Intercalibration of the barrel electromagnetic calorimeter of the CMS experiment at start-up

Calibration of the relative response of the individual channels of the barrel electromagnetic calorimeter of the CMS detector was accomplished, before installation, with cosmic ray muons and test beams. One fourth of the calorimeter was exposed to a beam of high energy electrons and the relative calibration of the channels, the intercalibration, was found to be reproducible to a precision of about 0.3%. Additionally, data were collected with cosmic rays for the entire ECAL barrel during the commissioning phase. By comparing the intercalibration constants obtained with the electron beam data with those from the cosmic ray data, it is demonstrated that the latter provide an intercalibration precision of 1.5% over most of the barrel ECAL. The best intercalibration precision is expected to come from the analysis of events collected in situ during the LHC operation. Using data collected with both electrons and pion beams, several aspects of the intercalibration procedures based on electrons or neutral pions were investigated

Search for gravitational waves from low mass compact binary coalescence in LIGO's sixth science run and Virgo's science runs 2 and 3

We report on a search for gravitational waves from coalescing compact binaries using LIGO and Virgo observations between July 7, 2009, and October 20, 2010. We searched for signals from binaries with total mass between 2 and 25M⊙; this includes binary neutron stars, binary black holes, and binaries consisting of a black hole and neutron star. The detectors were sensitive to systems up to 40 Mpc distant for binary neutron stars, and further for higher mass systems. No gravitational-wave signals were detected. We report upper limits on the rate of compact binary coalescence as a function of total mass, including the results from previous LIGO and Virgo observations. The cumulative 90% confidence rate upper limits of the binary coalescence of binary neutron star, neutron star-black hole, and binary black hole systems are 1.3×10−4, 3.1×10−5, and 6.4×10−6  Mpc−3 yr−1, respectively. These upper limits are up to a factor 1.4 lower than previously derived limits. We also report on results from a blind injection challenge. © 2012 The American Physical Societ

Upper limits on a stochastic gravitational-wave background using LIGO and Virgo interferometers at 600-1000 Hz

A stochastic background of gravitational waves is expected to arise from a superposition of many incoherent sources of gravitational waves, of either cosmological or astrophysical origin. This background is a target for the current generation of ground-based detectors. In this article we present the first joint search for a stochastic background using data from the LIGO and Virgo interferometers. In a frequency band of 600–1000 Hz, we obtained a 95% upper limit on the amplitude of ΩGW(f)=Ω3(f/900  Hz)3, of Ω3<0.32, assuming a value of the Hubble parameter of h100=0.71. These new limits are a factor of seven better than the previous best in this frequency band. © 2012 The American Physical Societ

All-sky search for gravitational-wave bursts in the second joint LIGO-Virgo run

We present results from a search for gravitational-wave bursts in the data collected by the LIGO and Virgo detectors between July 7, 2009 and October 20, 2010: data are analyzed when at least two of the three LIGO-Virgo detectors are in coincident operation, with a total observation time of 207 days. The analysis searches for transients of duration ≲1  s over the frequency band 64–5000 Hz, without other assumptions on the signal waveform, polarization, direction or occurrence time. All identified events are consistent with the expected accidental background. We set frequentist upper limits on the rate of gravitational-wave bursts by combining this search with the previous LIGO-Virgo search on the data collected between November 2005 and October 2007. The upper limit on the rate of strong gravitational-wave bursts at the Earth is 1.3 events per year at 90% confidence. We also present upper limits on source rate density per year and Mpc3 for sample populations of standard-candle sources. As in the previous joint run, typical sensitivities of the search in terms of the root-sum-squared strain amplitude for these waveforms lie in the range ∼5×10−22  Hz−1/2 to ∼1×10−20  Hz−1/2. The combination of the two joint runs entails the most sensitive all-sky search for generic gravitational-wave bursts and synthesizes the results achieved by the initial generation of interferometric detectors. © 2012 The American Physical Societ

All-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in the full S5 LIGO data

