Resonant production of the fourth family slepton at the LHC

The resonant production of the fourth family slepton ~l_4 via R-parity violating interactions of supersymmetry at the Large Hadron Collider has been investigated. We study the decay mode of ~l_4 into the fourth family neutrino nu_4 and W boson. The signal will be a like-sign dimuon and dijet if the fourth family neutrino has Majorana nature. We discuss the constraints on the R-parity violating couplings lambda and lambda' of the fourth family charged slepton at the LHC with the center of mass energies of 7, 10 and 14 TeV.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 4 table

Probing Charged Higgs Boson Couplings at the FCC-hh Collider

Many of the new physics models predicts a light Higgs boson similar to the Higgs boson of the Standard Model (SM) and also extra scalar bosons. Beyond the search channels for a SM Higgs boson, the future collider experiments will explore additional channels that are specific to extended Higgs sectors. We study the charged Higgs boson production within the framework of two Higgs doublet models (THDM) in the proton-proton collisions at the FCC-hh collider. With an integrated luminosity of 500 fb$^{-1}$ at very high energy frontier, we obtain a significant coverage of the parameter space and distinguish the charged Higgs-top-bottom interaction within the THDM or other new physics models with charged Higgs boson mass up to 1 TeV.Comment: 22 pages, 26 figures, 6 table

Simulation and Efficiency Studies of Optical Photon Transportation and Detection with Plastic Antineutrino Detector Modules

In this work, the simulation of optical photons is carried out in an antineutrino detector module consisting of a plastic scintillator connected to light guides and photomultipliers on both ends, which is considered to be used for remote reactor monitoring in the field of nuclear safety. Using Monte Carlo (MC) based GEANT4 simulation, numerous parameters influencing the light collection and thereby the energy resolution of the antineutrino detector module are studied: e.g., degrees of scintillator surface roughness, reflector type, and its ap- plying method onto scintillator and light guide surface, the reflectivity of the reflector, light guide geometries and diameter of the photocathode. The impact of each parameter is inves- tigated by looking at the detected spectrum, i.e. the number photoelectrons per depositing energy. In addition, the average light collection efficiency of the detector module and its spatial variation are calculated for each simulation setup. According to the simulation re- sults, it is found that photocathode size, light guide shape, reflectivity of reflecting material and wrapping method show a significant impact on the light collection efficiency while scin- tillator surface polishing level and the choose of reflector type show relatively less impact. This study demonstrates that these parameters are very important in the design of plastic scintillator included antineutrino detectors to improve the energy resolution efficiency

Comparison of Plastic Antineutrino Detector Designs in the Context of Near Field Reactor Monitoring

We compare existing segmented plastic antineutrino detectors with our new geometrically improved design for antineutrino detection and light collection efficiency. The purpose of this study is to determine the most suitable design style for remote reactor monitoring in the context of nuclear safeguards. Using Monte Carlo based GEANT4 simulation package, we perform detector simulation based on two prominent experiments: Plastic antineutrino detector array (Panda) and Core monitoring by reactor antineutrino detector (Cormorad). In addition to these two well-known designs, another concept, the Panda2, can be obtained by making a small variation of Panda detector, is also considered in the simulation. The results show that the light collection efficiency of the Cormorad is substantially less with respect to the other two detectors while the highest antineutrino detection efficiency is achieved with the Cormorad and Panda2. Furthermore, as an alternative to these design choices, which are composed of an array of identical rectangular-shaped modules, we propose to combine regular hexagonal-shaped modules which minimizes the surface area of the whole detector and consequently reduces the number of optical readout channels considerably. With this approach, it is possible to obtain a detector configuration with a slightly higher detection efficiency with respect to the Panda design and a better energy resolution detector compared to the Cormorad design

Factors influencing Barley Stripe Mosaic Virus-mediated gene silencing in wheat

Virus induced gene silencing (VIGS) is a technology that has been used primarily to target the virus genome in infected plants. However, if the virus genome carries inserts derived from the host plant, the system could be employed to target the mRNAs corresponding to the host gene. Barley Stripe Mosaic Virus (BSMV), a disease of various cereals including barley and wheat, has been one of the successfully used viral RNA silencing tools in monocotyledonous plants for the last decade. In this study, we investigated several factors that play a significant role in VIGS. We tested the efficiency of silencing two genes simultaneously using the BSMV-induced gene silencing (IGS) system in detail. We found that two genes could be silenced simultaneously using BSMV-IGS. However, the silencing efficiency was found to be influenced by several factors including stability of the insert, temperature, and the accumulation of small viral RNAs from BSMV. The effect of these factors on VIGS system has been discussed

Stress Response in Confined Arrays of Frictional and Frictionless Particles

Stress transmission inside three dimensional granular packings is investigated using computer simulations. Localized force perturbation techniques are implemented for frictionless and frictional shallow, ordered, granular arrays confined by solid boundaries for a range of system sizes. Stress response profiles for frictional packings agree well with the predictions for the semi-infinite half plane of classical isotropic elasticity theory down to boxes of linear dimensions of approximately forty particle diameters and over several orders of magnitude in the applied force. The response profiles for frictionless packings exhibit a transitional regime to strongly anisotropic features with increasing box size. The differences between the nature of the stress response are shown to be characterized by very different particle displacement fields.Comment: To appear in J. Sta