Ageing Studies on the Drift Tubes of the Muon Spectrometer and Observability of MSSM Heavy Higgses via a Sparticle decay Mode

This Ph.D. thesis summarized the work performed in INFN Cosenza group within the ATLAS Muon Collaboration. This work is a representative cross section of the different aspects to the preparation of a modern day high energy physics experiment. An important part is dedicated to the testing of specialized detector elements. And the experiment's discovery potential for signatures of new theoretical proposal is evaluated. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part, made up of the first three chapters, is an introduction about the theoretical and the experimental background of the two main work I have performed during the doctoral period. The second part, the fourth chapter, is about the main work I have dealt with, the ageing problem of the Monitored Drift Tube detectors, which make up the Muon Spectrometer. And the last third part, the fifth chapter, is about the study of an MSSM Higgs bosons decay mode into sparticles

Précurseur et outsider. Le ‘retour’ de Maïmonide dans l’historiographie philosophique et en philosophie aux XIXe et XXe siècles

La riscoperta dell'opera filosofica di Maimonide, la Guida dei Perplessi, da parte degli storici della filosofia ebraica all'interno del movimento della scienza dell'ebraismo durante il diciannovesimo secolo – riscoperta che è parallela alla creazione da parte degli stessi studiosi del mito dell' "epoca d'oro dell'ebraismo medievale" in Spagna – influenzò in maniera decisiva lo sviluppo della storiografia filosofica nella Germania e nella Francia del diciannovesimo secolo, così come anche l'opera e il pensiero di alcune delle maggiori figure della filosofia ebraica del ventesimo secolo: Hermann Cohen e Leo Strauss. Maimonide (1138-1204), copnosciuto anche come Rambam grazie all'acronimo ebraico, è uno dei filosofi medievali riconosciuti dalla storiografia filosofica moderna come precursori e allo stesso tempo "outsiders" della ragione moderna nella storia del suo sviluppo. Tale condizione fa di Maimonide un tassello fondamentale di questa storia, come l'articolo all'interno di questo volume ha ampiamente dimostrato.The rediscovery of Maimonides’ philosophical masterpiece, the Guide of the Perplexed, by the German-Jewish scholars of the Science of Judaism in the nineteenth century – a rediscovery which paralleled the creation, by those same scholars, of the myth of a “Golden Age of Judaism in Spain” – was to strongly influence the development of philosophical historiography in nineteenth-century Germany and France, as well as the work of major twentieth-century Jewish philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Leo Strauss. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1138-1204), also known by his Hebrew acronym as the Rambam, is one of the medieval philosophers regarded by modern philosophical historiography as having been both forerunners of modern reason and, at the same time, “outsiders” in the history of its development

Feasibility and coexistence of large ecological communities

The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of ecosystems and their biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after small perturbations of the species abundances (local asymptotic stability) has been well studied, whereas the likelihood of a community to persist when the conditions change (structural stability) has received much less attention. Our goal is to understand the effects of diversity, interaction strengths and ecological network structure on the volume of parameter space leading to feasible equilibria. We develop a geometrical framework to study the range of conditions necessary for feasible coexistence. We show that feasibility is determined by few quantities describing the interactions, yielding a nontrivial complexity–feasibility relationship. Analysing more than 100 empirical networks, we show that the range of coexistence conditions in mutualistic systems can be analytically predicted. Finally, we characterize the geometric shape of the feasibility domain, thereby identifying the direction of perturbations that are more likely to cause extinctions

Spatial distribution of species in ecosystems using statistical mechanics techniques

Questa tesi propone un modello spaziale di massima entropia per lo studio di sistemi ecologici a partire dalla conoscenza di una informazione minima. Vengono studiati pattern emergenti negli ecosistemi su larga scala con l'intento di comprendere i meccanismi che regolano le comunità ecologicheope

Search, navigation and foraging: an optimal decision-making perspective

Behavior in its general form can be defined as a mapping between sensory inputs and a pattern of motor actions that are used to achieve a goal. Reinforcement learning in the last years emerged as a general framework to analyze behavior in its general definition. In this thesis exploiting the techniques of reinforcement learning we study several phenomena that can be classified as search, navigation and foraging behaviors. Regarding the search aspect we analyze random walks forced to reach a target in a confined region of the space. In this case we can solve analytically the problem that allows to find a very efficient way to generate such walks. The navigation problem is inspired by olfactory navigation in homing pigeons. In this case we propose an algorithm to navigate a noisy environment relying only on local signals. The foraging instead is analyzed starting from the observation that fossil traces show the evolution of foraging strategies towards highly compact and self-avoiding trajectories. We show how this optimal behavior can emerge in the reinforcement learning framework