A Search for MeV to TeV Neutrinos from Fast Radio Bursts with IceCube

We present two searches for IceCube neutrino events coincident with 28 fast radio bursts (FRBs) and 1 repeating FRB. The first improves on a previous IceCube analysis - searching for spatial and temporal correlation of events with FRBs at energies greater than roughly 50 GeV - by increasing the effective area by an order of magnitude. The second is a search for temporal correlation of MeV neutrino events with FRBs. No significant correlation is found in either search; therefore, we set upper limits on the time-integrated neutrino flux emitted by FRBs for a range of emission timescales less than one day. These are the first limits on FRB neutrino emission at the MeV scale, and the limits set at higher energies are an order-of-magnitude improvement over those set by any neutrino telescope

Search for sources of astrophysical neutrinos using seven years of icecube cascade events

Low-background searches for astrophysical neutrino sources anywhere in the sky can be performed using cascade events induced by neutrinos of all flavors interacting in IceCube with energies as low as ∼1 TeV. Previously we showed that, even with just two years of data, the resulting sensitivity to sources in the southern sky is competitive with IceCube and ANTARES analyses using muon tracks induced by charge current muon neutrino interactions - especially if the neutrino emission follows a soft energy spectrum or originates from an extended angular region. Here, we extend that work by adding five more years of data, significantly improving the cascade angular resolution, and including tests for point-like or diffuse Galactic emission to which this data set is particularly well suited. For many of the signal candidates considered, this analysis is the most sensitive of any experiment to date. No significant clustering was observed, and thus many of the resulting constraints are the most stringent to date. In this paper we will describe the improvements introduced in this analysis and discuss our results in the context of other recent work in neutrino astronomy

Physics and Applications of Laser Diode Chaos

An overview of chaos in laser diodes is provided which surveys experimental achievements in the area and explains the theory behind the phenomenon. The fundamental physics underpinning this behaviour and also the opportunities for harnessing laser diode chaos for potential applications are discussed. The availability and ease of operation of laser diodes, in a wide range of configurations, make them a convenient test-bed for exploring basic aspects of nonlinear and chaotic dynamics. It also makes them attractive for practical tasks, such as chaos-based secure communications and random number generation. Avenues for future research and development of chaotic laser diodes are also identified.Comment: Published in Nature Photonic

Corpus annotation for mining biomedical events from literature

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Advanced Text Mining (TM) such as semantic enrichment of papers, event or relation extraction, and intelligent Question Answering have increasingly attracted attention in the bio-medical domain. For such attempts to succeed, text annotation from the biological point of view is indispensable. However, due to the complexity of the task, semantic annotation has never been tried on a large scale, apart from relatively simple term annotation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have completed a new type of semantic annotation, event annotation, which is an addition to the existing annotations in the GENIA corpus. The corpus has already been annotated with POS (Parts of Speech), syntactic trees, terms, etc. The new annotation was made on half of the GENIA corpus, consisting of 1,000 Medline abstracts. It contains 9,372 sentences in which 36,114 events are identified. The major challenges during event annotation were (1) to design a scheme of annotation which meets specific requirements of text annotation, (2) to achieve biology-oriented annotation which reflect biologists' interpretation of text, and (3) to ensure the homogeneity of annotation quality across annotators. To meet these challenges, we introduced new concepts such as Single-facet Annotation and Semantic Typing, which have collectively contributed to successful completion of a large scale annotation.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The resulting event-annotated corpus is the largest and one of the best in quality among similar annotation efforts. We expect it to become a valuable resource for NLP (Natural Language Processing)-based TM in the bio-medical domain.</p

A Search for IceCube Events in the Direction of ANITA Neutrino Candidates

During the first three flights of the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, the collaboration detected several neutrino candidates. Two of these candidate events were consistent with an ultra-high-energy upgoing air shower and compatible with a tau neutrino interpretation. A third neutrino candidate event was detected in a search for Askaryan radiation in the Antarctic ice, although it is also consistent with the background expectation. The inferred emergence angle of the first two events is in tension with IceCube and ANITA limits on isotropic cosmogenic neutrino fluxes. Here we test the hypothesis that these events are astrophysical in origin, possibly caused by a point source in the reconstructed direction. Given that any ultra-high-energy tau neutrino flux traversing the Earth should be accompanied by a secondary flux in the TeV-PeV range, we search for these secondary counterparts in 7 yr of IceCube data using three complementary approaches. In the absence of any significant detection, we set upper limits on the neutrino flux from potential point sources. We compare these limits to ANITA's sensitivity in the same direction and show that an astrophysical explanation of these anomalous events under standard model assumptions is severely constrained regardless of source spectrum

