Penetrating particle ANalyzer (PAN)

PAN is a scientific instrument suitable for deep space and interplanetary missions. It can precisely measure and monitor the flux, composition, and direction of highly penetrating particles ($> \sim$100 MeV/nucleon) in deep space, over at least one full solar cycle (~11 years). The science program of PAN is multi- and cross-disciplinary, covering cosmic ray physics, solar physics, space weather and space travel. PAN will fill an observation gap of galactic cosmic rays in the GeV region, and provide precise information of the spectrum, composition and emission time of energetic particle originated from the Sun. The precise measurement and monitoring of the energetic particles is also a unique contribution to space weather studies. PAN will map the flux and composition of penetrating particles, which cannot be shielded effectively, precisely and continuously, providing valuable input for the assessment of the related health risk, and for the development of an adequate mitigation strategy. PAN has the potential to become a standard on-board instrument for deep space human travel. PAN is based on the proven detection principle of a magnetic spectrometer, but with novel layout and detection concept. It will adopt advanced particle detection technologies and industrial processes optimized for deep space application. The device will require limited mass (~20 kg) and power (~20 W) budget. Dipole magnet sectors built from high field permanent magnet Halbach arrays, instrumented in a modular fashion with high resolution silicon strip detectors, allow to reach an energy resolution better than 10\% for nuclei from H to Fe at 1 GeV/n

Joint topology optimization, power control and spectrum allocation for intra-vehicular multi-hop sensor networks using dandelion-encoded heuristics

In the last years the interest in multi-hop communications has gained momentum within the research community due to the challenging characteristics of the intra-vehicular radio environment and the stringent robustness imposed on critical sensors within the vehicle. As opposed to point-to-point network topologies, multi-hop networking allows for an enhanced communication reliability at the cost of an additional processing overhead. In this context this manuscript poses a novel bi-objective optimization problem aimed at jointly minimizing (1) the average Bit Error Rate (BER) of sensing nodes under a majority fusion rule at the central data collection unit; and (2) the mean delay experienced by packets forwarded by such nodes due to multi-hop networking, frequency channel switching time multiplexing at intermediate nodes. The formulated paradigm is shown to be computationally tractable via a combination of evolutionary meta-heuristic algorithms and Dandelion codes, the latter capable of representing tree-like structures like those modeling the multi-hop routing approach. Simulations are carried out for realistic values of intra-vehicular radio channels and co-channel interference due to nearby IEEE 802.11 signals. The obtained results are promising and pave the way towards assessing the practical performance of the proposed scheme in real setups

UPGRADE OF THE PS BOOSTER-TO-ISOLDE BEAM TRANSFER LINE TO FACILITATE AN INCREASE IN PROTON DRIVER ENERGY

Following the successful completion of the LHC Injectors Upgrade (LIU) project, since 2021 the Proton Synchrotron (PS) Booster has served the LHC injector chain with protons at an increased kinetic energy of 2 GeV. An upgrade of the ISOLDE (Isotope Separator On-Line DEvice) facility has long been considered to produce radioactive ion beams with a higher energy proton driver beam. A Consolidation and Improvements programme is presently underway to maintain ISOLDE’s position as a world-leading ISOL facility in the decades to come, with activities planned during the upcoming Long Shutdown 3 (LS3) (2026 - 28) and beyond. This contribution details a study to upgrade the beam line from the PS Booster to ISOLDE to operate between 1.4 and 2 GeV, and to increase the power of the proton driver in the future, assuming the replacement of the two beam dumps behind the facility’s production targets

The Large Hadron-Electron Collider at the HL-LHC

The Large Hadron-Electron Collider (LHeC) is designed to move the field of deep inelastic scattering (DIS) to the energy and intensity frontier of particle physics. Exploiting energy-recovery technology, it collides a novel, intense electron beam with a proton or ion beam from the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). The accelerator and interaction region are designed for concurrent electron-proton and proton-proton operations. This report represents an update to the LHeC's conceptual design report (CDR), published in 2012. It comprises new results on the parton structure of the proton and heavier nuclei, QCD dynamics, and electroweak and top-quark physics. It is shown how the LHeC will open a new chapter of nuclear particle physics by extending the accessible kinematic range of lepton-nucleus scattering by several orders of magnitude. Due to its enhanced luminosity and large energy and the cleanliness of the final hadronic states, the LHeC has a strong Higgs physics programme and its own discovery potential for new physics. Building on the 2012 CDR, this report contains a detailed updated design for the energy-recovery electron linac (ERL), including a new lattice, magnet and superconducting radio-frequency technology, and further components. Challenges of energy recovery are described, and the lower-energy, high-current, three-turn ERL facility, PERLE at Orsay, is presented, which uses the LHeC characteristics serving as a development facility for the design and operation of the LHeC. An updated detector design is presented corresponding to the acceptance, resolution, and calibration goals that arise from the Higgs and parton-density-function physics programmes. This paper also presents novel results for the Future Circular Collider in electron-hadron (FCC-eh) mode, which utilises the same ERL technology to further extend the reach of DIS to even higher centre-of-mass energies.Peer reviewe

A unified latent variable model for contrastive opinion mining

There are large and growing textual corpora in which people express contrastive opinions about the same topic. This has led to an increasing number of studies about contrastive opinion mining. However, there are several notable issues with the existing studies. They mostly focus on mining contrastive opinions from multiple data collections, which need to be separated into their respective collections beforehand. In addition, existing models are opaque in terms of the relationship between topics that are extracted and the sentences in the corpus which express the topics; this opacity does not help us understand the opinions expressed in the corpus. Finally, contrastive opinion is mostly analysed qualitatively rather than quantitatively. This paper addresses these matters and proposes a novel unified latent variable model (contraLDA), which: mines contrastive opinions from both single and multiple data collections, extracts the sentences that project the contrastive opinion, and measures the strength of opinion contrastiveness towards the extracted topics. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our model in mining contrasted opinions, which outperformed our baselines in extracting coherent and informative sentiment-bearing topics. We further show the accuracy of our model in classifying topics and sentiments of textual data, and we compared our results to five strong baselines

The Forward Physics Facility at the High-Luminosity LHC

High energy collisions at the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produce a large number of particles along the beam collision axis, outside of the acceptance of existing LHC experiments. The proposed Forward Physics Facility (FPF), to be located several hundred meters from the ATLAS interaction point and shielded by concrete and rock, will host a suite of experiments to probe standard model (SM) processes and search for physics beyond the standard model (BSM). In this report, we review the status of the civil engineering plans and the experiments to explore the diverse physics signals that can be uniquely probed in the forward region. FPF experiments will be sensitive to a broad range of BSM physics through searches for new particle scattering or decay signatures and deviations from SM expectations in high statistics analyses with TeV neutrinos in this low-background environment. High statistics neutrino detection will also provide valuable data for fundamental topics in perturbative and non-perturbative QCD and in weak interactions. Experiments at the FPF will enable synergies between forward particle production at the LHC and astroparticle physics to be exploited. We report here on these physics topics, on infrastructure, detector, and simulation studies, and on future directions to realize the FPF's physics potential