the input perturbations related to the Sodium Layer variability, modeled directly on measured sodium layer profiles, we analyze, through a simplified end-to-end simulation code, the impact of the low/medium orders induced on global performance of the European Extremely Large Telescope Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics module MAORY.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, SPIE conference Proceedin

End to end numerical simulations of the MAORY multiconjugate adaptive optics system

MAORY is the adaptive optics module of the E-ELT that will feed the MICADO imaging camera through a gravity invariant exit port. MAORY has been foreseen to implement MCAO correction through three high order deformable mirrors driven by the reference signals of six Laser Guide Stars (LGSs) feeding as many Shack-Hartmann Wavefront Sensors. A three Natural Guide Stars (NGSs) system will provide the low order correction. We develop a code for the end-to-end simulation of the MAORY adaptive optics (AO) system in order to obtain high-delity modeling of the system performance. It is based on the IDL language and makes extensively uses of the GPUs. Here we present the architecture of the simulation tool and its achieved and expected performance.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2014 in Montr\'eal, Quebec, Canada, with number 9148-25

Evaporative cooling of an atomic beam

We present a theoretical analysis of the evaporative cooling of an atomic beam propagating in a magnetic guide. Cooling is provided by transverse evaporation. The atomic dynamics inside the guide is analyzed by solving the Boltzmann equation with two different approaches: an approximate analytical ansatz and a Monte-Carlo simulation. Within their domain of validity, these two methods are found to be in very good agreement with each other. They allow us to determine how the phase-space density and the flux of the beam vary along its direction of propagation. We find a significant increase for the phase-space density along the guide for realistic experimental parameters. By extrapolation, we estimate the length of the beam needed to reach quantum degeneracy.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, to be published in EPJ D, revised versio