Status and prospects for the LHCb upgrade

High-precision measurements performed by the LHCb collaboration have opened a new era in charm physics. Several crucial measurements, particularly in spectroscopy, rare decays and CP violation, can benefit from the increased statistical power of an upgraded LHCb detector. The upgrade of LHCb detector, its software infrastructure, and the impact on charm physics are discussed in detail.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of The 6th International Workshop on Charm Physics (CHARM 2013

Gauging Airbnb review sentiments and critical key-topics by small area estimation

In literature, several researchers have discovered that the reviews written about Airbnb accommodation tend to be extremely positive than those published on other famous platforms, consequently, many negative experiences remain untracked. Leaving negative experiences underrepresented hampers hosts’ ability to improve their services. To overcome this gap, we employ Small Area Estimation to quantify negative sentiment in Airbnb reviews and the relative critical topics that characterize them. Our methodology involves a two-step process: frst, we employ sentiment analysis and topic modeling to identify negative sentiment and critical issues, followed by the application of a mixed efect random forest model to provide a granular analysis of Airbnb reviews in small sub-populations in the context of small area estimation. We focus on domains of the city of Rome defned by geographical areas and the presence of hosts and Superhosts. Our fndings reveal nuanced sentiment variations and critical topic proportions that traditional methods often overlook

Involving medical students in re-orienting health services: a photovoice study.

Abstract Introduction. Health promotion healthcare reorientation aims for health services focused not exclusively on diseases but also on prevention and health promotion. The implementation depends strongly on professionals’ willingness to actively participate in the reorientation. An effective strategy to boost reorientation is to reorient education and role definition of future professionals. This paper examines whether photovoice, a qualitative research method, can be suitable to i) increase future health professionals’ awareness of users’ needs and expectations; and ii) enable a process of critical reflection on role definition and health services organisation. Methods. One hundred and seventy-two medical students participated in the photovoice project. Participants were asked to produce one photo combined with an accompanying caption, responding to a pre-identified question: “What is, in your opinion, the main aspect affecting users' satisfaction/dissatisfaction in a healthcare facility?”. Participants discussed their photos in group discussions (n=16) and participated in data analysis sessions (n=4). Results. Participants' contributions revolved around how services were delivered (e.g., kindness, accessibility, attention to additional needs) rather than the service provided. The students showed their empathic side and proposed smart and inclusive solutions to improve users' overall experience. The proposals often implied a change in behaviour of professionals -their future selves- towards patients and low-cost improvements of organisational practices. Conclusions. This study demonstrated the value of using photovoice to reach medical students to integrate health promotion into their professional identities. The photovoice process, teamwork, and discussions opened a breach into traditional thinking about healthcare aspects often taken for granted or overlooked.  Our results confirm that a mix of advanced education and community-based participatory research activities has the potential to produce medical doctors responsive to users’ needs. This low-cost strategy should be considered for future interventions aimed at reorienting healthcare

Medusa, a multithread 4-body decay fitting and simulation software

We present a new C++14 compliant application to perform physics data analyses of generic 4-body decays in massively parallel platforms. Medusa is highly based on Hydra, a header-only library which hides most of the complexities of writing parallel code for different architectures. Medusa has been tested through the measurement of the CP-violating phase ϕsin b-hadron decays exploiting the data collected by the LHCb experiment. Medusa executes the optimization of the full model, running over 500000 events, until 330 times faster than a non-parallelized program. Medusa is freely available on GitHub under GPL v.3.0 license

Both Maternal High-Fat and Post-Weaning High-Carbohydrate Diets Increase Rates of Spontaneous Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Aged-Mouse Offspring

Both maternal obesity and postnatal consumption of obesogenic diets contribute to the development of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, there is no consensus as to whether diets that are high in fat or carbohydrates/sugars differentially influence the development of HCC. Moreover, the long-term effects of prenatal HF exposure on HCC and whether this is influenced by postnatal diet has not yet been evaluated. C57BL/6 dams were fed either a low-fat, high-carbohydrate control (C) or low-carbohydrate, high-fat (HF) diet. At weaning, male and female offspring were fed the C or HF diet, generating four diet groups: C/C, C/HF, HF/C and HF/HF. Tissues were collected at 16 months of age and livers were assessed for MASLD and HCC. Glucose regulation and pancreatic morphology were also evaluated. Liver tissues were assessed for markers of glycolysis and fatty acid metabolism and validated using a human HCC bioinformatic database. Both C/HF and HF/HF mice developed obesity, hyperinsulinemia and a greater degree of MASLD than C/C and HF/C offspring. However, despite significant liver and pancreas pathology, C/HF mice had the lowest incidence of HCC while tumour burden was highest in HF/C male offspring. The molecular profile of HCC mouse samples suggested an upregulation of the pentose phosphate pathway and a downregulation of fatty acid synthesis and oxidation, which was largely validated in the human dataset. Both pre-weaning HF diet exposure and post-weaning consumption of a high-carbohydrate diet increased the risk of developing spontaneous HCC in aged mice. However, the influence of pre-weaning HF feeding on HCC development appeared to be stronger in the context of post-weaning obesity. As rates of maternal obesity continue to rise, this has implications for the future incidence of HCC and possible dietary manipulation of offspring carbohydrate intake to counteract this risk

