Measurement of the Michel Parameter xi" in Polarized Muon Decay and Implications on Exotic Couplings of the Leptonic Weak Interaction

The Michel parameter xi" has been determined from a measurement of the longitudinal polarization of positrons emitted in the decay of polarized and depolarized muons. The result, xi" = 0.981 +- 0.045stat +- 0.003syst, is consistent with the Standard Model prediction of unity, and provides an order of magnitude improvement in the relative precision of this parameter. This value sets new constraints on exotic couplings beyond the dominant V-A description of the leptonic weak interaction.Comment: 15 pages, 16 figures, 3 tables; submitted to Phys. Rev.

Floor sensor development using signal scavenging for personnel detection system

"July 2010.""A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School At the University of Missouri--Columbia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science."Thesis supervisor: Dr. Harry Tyrer.Falls have been a major cause of injuries likes fractures, head trauma in elder people. In many cases, these injuries have been fatal. This being a major concern of the Alzheimer's Association, a 'Smart Carpet' to detect a person's fall and accordingly generate an alarm was important. We developed faux floors and an actual floor for testing and demonstration to detect motion. We used a novel technique of signal scavenging to detect presence of the person. Aluminum foils were used as sensors as they were conducive to the applied pressure on them. Rigorous tests and experiments were performed on the faux floor sized 1m x 1m (3feet x 3feet) and 2.1m x 1m (7feet x 3feet) using these aluminum sensors. The noisy output pattern of the aluminum sensor was signal conditioned and converted into digital format using Op-Amps. The digital signal was later interfaced with a micro-controller unit and displayed onto a PC. Graphical analysis with ROC space and personal experience with utilization of the faux floor system gave us confidence to develop a real floor of the size 3.6m x 3.6m (12feet x 12feet). The results obtained on the full floor were beyond the expectations. Previously observed problems like cross-talk, noise interference and abrupt output behavior of the sensor system were avoided with careful manufacturing of carpet and earthing. With the development of the full floor, we have created a prototype which has high reliability and accuracy to detect motion and can be extensively used for further research.Includes bibliographical references (pages 57-59)

NA61/SHINE facility at the CERN SPS: beams and detector system

NA61/SHINE (SPS Heavy Ion and Neutrino Experiment) is a multi-purpose experimental facility to study hadron production in hadron-proton, hadron-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron. It recorded the first physics data with hadron beams in 2009 and with ion beams (secondary 7Be beams) in 2011. NA61/SHINE has greatly profited from the long development of the CERN proton and ion sources and the accelerator chain as well as the H2 beamline of the CERN North Area. The latter has recently been modified to also serve as a fragment separator as needed to produce the Be beams for NA61/SHINE. Numerous components of the NA61/SHINE set-up were inherited from its predecessors, in particular, the last one, the NA49 experiment. Important new detectors and upgrades of the legacy equipment were introduced by the NA61/SHINE Collaboration. This paper describes the state of the NA61/SHINE facility - the beams and the detector system - before the CERN Long Shutdown I, which started in March 2013