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory - Contributions to ICRC 2017 Part VI: IceCube-Gen2, the Next Generation Neutrino Observatory

Papers on research & development towards IceCube-Gen2, the next generation neutrino observatory at South Pole, submitted to the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2017, Busan, South Korea) by the IceCube-Gen2 Collaboration

Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger

On 2017 August 17 a binary neutron star coalescence candidate (later designated GW170817) with merger time 12:41:04 UTC was observed through gravitational waves by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor independently detected a gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) with a time delay of ~1.7 s with respect to the merger time. From the gravitational-wave signal, the source was initially localized to a sky region of 31 deg2 at a luminosity distance of 40+8-8 Mpc and with component masses consistent with neutron stars. The component masses were later measured to be in the range 0.86 to 2.26 Mo. An extensive observing campaign was launched across the electromagnetic spectrum leading to the discovery of a bright optical transient (SSS17a, now with the IAU identification of AT 2017gfo) in NGC 4993 (at ~40 Mpc) less than 11 hours after the merger by the One- Meter, Two Hemisphere (1M2H) team using the 1 m Swope Telescope. The optical transient was independently detected by multiple teams within an hour. Subsequent observations targeted the object and its environment. Early ultraviolet observations revealed a blue transient that faded within 48 hours. Optical and infrared observations showed a redward evolution over ~10 days. Following early non-detections, X-ray and radio emission were discovered at the transient’s position ~9 and ~16 days, respectively, after the merger. Both the X-ray and radio emission likely arise from a physical process that is distinct from the one that generates the UV/optical/near-infrared emission. No ultra-high-energy gamma-rays and no neutrino candidates consistent with the source were found in follow-up searches. These observations support the hypothesis that GW170817 was produced by the merger of two neutron stars in NGC4993 followed by a short gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) and a kilonova/macronova powered by the radioactive decay of r-process nuclei synthesized in the ejecta

Crowdsourcing in business and management disciplines: an integrative literature review

The objective of this study is to review crowdsourcing literature of the business and management disciplines and to know its relation with the open innovation concept. A systematic literature review is used in this study. Studies on crowdsourcing are published mostly in recent years, 2011-2013. Studies are highly dispersed, published in a very wide range of journals and are mostly based on a single case as data source. Content analysis of the findings of articles are performed to synthesize the findings in the extant literature. Most of the qualitative articles used single case method and most of the quantitative studies relied on online survey over a single crowdsourcing platform. Studies and scholars in the literature are from a limited number of countries. Although crowdsourcing as a concept overlaps with the open innovation concept, by no means, it can be considered a concept under the broad umbrella of open innovation concept. Based on identified gaps, future research avenues are presented

Second primary malignancies induced by radioactive iodine treatment of differentiated thyroid carcinoma - a critical review and evaluation of the existing evidence.

PURPOSE: Concern is growing about long-term side effects of differentiated thyroid cancer treatment, most notably radioactive iodine (RAI) therapy. However, published studies on the subject have had heterogeneous cohorts and conflicting results. This review seeks to provide an updated evaluation of published evidence, and to elucidate the risk of second primary malignancies (SPMs), especially secondary hematologic malignancies (SHMs), attributable to RAI therapy. METHODS: An extensive literature search was performed in Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid MEDLINE and In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations, Ovid MEDLINE Epub Ahead of Print, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) and PubMed. Studies regarding RAI-induced SPMs or a dose-response relationship between RAI therapy and SPMs were identified, 10 of which were eligible for the analysis. We evaluated risk of bias in each study and judged quality of evidence (QOE) across all studies using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations approach. RESULTS: For the outcome "SPM", the relative effect (relative risk, hazard ratio, or odds ratio) of RAI vs. no RAI ranged from 1.14 to 1.84 across studies, but most results were not statistically significant. For the outcome "SHM", reported relative effects ranged from 1.30 to 2.50, with 2/3 of the studies presenting statistically significant results. In 7/8 of the studies, increased risk for SPM was shown with increasing cumulative RAI activity. QOE was "very low" regarding SPM after RAI and regarding a dose-response relationship, and "low" for SHM after RAI. CONCLUSION: Based on low quality evidence, an excess risk for the development of SPM cannot be excluded but is expected to be small