Demonstration of track reconstruction with FPGAs on live data at LHCb

The LHCb experiment is currently taking data with a completely renewed DAQ system, capable for the first time of performing a full real-time reconstruction of all collision events occurring at LHC point 8. The Collaboration is now pursuing a further upgrade (“LHCb Upgrade-II”), to enable the experiment to retain the same capability at luminosities an order of magnitude larger than the maximum planned for the current Run3. To this purpose, a vigorous R&D program is ongoing to boost the real-time processing capability of LHCb, needed to cope both with the luminosity increase and the adoption of correspondingly more granular and complex detectors. New heterogeneous computing solutions are being explored, with the aim of moving reconstruction and data reduction to the earliest possible stages of processing. In this talk, we describe the results obtained from a realistic demonstrator for a high-throughput reconstruction of tracking detectors, operating parasitically on real LHCb data from Run3 in a purposely-built testbed facility. This demonstrator is based on a extremely parallel, “Artificial Retina” architecture, implemented in commercial, PCIe-hosted FPGA cards interconnected by fast optical links, and encompasses a sizeable fraction of the LHCb VELO pixel detector. The implications of the results in view of potential applications in HEP are discussed

Correlated 0.01Hz-40Hz seismic and Newtonian noise and its impact on future gravitational-wave detectors

We report correlations in underground seismic measurements with horizontal separations of several hundreds of meters to a few kilometers in the frequency range 0.01Hz to 40Hz. These seismic correlations could threaten science goals of planned interferometric gravitational-wave detectors such as the Einstein Telescope as well as atom interferometers such as MIGA and ELGAR. We use seismic measurements from four different sites, i.e. the former Homestake mine (USA) as well as two candidate sites for the Einstein Telescope, Sos Enattos (IT) and Euregio Maas-Rhein (NL-BE-DE) and the site housing the MIGA detector, LSBB (FR). At all sites, we observe significant coherence for at least 50% of the time in the majority of the frequency region of interest. Based on the observed correlations in the seismic fields, we predict levels of correlated Newtonian noise from body waves. We project the effect of correlated Newtonian noise from body waves on the capabilities of the triangular design of the Einstein Telescope's to observe an isotropic gravitational-wave background (GWB) and find that, even in case of the most quiet site, its sensitivity will be affected up to $\sim$20Hz. The resolvable amplitude of a GWB signal with a negatively sloped power-law behaviour would be reduced by several orders of magnitude. However, the resolvability of a power-law signal with a slope of e.g. $\alpha=0$ ($\alpha=2/3$) would be more moderately affected by a factor $\sim$ 6-9 ($\sim$3-4) in case of a low noise environment. Furthermore, we bolster confidence in our results by showing that transient noise features have a limited impact on the presented results

Characterizing the Sardinia candidate site for the Einstein Telescope

Due to its unique geophysical features and to the low density population of the area, Sos Enattos is a promising candidate site to host the Einstein Telescope (ET), the third-generation Gravitational Wave Observatory. The geophysical characterization of the Sos Enattos former mine, close to one of the proposed ET corners, started in 2010 with the deployment of seismic and environmental sensors underground. Since 2019 a new extensive array of seismometers, magnetometers and acoustic sensors have been installed in three stations along the underground tunnels, with one additional station at the surface. Beside a new geological survey over a wider area, two boreholes about 270 m deep each were excavated at the other two corners, determining the good quality of the drilled granite and orthogneiss rocks and the absence of significant thoroughgoing fault zones. These boreholes are instrumented with broadband seismometers that revealed an outstanding low level of vibrational noise in the low-frequency band of ET-LF (2-10Hz), significantly lower than the Peterson's NLNM and resulting among the quietest seismic stations in the world in that frequency band. The low seismic background and the reduced number of seismic glitches ensure that just a moderated Newtonian noise subtraction would be needed to achieve the ET target sensitivity. Geoelectrical and active seismic campaigns have been carried out to reveal the features of the subsurface, revealing the presence of small-sized fractured areas with limited water circulation. Finally, temporary arrays of seismometers, magnetometers and acoustic sensors are deployed in the area to study the local sources of environmental noise