A Rapid Protocol for Somatic Embryogenesis Mediated Regeneration in Banana (Musa Spp.) Cv. Nendran

A simple and rapid protocol for somatic embryogenesis in banana cv. Nendran (AAB) using immature male flowers (IMF) has been developed. The IMF produced palewhite to yellow, globular embryogenic callus on MS medium supplemented with BA (0.05 - 0.50mgL-1) and picloram (0.50 - 2.00mgL-1) with explant response of to 30 per cent. Addition of ascorbic acid (20mgL-1) and Gelrite© (0.45 per cent) to callus induction medium reduced interference from phenolic exudation. Embryogenesis was induced (33.3 to 60 per cent) on semisolid (0.30 per cent Gelrite©) MS medium supplemented with BA 2mgL-1 + IAA 0.5mgL-1. The somatic embryos showed 60-80 per cent germination on half- strength semisolid MS medium with BA 2mgL-1 + IAA 0.5mgL-1. Transfer of germinated embryos to semisolid MS medium supplemented with BA 2mgL-1 + NAA 1mgL-1under 14 h light /8h dark photoperiod resulted in hundred percent conversion to plantlets. This protocol takes merely 6 months for producing plantlets from immature flower buds through somatic embryogenesis, without any intermediate liquid cultures

The Origin of Blue-Green Window and the Propagation of Radiation in Ocean Waters

A review of the present knowledge about the origin of blue-green window in the attenuation spectrum of ocean waters is presented. The various physical mechanisms which contribute to the formation of the w-indow are dealt separately and discussed. The typical values of attenuation coefficient arising out of the various processes are compiled to obtain the total beam attenuation coefficient. These values are then compared with measured values of attenuation coefficient for ocean waters collected from Arabian sea and Bay of Bengal. The region of minimum attenuation in pure particle-free sea water is found to be at 450 to 500 nm. It is sbown that in the presence of suspended 'particlesand chlorophyll, the window shifts to longer wavelength side. Some suggestions for future work in this area are also given in the concluding section

SND@LHC: The Scattering and Neutrino Detector at the LHC

SND@LHC is a compact and stand-alone experiment designed to perform measurements with neutrinos produced at the LHC in the pseudo-rapidity region of ${7.2 < \eta < 8.4}$. The experiment is located 480 m downstream of the ATLAS interaction point, in the TI18 tunnel. The detector is composed of a hybrid system based on an 830 kg target made of tungsten plates, interleaved with emulsion and electronic trackers, also acting as an electromagnetic calorimeter, and followed by a hadronic calorimeter and a muon identification system. The detector is able to distinguish interactions of all three neutrino flavours, which allows probing the physics of heavy flavour production at the LHC in the very forward region. This region is of particular interest for future circular colliders and for very high energy astrophysical neutrino experiments. The detector is also able to search for the scattering of Feebly Interacting Particles. In its first phase, the detector will operate throughout LHC Run 3 and collect a total of 250 $\text{fb}^{-1}$

The SHiP experiment at the proposed CERN SPS Beam Dump Facility

The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) Collaboration has proposed a general-purpose experimental facility operating in beam-dump mode at the CERN SPS accelerator to search for light, feebly interacting particles. In the baseline configuration, the SHiP experiment incorporates two complementary detectors. The upstream detector is designed for recoil signatures of light dark matter (LDM) scattering and for neutrino physics, in particular with tau neutrinos. It consists of a spectrometer magnet housing a layered detector system with high-density LDM/neutrino target plates, emulsion-film technology and electronic high-precision tracking. The total detector target mass amounts to about eight tonnes. The downstream detector system aims at measuring visible decays of feebly interacting particles to both fully reconstructed final states and to partially reconstructed final states with neutrinos, in a nearly background-free environment. The detector consists of a 50 m long decay volume under vacuum followed by a spectrometer and particle identification system with a rectangular acceptance of 5 m in width and 10 m in height. Using the high-intensity beam of 400 GeV protons, the experiment aims at profiting from the 4 x 10(19) protons per year that are currently unexploited at the SPS, over a period of 5-10 years. This allows probing dark photons, dark scalars and pseudo-scalars, and heavy neutral leptons with GeV-scale masses in the direct searches at sensitivities that largely exceed those of existing and projected experiments. The sensitivity to light dark matter through scattering reaches well below the dark matter relic density limits in the range from a few MeV/c(2) up to 100 MeV-scale masses, and it will be possible to study tau neutrino interactions with unprecedented statistics. This paper describes the SHiP experiment baseline setup and the detector systems, together with performance results from prototypes in test beams, as it was prepared for the 2020 Update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. The expected detector performance from simulation is summarised at the end

Track reconstruction and matching between emulsion and silicon pixel detectors for the SHiP-charm experiment

In July 2018 an optimization run for the proposed charm cross section measurement for SHiP was performed at the CERN SPS. A heavy, moving target instrumented with nuclear emulsion films followed by a silicon pixel tracker was installed in front of the Goliath magnet at the H4 proton beam-line. Behind the magnet, scintillating-fibre, drift-tube and RPC detectors were placed. The purpose of this run was to validate the measurement's feasibility, to develop the required analysis tools and fine-tune the detector layout. In this paper, we present the track reconstruction in the pixel tracker and the track matching with the moving emulsion detector. The pixel detector performed as expected and it is shown that, after proper alignment, a vertex matching rate of 87% is achieved