Astrophysical point source search with the ANTARES neutrino telescope

The ANTARES neutrino telescope is installed at a depth of 2.5 km of the Mediterranean Sea and consists of a three-dimensional array of 885 photomultipliers arranged on twelve detector lines. The prime objective is to detect high-energy neutrinos from extraterrestrial origin. Relativistic muons emerging from charged-current muon neutrino interactions in the detector surroundings produce a cone of Cerenkov light which allows the reconstruction of the original neutrino direction. The collaboration has implemented different methods to search for neutrino point sources in the data collected since 2007. Results obtained with these methods as well as the sensitivity of the telescope are presented.Comment: 1 page, 1 figur

Charging Interacting Rotating Black Holes in Heterotic String Theory

We present a formulation of the stationary bosonic string sector of the whole toroidally compactified effective field theory of the heterotic string as a double Ernst system which, in the framework of General Relativity describes, in particular, a pair of interacting spinning black holes; however, in the framework of low--energy string theory the double Ernst system can be particularly interpreted as the rotating field configuration of two interacting sources of black hole type coupled to dilaton and Kalb--Ramond fields. We clarify the rotating character of the $B_{t\phi}$--component of the antisymmetric tensor field of Kalb--Ramond and discuss on its possible torsion nature. We also recall the fact that the double Ernst system possesses a discrete symmetry which is used to relate physically different string vacua. Therefore we apply the normalized Harrison transformation (a charging symmetry which acts on the target space of the low--energy heterotic string theory preserving the asymptotics of the transformed fields and endowing them with multiple electromagnetic charges) on a generic solution of the double Ernst system and compute the generated field configurations for the 4D effective field theory of the heterotic string. This transformation generates the $U(1)^n$ vector field content of the whole low--energy heterotic string spectrum and gives rise to a pair of interacting rotating black holes endowed with dilaton, Kalb--Ramond and multiple electromagnetic fields where the charge vectors are orthogonal to each other.Comment: 15 pages in latex, revised versio

Symbol detection in online handwritten graphics using Faster R-CNN

Symbol detection techniques in online handwritten graphics (e.g. diagrams and mathematical expressions) consist of methods specifically designed for a single graphic type. In this work, we evaluate the Faster R-CNN object detection algorithm as a general method for detection of symbols in handwritten graphics. We evaluate different configurations of the Faster R-CNN method, and point out issues relative to the handwritten nature of the data. Considering the online recognition context, we evaluate efficiency and accuracy trade-offs of using Deep Neural Networks of different complexities as feature extractors. We evaluate the method on publicly available flowchart and mathematical expression (CROHME-2016) datasets. Results show that Faster R-CNN can be effectively used on both datasets, enabling the possibility of developing general methods for symbol detection, and furthermore, general graphic understanding methods that could be built on top of the algorithm.Comment: Submitted to DAS-201

Gluon mass and freezing of the QCD coupling

Infrared finite solutions for the gluon propagator of pure QCD are obtained from the gauge-invariant non-linear Schwinger-Dyson equation formulated in the Feynman gauge of the background field method. These solutions may be fitted using a massive propagator, with the special characteristic that the effective mass employed drops asymptotically as the inverse square of the momentum transfer, in agreement with general operator-product expansion arguments. Due to the presence of the dynamical gluon mass the strong effective charge extracted from these solutions freezes at a finite value, giving rise to an infrared fixed point for QCD.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, based on talk given at the 2007 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics, Manchester, 19-25 Jul

Single top polarisation as a window to new physics

We discuss the effect of heavy new physics, parameterised in terms of four-fermion operators, in the polarisation of single top (anti-)quarks in the $t$-channel process at the LHC. It is found that for operators involving a right-handed top quark field the relative effect on the longitudinal polarisation is twice larger than the relative effect on the total cross section. This enhanced dependence on possible four-fermion contributions makes the polarisation measurements specially interesting, in particular at high momenta.Comment: LaTeX 10 pages. v2: comments and references added, journal versio

Top effective operators at the ILC

We investigate the effect of top trilinear operators in t tbar production at the ILC. We find that the sensitivity to these operators largely surpasses the one achievable by the LHC either in neutral or charged current processes, allowing to probe new physics scales up to 4.5 TeV for a centre of mass energy of 500 GeV. We show how the use of beam polarisation and an eventual energy upgrade to 1 TeV allow to disentangle all effective operator contributions to the Ztt and gamma tt vertices.Comment: LaTeX 13 pages. Typos corrected. Final version in JHE

Top effective operators at the ILC

We investigate the effect of top trilinear operators in t tbar production at the ILC. We find that the sensitivity to these operators largely surpasses the one achievable by the LHC either in neutral or charged current processes, allowing to probe new physics scales up to 4.5 TeV for a centre of mass energy of 500 GeV. We show how the use of beam polarisation and an eventual energy upgrade to 1 TeV allow to disentangle all effective operator contributions to the Ztt and gamma tt vertices.Comment: LaTeX 13 pages. Typos corrected. Final version in JHE