The future prospects of muon colliders and neutrino factories

The potential of muon beams for high energy physics applications is described along with the challenges of producing high quality muon beams. Two proposed approaches for delivering high intensity muon beams, a proton driver source and a positron driver source, are described and compared. The proton driver concepts are based on the studies from the Muon Accelerator Program (MAP). The MAP effort focused on a path to deliver muon-based facilities, ranging from neutrino factories to muon colliders, that could span research needs at both the intensity and energy frontiers. The Low EMittance Muon Accelerator (LEMMA) concept, which uses a positron-driven source, provides an attractive path to very high energy lepton colliders with improved particle backgrounds. The recent study of a 14 TeV muon collider in the LHC tunnel, which could leverage the existing CERN injectors and infrastructure and provide physics reach comparable to the 100 TeV FCC-hh, at lower cost and with cleaner physics conditions, is also discussed. The present status of the design and R&D efforts towards each of these sources is described. A summary of important R&D required to establish a facility path for each concept is also presented.Comment: 29 pages, 17 figure

Mejorando los sistemas rurales de alertas tempranas a través de la integración de OpenBTS y JAIN SLEE

Actualmente existe una tendencia que combina las características de los servicios Web 2.0 y los servicios de telecomunicaciones, conocida como Telco 2.0. Estos servicios convergentes se han aplicado exitosamente en sistemas de alertas tempranas, proporcionando mayor agilidad y flexibilidad en la prestación de servicios. Sin embargo, existen varias limitantes que no permiten el despliegue de servicios convergentes en las zonas rurales de países en vía de desarrollo, como la falta de disponibilidad de una ngn (Next Generation Network), la ausencia de tecnología avanzada y la falta de recursos para inversión. Este artículo propone una arquitectura de integración entre jain slee y OpenBTS para sistemas rurales de alertas tempranas. Se evalúa el prototipo implementado con un caso de estudio específico al enviar advertencias Telco 2.0 a los cafeteros colombianos cuyas plantaciones puedan verse afectadas por la roya, una de las enfermedades más peligrosas para la producción de café.Nowadays exists a trend that combines the features of Web 2.0 services and telecommunications services known as Telco 2.0. These converged services have been successfully implemented in early warning systems providing improved agility and flexibility in service delivery. However the deployment of converged services in rural zones of developing countries presents several constraints which do not allow to provide this kind of services, as the unavailability of a Next Generation Network (ngn), absence of advanced technology and lack of investment resources. This paper proposes a jain slee and OpenBTS integration architecture for early warning systems in rural zones. The implemented prototype is evaluated with a specific case study involving the deployment of Telco 2.0 warnings in Colombian coffee plantations which may be affected by coffee rust, one of the most threatening diseases in coffee production

From fly-by-wire to drive-by-wire: Safety implications of automation in vehicles

The purpose of this paper is to critically review the current trend in automobile engineering toward automation of many of the functions previously performed by the driver. Working on the assumption that automation in aviation represents the basic model for driver automation, the costs and benefits of automation in aviation are explored as a means of establishing where automation of drivers' tasks are likely to yield benefits. It is concluded that there are areas where automation can provide benefits to the driver, but there are other areas where this is unlikely to be the case. Automation per se does not guarantee success, and therefore it becomes vital to involve Human Factors into design to identify where automation of driver functions can be allocated with a beneficial outcome for driving performance

Transparent multi-core speculative parallelization of DES models with event and cross-state dependencies

In this article we tackle transparent parallelization of Discrete Event Simulation (DES) models to be run on top of multi-core machines according to speculative schemes. The innovation in our proposal lies in that we consider a more general programming and execution model, compared to the one targeted by state of the art PDES platforms, where the boundaries of the state portion accessible while processing an event at a specific simulation object do not limit access to the actual object state, or to shared global variables. Rather, the simulation object is allowed to access (and alter) the state of any other object, thus causing what we term cross-state dependency. We note that this model exactly complies with typical (easy to manage) sequential-style DES programming, where a (dynamically-allocated) state portion of object A can be accessed by object B in either read or write mode (or both) by, e.g., passing a pointer to B as the payload of a scheduled simulation event. However, while read/write memory accesses performed in the sequential run are always guaranteed to observe (and to give rise to) a consistent snapshot of the state of the simulation model, consistency is not automatically guaranteed in case of parallelization and concurrent execution of simulation objects with cross-state dependencies. We cope with such a consistency issue, and its application-transparent support, in the context of parallel and optimistic executions. This is achieved by introducing an advanced memory management architecture, able to efficiently detect read/write accesses by concurrent objects to whichever object state in an application transparent manner, together with advanced synchronization mechanisms providing the advantage of exploiting parallelism in the underlying multi-core architecture while transparently handling both cross-state and traditional event-based dependencies. Our proposal targets Linux and has been integrated with the ROOT-Sim open source optimistic simulation platform, although its design principles, and most parts of the developed software, are of general relevance. Copyright 2014 ACM