LHCb prospects for full energy and beyond (incl. upgrades)

The LHCb experiment is running at the Large Hadron Collider to study CP violation and rare decays in the beauty and charm sectors. The physics potential is given for five key observables sensitive to new physics in nominal conditions. The motivation and the strategy of the upgrade envisaged for 2016 is presented with the expected performance for an integrated luminosity of 50 1/fb.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, Proceeding of the HCP2010 conferenc

Thermooxidative aging of polydicyclopentadiene in glassy state

Thermal aging of thin films of unstabilized polydicyclopentadiene (pDCPD) at several temperatures ranging from 120 to 30 C was investigated by means of carbonyl build up by FTIR with ammonia derivatization, double bond titration, mass uptake measurement, hydroperoxides titration by iodometry and DSC coupled with sulfur dioxide treatment. In the temperature range under investigation, pDCPD is in glassy state and it oxidizes faster than common polymers oxidized at rubbery state (e.g. polydienic elastomers). Using the kinetic analysis, these results were ascribed to increased initiation rate due to catalyst residues, some possible intramolecular processes favoring propagation, or a very low termination rate of oxidation radical chains because of the control of termination reactions by macroradical diffusion

Controlled Cavitation in Microfluidic Systems

We report on cavitation in confined microscopic environments which are commonly called microfluidic or lab-on-a-chip systems. The cavitation bubble is created by focusing a pulsed laser into these structures filled with a light-absorbing liquid. At the center of a 20 µm thick and 1 mm wide channel, pancake-shaped bubbles expand and collapse radially. The bubble dynamics compares with a two-dimensional Rayleigh model and a planar flow field during the bubble collapse is measured. When the bubble is created close to a wall a liquid jet is focused towards the wall, resembling the jetting phenomenon in axisymmetry. The jet flow creates two counter-rotating vortices which stir the liquid at high velocities. For more complex geometries, e.g., triangle- and square-shaped structures, the number of liquid jets recorded correlates with the number of boundaries close t

Le complexe dénotant défini de Russell

With " On Denoting " (OD, 1905), the philosophy of Russell takes a dramatic turn. Russell contends that the conception of a " denoting concept " he introduced in Principles of Mathem- atics (PoM, 1903) is wrong: the noun phrase has no correlate on the logical level and, if it is to reflect the logical structure, it should be broken up into quantification, variable et predicate. Russell's semantic arguments relevant to the definite descriptions, especially those linked to the Gray's Elegy passage, will be thoroughly investigated. The fallacy lies, as one could have expected, in his confusing use and mention... Once clarified and amended, it appears that the conception is, at least on this point, no longer aporetic: the (used) denoting complex, properly distinguished from the (mentioned) denoting concept, is really the source of no specific diffi- culty. It turns out that Russell discarded his first model quite hastily.La philosophie de Russell connaît un tournant décisif en 1905 avec la publication de " On Denoting " (OD). Russell prétend y réfuter un élément important de Principles of Mathematics (PoM) publié deux ans plus tôt, le " concept dénotatif " : ainsi, le groupe nominal ne corres- pondrait à aucun objet sur le plan logique mais devrait être éclaté entre quantification, variable et prédicat. On examinera ici les arguments sémantiques de Russell concernant les descriptions définies, et particulièrement ceux du passage de " l'Élégie de Gray ". Comme on pouvait s'y attendre, l'erreur réside dans une confusion entre usage et mention... La conception une fois précisée et un rien rectifiée n'est plus aporétique, au moins sur le plan sémantique : le complexe dénotant (utilisé), bien distingué du concept dénotatif (mentionné), ne pose en fait pas de difficulté spécifique. Il s'avère que ce premier modèle a été condamné bien hâtivement. Il sera commode et utile de présenter les notions de Russell en les mettant en contraste avec celles de Frege (§1). Ensuite seront exposées les raisons d'être de la signification et de la dénota- tion, et la dualité des deux notions avec le " complexe dénotant " (§2). On abordera alors les difficultés que Russell soulève dans le passage de l'Élégie de Gray de " On Denoting " (§3), on proposera une construction alternative (§4), on montrera que l'aporie est due à la confusion, à deux reprises, entre usage et mention (§5) puis on rapportera les difficultés à celles qu'amène le concept distinctif (§6). La relecture minutieuse du texte de Russell permettra de préciser la cons- truction présentée (§7). Enfin, on examinera l'apport de " On Denoting " sur le plan sémantique (§8) et on dressera un bilan clarifié de cette révolution de 1905 (§9)

The Banjo: America\\u27s African Instrument

A Transnational Look at the Banjo A national music is the spontaneous growth of ages of insulated life and feeling, said Christopher Pearce Cranch to the Harvard Music Association in 1846. It is impossible that American music can do more than reproduce the music of other ages We are too much a ...

Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery

Performance and Race in American Slavery Ring Shout, Wheel About presents a vivid reconceptualization of the origins of American entertainment. In five short chapters—Script, Casting, Backstage, Advertisement, and Same Script, Different Actors—, Thompson draws readers’ attention to...

Reflections: Was the Civil War a Mistake? Fifty Years of Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore [post-print]

From the introduction: In 2012, the American Civil War sesquicentennial continued. We were prepared for the panels on secession, Sumter, and Shiloh, and of course the books in preparation for the 2013 salute to the Emancipation Proclamation. Perhaps the film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer caught a few off guard, but it too had precedent: in the centennial, moviegoers watched Two Thousand Maniacs (1964), a horror-filled Confederate revival where Yankees were “gruesomely stained in gushing blood color.” In April 2012, though, an important anniversary passed nearly unnoticed: Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War turned fifty. Since 1962, scholars have grappled with this epic. Wilson put a question mark where, today, few believe there is a question—Was the Civil War a mistake

The Republic of Violence: The Tormented Rise of Abolition in Andrew Jackson\u27s America

In The Republic of Violence: The Tormented Rise of Abolition in Andrew Jackson’s America, J. D. Dickey contends the white-supremacist violence abolitionists suffered and repelled was rooted in the Jackson administration, its policies, and the white workingmen’s politics Jackson advanced and relied upon. Reviewer Scott Gac understands Dickey’s impulse to situate Jackson at the headwaters of white supremacist violence but points out that broader anti-black agitation preceded the seventh president

Toward a numerical deshaker for PFS

The Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) onboard Mars Express (MEx) is the instrument with the highest spectral resolution observing Mars from orbit since January 2004. It permits studying the atmospheric structure, major and minor compounds. The present time version of the calibration is limited by the effects of mechanical vibration, currently not corrected. We proposed here a new approach to correct for the vibrations based on semi-blind deconvolution of the measurements. This new approach shows that a correction can be done efficiently with 85% reduction of the artefacts, in a equivalent manner to the stacking of 10 spectra. Our strategy is not fully automatic due to the dependence on some regularisation parameters. It may be applied on the complete PFS dataset, correcting the large-scale perturbation due to microvibrations for each spectrum independently. This approach is validated on actual PFS data of Short Wavelength Channel (SWC), perturbed by microvibrations. A coherence check can be performed and also validate our approach. Unfortunately, the coherence check can be done only on the first 310 orbits of MEx only, until the laser line has been switch off. More generally, this work may apply to numerically "deshake" Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS), widely used in space experiments or in the laboratory.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Planetary and Space Scienc