19,953 research outputs found
ALICE experience with GEANT4
Since its release in 1999, the LHC experiments have been evaluating GEANT4 in
view of adopting it as a replacement for the obsolescent GEANT3 transport
MonteCarlo. The ALICE collaboration has decided to perform a detailed physics
validation of elementary hadronic processes against experimental data already
used in international benchmarks. In one test, proton interactions on different
nuclear targets have been simulated, and the distribution of outgoing particles
has been compared to data. In a second test, penetration of quasi-monoenergetic
low energy neutrons through a thick shielding has been simulated and again
compared to experimental data. In parallel, an effort has been put on the
integration of GEANT4 in the AliRoot framework. An overview of the present
status of ALICE GEANT4 simulation and the remaining problems will be presented.
This document will describe in detail the results of these tests, together with
the improvements that the GEANT4 team has made to the program as a result of
the feedback received from the ALICE collaboration. We will also describe the
remaining problems that have been communicated to GEANT4 but not yet addressed.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures, for the CHEP03 conference proceeding
Recovery of normal heat conduction in harmonic chains with correlated disorder
We consider heat transport in one-dimensional harmonic chains with isotopic
disorder, focussing our attention mainly on how disorder correlations affect
heat conduction. Our approach reveals that long-range correlations can change
the number of low-frequency extended states. As a result, with a proper choice
of correlations one can control how the conductivity scales with the
chain length . We present a detailed analysis of the role of specific
long-range correlations for which a size-independent conductivity is exactly
recovered in the case of fixed boundary conditions. As for free boundary
conditions, we show that disorder correlations can lead to a conductivity
scaling as , with the scaling exponent
being arbitrarily small (although not strictly zero), so that
normal conduction is almost recovered even in this case.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure
Many-body effects in doped graphene on a piezoelectric substrate
We investigate the many-body properties of graphene on top of a piezoelectric
substrate, focusing on the interaction between the graphene electrons and the
piezoelectric acoustic phonons. We calculate the electron and phonon
self-energies as well as the electron mobility limited by the substrate
phonons. We emphasize the importance of the proper screening of the
electron-phonon vertex and discuss the various limiting behaviors as a function
of electron energy, temperature, and doping level. The effect on the graphene
electrons of the piezoelectric acoustic phonons is compared with that of the
intrinsic deformation acoustic phonons of graphene. Substrate phonons tend to
dominate over intrinsic ones for low doping levels at high and low
temperatures.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure
Green's functions for far-side seismic images: a polar expansion approach
We have computed seismic images of magnetic activity on the far surface of
the Sun by using a seismic-holography technique. As in previous works, the
method is based on the comparison of waves going in and out of a particular
point in the Sun but we have computed here the Green's functions from a
spherical polar expansion of the adiabatic wave equations in the Cowling
approximation instead of using the ray-path approximation previously used in
the far-side holography. A comparison between the results obtained using the
ray theory and the spherical polar expansion is shown. We use the
gravito-acoustic wave equation in the local plane-parallel limit in both cases
and for the latter we take the asymptotic approximation for the radial
dependencies of the Green's function. As a result, improved images of the
far-side can be obtained from the polar-expansion approximation, especially
when combining the Green's functions corresponding to two and three skips. We
also show that the phase corrections in the Green's functions due to the
incorrect modeling of the uppermost layers of the Sun can be estimated from the
eigenfrequencies of the normal modes of oscillation.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, Astrophysical Journal, accepted (2010
Charge control in laterally coupled double quantum dots
We investigate the electronic and optical properties of InAs double quantum
dots grown on GaAs (001) and laterally aligned along the [110] crystal
direction. The emission spectrum has been investigated as a function of a
lateral electric field applied along the quantum dot pair mutual axis. The
number of confined electrons can be controlled with the external bias leading
to sharp energy shifts which we use to identify the emission from neutral and
charged exciton complexes. Quantum tunnelling of these electrons is proposed to
explain the reversed ordering of the trion emission lines as compared to that
of excitons in our system.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures submitted to PRB Rapid Com
Forecasting Food Price Inflation in Developing Countries with Inflation Targeting Regimes: the Colombian Case
Many developing countries are adopting inflation targeting regimes to guide monetary policy decisions. In such countries the share of food in the consumption basket is high and policy makers often employ total inflation (as opposed to core inflation) to set inflationary targets. Therefore, central banks need to develop reliable models to forecast food inflation. Our literature review suggests that little has been done in the construction of models to forecast short-run food inflation in developing countries. We develop a model to improve short-run food inflation forecasts in Colombia. The model disaggregates food items according to economic theory and employs Flexible Least Squares given the presence of structural changes in the inflation series. We compare the performance of this new model to current models employed by the central bank. Next, we apply econometric methods to combine forecasts from alternative models and test whether such combination outperforms individual models. Our results indicate that forecasts can be improved by classifying food basket items according to unprocessed, processed and food away from home and by employing forecast combination techniques.Food Inflation, Time Series,
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