We report on an all-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in the frequency band 50–800 Hz and with the frequency time derivative in the range of 0 through −6×10−9  Hz/s. Such a signal could be produced by a nearby spinning and slightly nonaxisymmetric isolated neutron star in our Galaxy. After recent improvements in the search program that yielded a 10× increase in computational efficiency, we have searched in two years of data collected during LIGO’s fifth science run and have obtained the most sensitive all-sky upper limits on gravitational-wave strain to date. Near 150 Hz our upper limit on worst-case linearly polarized strain amplitude h0 is 1×10−24, while at the high end of our frequency range we achieve a worst-case upper limit of 3.8×10−24 for all polarizations and sky locations. These results constitute a factor of 2 improvement upon previously published data. A new detection pipeline utilizing a loosely coherent algorithm was able to follow up weaker outliers, increasing the volume of space where signals can be detected by a factor of 10, but has not revealed any gravitational-wave signals. The pipeline has been tested for robustness with respect to deviations from the model of an isolated neutron star, such as caused by a low-mass or long-period binary companion. © 2012 The American Physical Societ

Horizontal Branch Stars: The Interplay between Observations and Theory, and Insights into the Formation of the Galaxy

We review HB stars in a broad astrophysical context, including both variable and non-variable stars. A reassessment of the Oosterhoff dichotomy is presented, which provides unprecedented detail regarding its origin and systematics. We show that the Oosterhoff dichotomy and the distribution of globular clusters (GCs) in the HB morphology-metallicity plane both exclude, with high statistical significance, the possibility that the Galactic halo may have formed from the accretion of dwarf galaxies resembling present-day Milky Way satellites such as Fornax, Sagittarius, and the LMC. A rediscussion of the second-parameter problem is presented. A technique is proposed to estimate the HB types of extragalactic GCs on the basis of integrated far-UV photometry. The relationship between the absolute V magnitude of the HB at the RR Lyrae level and metallicity, as obtained on the basis of trigonometric parallax measurements for the star RR Lyrae, is also revisited, giving a distance modulus to the LMC of (m-M)_0 = 18.44+/-0.11. RR Lyrae period change rates are studied. Finally, the conductive opacities used in evolutionary calculations of low-mass stars are investigated. [ABRIDGED]Comment: 56 pages, 22 figures. Invited review, to appear in Astrophysics and Space Scienc

Search for gravitational waves from compact binary coalescence in LIGO and Virgo data from S5 and VSR1

We report the results of the first search for gravitational waves from compact binary coalescence using data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory and Virgo detectors. Five months of data were collected during the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory’s S5 and Virgo’s VSR1 science runs. The search focused on signals from binary mergers with a total mass between 2 and 35M⊙. No gravitational waves are identified. The cumulative 90%-confidence upper limits on the rate of compact binary coalescence are calculated for nonspinning binary neutron stars, black hole-neutron star systems, and binary black holes to be 8.7×10−3  yr−1 L10−1, 2.2×10−3  yr−1 L10−1, and 4.4×10−4  yr−1 L10−1, respectively, where L10 is 1010 times the blue solar luminosity. These upper limits are compared with astrophysical expectations. © 2010 The American Physical Societ

Search for gravitational waves from intermediate mass binary black holes

We present the results of a weakly modeled burst search for gravitational waves from mergers of nonspinning intermediate mass black holes in the total mass range 100–450  M⊙ and with the component mass ratios between 1∶1 and 4∶1. The search was conducted on data collected by the LIGO and Virgo detectors between November of 2005 and October of 2007. No plausible signals were observed by the search which constrains the astrophysical rates of the intermediate mass black holes mergers as a function of the component masses. In the most efficiently detected bin centered on 88+88  M⊙, for nonspinning sources, the rate density upper limit is 0.13 per Mpc3 per Myr at the 90% confidence level. © 2012 The American Physical Societ

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Jet size dependence of single jet suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s(NN)) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide direct sensitivity to the physics of jet quenching. In a sample of lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s) = 2.76 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 7 inverse microbarns, ATLAS has measured jets with a calorimeter over the pseudorapidity interval |eta| < 2.1 and over the transverse momentum range 38 < pT < 210 GeV. Jets were reconstructed using the anti-kt algorithm with values for the distance parameter that determines the nominal jet radius of R = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5. The centrality dependence of the jet yield is characterized by the jet "central-to-peripheral ratio," Rcp. Jet production is found to be suppressed by approximately a factor of two in the 10% most central collisions relative to peripheral collisions. Rcp varies smoothly with centrality as characterized by the number of participating nucleons. The observed suppression is only weakly dependent on jet radius and transverse momentum. These results provide the first direct measurement of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions and complement previous measurements of dijet transverse energy imbalance at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Physics Letters B. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HION-2011-02