Integrated scheme of rapid environmental assessment for shallow water acoustics

Predicting sound propagation in shallow or very shallow water environments requires that the frequency-dependent acoustic properties be assessed for all components of the waveguide, i.e., the water column, sea bottom and sea surface interface. During the Maritime Rapid Environmental Assessment MREA?BP'07 sea trial in April-May 2007, south of Elba Island in the Mediterranean Sea, an integrated MREA scheme has been implemented to provide a full 4D (3D+T) environmental picture that is directly exploitable by acoustic propagation models. Based on a joint multi-disciplinary effort, several standard and advanced techniques of environmental characterization covering the fields of underwater acoustics, physical oceanography and geophysics have been combined within a coherent scheme of data acquisition, processing and assimilation. The paper presents the whole architecture of the implemented scheme. Based on a preliminary analysis of MREA?BP'07 data, advantages and drawbacks of the approach will be discussed. Ways ahead for further improvement and perspectives are finally drawn

The PCIe-based readout system for the LHCb experiment

International audienceThe LHCb experiment is designed to study differences between particles and anti-particles as well as very rare decays in the beauty and charm sector at the LHC. The detector will be upgraded in 2019 in order to significantly increase its efficiency, by removing the first-level hardware trigger. The upgrade experiment will implement a trigger-less readout system in which all the data from every LHC bunch-crossing are transported to the computing farm over 12000 optical links without hardware filtering. The event building and event selection are carried out entirely in the farm. Another original feature of the system is that data transmitted through these fibres arrive directly to computers through a specially designed PCIe card called PCIe40. The same board handles the data acquisition flow and the distribution of fast and slow controls to the detector front-end electronics. It embeds one of the most powerful FPGAs currently available on the market with 1.2 million logic cells. The board has a bandwidth of 480 Gbits/s in both input and output over optical links and 100 Gbits/s over the PCI Express bus to the CPU. We will present how data circulate through the board and in the PC server for achieving the event building. We will focus on specific issues regarding the design of such a board with a very large FPGA, in particular in terms of power supply dimensioning and thermal simulations. The features of the board will be detailed and we will finally present the first performance measurement

The Level-0 Muon Trigger for the LHCb Experiment

A very compact architecture has been developed for the first level Muon Trigger of the LHCb experiment that processes 40 millions of proton-proton collisions per second. For each collision, it receives 3.2 kBytes of data and it finds straight tracks within a 1.2 microseconds latency. The trigger implementation is massively parallel, pipelined and fully synchronous with the LHC clock. It relies on 248 high density Field Programable Gate arrays and on the massive use of multigigabit serial link transceivers embedded inside FPGAs.Comment: 33 pages, 16 figures, submitted to NIM

Conception and Validation Software Tools for the Level 0 Muon Trigger of LHCb

The Level-0 muon trigger processor of the LHCb experiment looks for straight particules crossing muon detector and measures their transverse momentum. It processes 40×106 proton-proton collisions per second. The tracking uses a road algorithm relying on the projectivity of the muon detector. The architecture of the Level-0 muon trigger is complex with a dense network of data interconnections. The design and validation of such an intricate system has only been possible with intense use of software tools for the detector simulation, the modelling of the hardware components behaviour and the validation. A database describing the dataflow is the corner stone between the software and hardware components

Test of CPT Symmetry and Quantum Mechanics with Experimental data from CPLEAR

We use fits to recent published CPLEAR data on neutral kaon decays to $\pi^+\pi^-$ and $\pi e\nu$ to constrain the CPT--violation parameters appearing in a formulation of the neutral kaon system as an open quantum-mechanical system. The obtained upper limits of the CPT--violation parameters are approaching the range suggested by certain ideas concerning quantum gravity.Comment: 9 pages of uuencoded postscript (includes 3 figures

Cancer-ID:Toward Identification of Cancer by Tumor-Derived Extracellular Vesicles in Blood

