Two Detector Reactor Neutrino Oscillation Experiment Kr2Det at Krasnoyarsk. Status Report

We consider status of the Kr2Det project aimed at sensitive searches for neutrino oscillations in the atmospheric neutrino mass parameter region around Dm2 ~ 3x10-3 eV2and at obtaining new information on the electron neutrino mass structure (Ue3).Comment: 4 pages in pdf file. Talk presented at NANP-2001 International Conference in Dubna, Russia, June 200

Neutrino Oscillations at Reactors: What Next?

We shortly review past and future experiments at reactors aimed at searches for neutrino masses and mixing. We also consider new idea to search at Krasnoyarsk for small mixing angle oscillations in the atmosheric neutrino mass parameter region.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX 2.09, 6 Postscript figures. Talk given at Non-Accelerator New Physics Conference, Dubna, 28.06-03.07.199

Future Atmospheric Neutrino Detectors

Future experiments focusing on atmospheric neutrino detection are reviewed. One of the main goals of these experiments is the detection of an unambiguous oscillation pattern (nu_mu reappearance) to prove the oscillation hypothesis. Further goals include the discrimination of nu_mu - nu_tau and nu_mu - nu_sterile oscillations, and the detection of a potential small nu_mu - nu_e contribution. The search for matter effects in three or more flavour oscillations can be used to constrain hybrid oscillation models and potentially measure the sign of delta m^2. The detectors and measurement techniques proposed to achieve these goals are described, and their physics reach is discussed.Comment: 9 pages, invited talk at the XIX International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, Sudbury, Canada, June 16-21, 2000, to appear in Nucl. Phys. B (Proc. Suppl.

Prey selection by an apex predator : the importance of sampling uncertainty.

The impact of predation on prey populations has long been a focus of ecologists, but a firm understanding of the factors influencing prey selection, a key predictor of that impact, remains elusive. High levels of variability observed in prey selection may reflect true differences in the ecology of different communities but might also reflect a failure to deal adequately with uncertainties in the underlying data. Indeed, our review showed that less than 10% of studies of European wolf predation accounted for sampling uncertainty. Here, we relate annual variability in wolf diet to prey availability and examine temporal patterns in prey selection; in particular, we identify how considering uncertainty alters conclusions regarding prey selection. Over nine years, we collected 1,974 wolf scats and conducted drive censuses of ungulates in Alpe di Catenaia, Italy. We bootstrapped scat and census data within years to construct confidence intervals around estimates of prey use, availability and selection. Wolf diet was dominated by boar (61.5±3.90 [SE] % of biomass eaten) and roe deer (33.7±3.61%). Temporal patterns of prey densities revealed that the proportion of roe deer in wolf diet peaked when boar densities were low, not when roe deer densities were highest. Considering only the two dominant prey types, Manly's standardized selection index using all data across years indicated selection for boar (mean = 0.73±0.023). However, sampling error resulted in wide confidence intervals around estimates of prey selection. Thus, despite considerable variation in yearly estimates, confidence intervals for all years overlapped. Failing to consider such uncertainty could lead erroneously to the assumption of differences in prey selection among years. This study highlights the importance of considering temporal variation in relative prey availability and accounting for sampling uncertainty when interpreting the results of dietary studies

Term limits and the tobacco industry.

In the 1990s several American states passed term limits on legislators with the stated intention of reducing the influence of wealthy industries on career legislators. Although term limits in the United States do not have a direct relationship to public health, the tobacco industry anticipated that term limits could have indirect effects by either limiting or expanding industry influence. We detail the strategy of the tobacco industry in the wake of term limits using internal tobacco company documents and a database of campaign contributions made to legislators in term limited states between 1988 and 2002. Despite some expectations that term limits would limit tobacco industry access to state legislators, term limits appear to have had the opposite effect

Revealing spectrum features of stochastic neuron spike trains

Power spectra of spike trains reveal important properties of neuronal behavior. They exhibit several peaks, whose shape and position depend on applied stimuli and intrinsic biophysical properties, such as input current density and channel noise. The position of the spectral peaks in the frequency domain is not straightforwardly predictable from statistical averages of the interspike intervals, especially when stochastic behavior prevails. In this work, we provide a model for the neuronal power spectrum, obtained from Discrete Fourier Transform and expressed as a series of expected value of sinusoidal terms. The first term of the series allows us to estimate the frequencies of the spectral peaks to a maximum error of a few Hz, and to interpret why they are not harmonics of the first peak frequency. Thus, the simple expression of the proposed power spectral density (PSD) model makes it a powerful interpretative tool of PSD shape, and also useful for neurophysiological studies aimed at extracting information on neuronal behavior from spike train spectra

Observation of Neutrons with a Gadolinium Doped Water Cerenkov Detector

Spontaneous and induced fission in Special Nuclear Material (SNM) such as 235U and 239Pu results in the emission of neutrons and high energy gamma-rays. The multiplicities of and time correlations between these particles are both powerful indicators of the presence of fissile material. Detectors sensitive to these signatures are consequently useful for nuclear material monitoring, search, and characterization. In this article, we demonstrate sensitivity to both high energy gamma-rays and neutrons with a water Cerenkov based detector. Electrons in the detector medium, scattered by gamma-ray interactions, are detected by their Cerenkov light emission. Sensitivity to neutrons is enhanced by the addition of a gadolinium compound to the water in low concentrations. Cerenkov light is similarly produced by an 8 MeV gamma-ray cascade following neutron capture on the gadolinium. The large solid angle coverage and high intrinsic efficiency of this detection approach can provide robust and low cost neutron and gamma-ray detection with a single device.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to Nuclear Instruments and Methods,

New model for the neutrino mass matrix

I suggest a model based on a softly broken symmetry L_e - L_mu - L_tau and on Babu's mechanism for two-loops radiative generation of the neutrino masses. The model predicts that one of the physical neutrinos (nu_3) is massless and that its component along the nu_e direction (U_e3) is zero. Moreover, if the soft-breaking term is assumed to be very small, then the vacuum oscillations of nu_e have almost maximal amplitude and solve the solar-neutrino problem. New scalars are predicted in the 10 TeV energy range, and a breakdown of e-mu-tau universality should not be far from existing experimental bounds.Comment: 7 pages including 3 figure

Super-Kamiokande atmospheric neutrinos: Status of subdominant oscillations

In the context of the recent (79.5 kTy) Super-Kamiokande atmospheric neutrino data, we concisely review the status of muonic-tauonic flavor oscillations and of the subdominant electron or sterile neutrino mixing, in schemes with three or four families and one dominant mass scale. In the three-family case, where we include the full CHOOZ spectral data, we also show, through a specific example, that ``maximal'' violations of the one-dominant mass scale approximation are not ruled out yet.Comment: 8 pages + 10 figure