Measurement of the effect of Non Ionising Energy Losses on the leakage current of Silicon Drift Detector prototypes for the LOFT satellite

The silicon drift detectors are at the basis of the instrumentation aboard the Large Observatory For x-ray Timing (LOFT) satellite mission, which underwent a three year assessment phase within the "Cosmic Vision 2015 - 2025" long-term science plan of the European Space Agency. Silicon detectors are especially sensitive to the displacement damage, produced by the non ionising energy losses of charged and neutral particles, leading to an increase of the device leakage current and thus worsening the spectral resolution. During the LOFT assessment phase, we irradiated two silicon drift detectors with a proton beam at the Proton Irradiation Facility in the accelerator of the Paul Scherrer Institute and we measured the increase in leakage current. In this paper we report the results of the irradiation and we discuss the impact of the radiation damage on the LOFT scientific performance.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication by Journal of Instrumentation (JINST

Radiation tests of the Silicon Drift Detectors for LOFT

During the three years long assessment phase of the LOFT mission, candidate to the M3 launch opportunity of the ESA Cosmic Vision programme, we estimated and measured the radiation damage of the silicon drift detectors (SDDs) of the satellite instrumentation. In particular, we irradiated the detectors with protons (of 0.8 and 11 MeV energy) to study the increment of leakage current and the variation of the charge collection efficiency produced by the displacement damage, and we "bombarded" the detectors with hypervelocity dust grains to measure the effect of the debris impacts. In this paper we describe the measurements and discuss the results in the context of the LOFT mission.Comment: Proc. SPIE 9144, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 91446

Hyper-velocity impact test and simulation of a double-wall shield concept for the Wide Field Monitor aboard LOFT

The space mission LOFT (Large Observatory For X-ray Timing) was selected in 2011 by ESA as one of the candidates for the M3 launch opportunity. LOFT is equipped with two instruments, the Large Area Detector (LAD) and the Wide Field Monitor (WFM), based on Silicon Drift Detectors (SDDs). In orbit, they would be exposed to hyper-velocity impacts by environmental dust particles, which might alter the surface properties of the SDDs. In order to assess the risk posed by these events, we performed simulations in ESABASE2 and laboratory tests. Tests on SDD prototypes aimed at verifying to what extent the structural damages produced by impacts affect the SDD functionality have been performed at the Van de Graaff dust accelerator at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg. For the WFM, where we expect a rate of risky impacts notably higher than for the LAD, we designed, simulated and successfully tested at the plasma accelerator at the Technical University in Munich (TUM) a double-wall shielding configuration based on thin foils of Kapton and Polypropylene. In this paper we summarize all the assessment, focussing on the experimental test campaign at TUM.Comment: Proc. SPIE 9144, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 91446

Uncovering predictability in the evolution of the WTI oil futures curve

Accurately forecasting the price of oil, the world's most actively traded commodity, is of great importance to both academics and practitioners. We contribute by proposing a functional time series based method to model and forecast oil futures. Our approach boasts a number of theoretical and practical advantages including effectively exploiting underlying process dynamics missed by classical discrete approaches. We evaluate the finite-sample performance against established benchmarks using a model confidence set test. A realistic out-of-sample exercise provides strong support for the adoption of our approach with it residing in the superior set of models in all considered instances.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figures, to appear in European Financial Managemen

Tourism income and economic growth in Greece: Empirical evidence from their cyclical components

This paper examines the relationship between the cyclical components of Greek GDP and international tourism income for Greece for the period 1976–2004. Using spectral analysis the authors find that cyclical fluctuations of GDP have a length of about nine years and that international tourism income has a cycle of about seven years. The volatility of tourism income is more than eight times the volatility of the Greek GDP cycle. VAR analysis shows that the cyclical component of tourism income is significantly influencing the cyclical component of GDP in Greece. The findings support the tourism-led economic growth hypothesis and are of particular interest and importance to policy makers, financial analysts and investors dealing with the Greek tourism industry

On a generalised model for time-dependent variance with long-term memory

The ARCH process (R. F. Engle, 1982) constitutes a paradigmatic generator of stochastic time series with time-dependent variance like it appears on a wide broad of systems besides economics in which ARCH was born. Although the ARCH process captures the so-called "volatility clustering" and the asymptotic power-law probability density distribution of the random variable, it is not capable to reproduce further statistical properties of many of these time series such as: the strong persistence of the instantaneous variance characterised by large values of the Hurst exponent (H > 0.8), and asymptotic power-law decay of the absolute values self-correlation function. By means of considering an effective return obtained from a correlation of past returns that has a q-exponential form we are able to fix the limitations of the original model. Moreover, this improvement can be obtained through the correct choice of a sole additional parameter, $q_{m}$. The assessment of its validity and usefulness is made by mimicking daily fluctuations of SP500 financial index.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Accelerator experiments with soft protons and hyper-velocity dust particles: application to ongoing projects of future X-ray missions

We report on our activities, currently in progress, aimed at performing accelerator experiments with soft protons and hyper-velocity dust particles. They include tests of different types of X-ray detectors and related components (such as filters) and measurements of scattering of soft protons and hyper-velocity dust particles off X-ray mirror shells. These activities have been identified as a goal in the context of a number of ongoing space projects in order to assess the risk posed by environmental radiation and dust and qualify the adopted instrumentation with respect to possible damage or performance degradation. In this paper we focus on tests for the Silicon Drift Detectors (SDDs) used aboard the LOFT space mission. We use the Van de Graaff accelerators at the University of T\"ubingen and at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg, for soft proton and hyper-velocity dust tests respectively. We present the experimental set-up adopted to perform the tests, status of the activities and some very preliminary results achieved at present time.Comment: Proceedings of SPIE, Vol. 8443, Paper No. 8443-24, 201