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) have great potential as biomarkers since their composition and concentration in biofluids are disease state dependent and their cargo can contain disease-related information. Large tumor-derived EVs (tdEVs, >1μm) in blood from cancer patients are associated with poor outcome, and changes in their number can be used to monitor therapy effectiveness. Whereas, small tumor-derived EVs (<1μm) are likely to outnumber their larger counterparts, thereby offering better statistical significance, identification and quantification of small tdEVs are more challenging. In the blood of cancer patients, a subpopulation of EVs originate from tumor cells, but these EVs are outnumbered by non-EV particles and EVs from other origin. In the Dutch NWO Perspectief Cancer-ID program, we developed and evaluated detection and characterization techniques to distinguish EVs from non-EV particles and other EVs. Despite low signal amplitudes, we identified characteristics of these small tdEVs that may enable the enumeration of small tdEVs and extract relevant information. The insights obtained from Cancer-ID can help to explore the full potential of tdEVs in the clinic

Opposite-side flavour tagging of B mesons at the LHCb experiment

The calibration and performance of the oppositeside flavour tagging algorithms used for the measurements of time-dependent asymmetries at the LHCb experiment are described. The algorithms have been developed using simulated events and optimized and calibrated with B + →J/ψK +, B0 →J/ψK ∗0 and B0 →D ∗− μ + νμ decay modes with 0.37 fb−1 of data collected in pp collisions at √ s = 7 TeV during the 2011 physics run. The oppositeside tagging power is determined in the B + → J/ψK + channel to be (2.10 ± 0.08 ± 0.24) %, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic

Search for CP violation in D+→K−K+π+D^{+} \to K^{-}K^{+}\pi^{+} decays

A model-independent search for direct CP violation in the Cabibbo suppressed decay $D^+ \to K^- K^+\pi^+$ in a sample of approximately 370,000 decays is carried out. The data were collected by the LHCb experiment in 2010 and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 35 pb$^{-1}$. The normalized Dalitz plot distributions for $D^+$ and $D^-$ are compared using four different binning schemes that are sensitive to different manifestations of CP violation. No evidence for CP asymmetry is found.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Differential branching fraction and angular analysis of the decay B0→K∗0μ+μ−

The angular distribution and differential branching fraction of the decay B 0→ K ∗0 μ + μ − are studied using a data sample, collected by the LHCb experiment in pp collisions at s√=7 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.0 fb−1. Several angular observables are measured in bins of the dimuon invariant mass squared, q 2. A first measurement of the zero-crossing point of the forward-backward asymmetry of the dimuon system is also presented. The zero-crossing point is measured to be q20=4.9±0.9GeV2/c4 , where the uncertainty is the sum of statistical and systematic uncertainties. The results are consistent with the Standard Model predictions

Observation of two new Ξb−\Xi_b^- baryon resonances

Two structures are observed close to the kinematic threshold in the $\Xi_b^0 \pi^-$ mass spectrum in a sample of proton-proton collision data, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3.0 fb$^{-1}$ recorded by the LHCb experiment. In the quark model, two baryonic resonances with quark content $bds$ are expected in this mass region: the spin-parity $J^P = \frac{1}{2}^+$ and $J^P=\frac{3}{2}^+$ states, denoted $\Xi_b^{\prime -}$ and $\Xi_b^{*-}$. Interpreting the structures as these resonances, we measure the mass differences and the width of the heavier state to be $m(\Xi_b^{\prime -}) - m(\Xi_b^0) - m(\pi^{-}) = 3.653 \pm 0.018 \pm 0.006$ MeV$/c^2$, $m(\Xi_b^{*-}) - m(\Xi_b^0) - m(\pi^{-}) = 23.96 \pm 0.12 \pm 0.06$ MeV$/c^2$, $\Gamma(\Xi_b^{*-}) = 1.65 \pm 0.31 \pm 0.10$ MeV, where the first and second uncertainties are statistical and systematic, respectively. The width of the lighter state is consistent with zero, and we place an upper limit of $\Gamma(\Xi_b^{\prime -}) < 0.08$ MeV at 95% confidence level. Relative production rates of these states are also reported.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figure