The GALATEA Test-Facility for High Purity Germanium Detectors

GALATEA is a test facility designed to investigate bulk and surface effects in high purity germanium detectors. A vacuum tank houses an infrared screened volume with a cooled detector inside. A system of three stages allows an almost complete scan of the detector. The main feature of GALATEA is that there is no material between source and detector. This allows the usage of alpha and beta sources as well as of a laser beam to study surface effects. A 19-fold segmented true-coaxial germanium detector was used for commissioning

Digital control of force microscope cantilevers using a field programmable gate array

This report describes a cantilever controller for magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM) based on a field programmable gate array (FPGA), along with the hardware and software used to integrate the controller into an experiment. The controller is assembled from a low-cost commercially available software defined radio (SDR) device and libraries of open-source software. The controller includes a digital filter comprising two cascaded second-order sections ("biquads"), which together can implement transfer functions for optimal cantilever controllers. An appendix in this report shows how to calculate filter coefficients for an optimal controller from measured cantilever characteristics. The controller also includes an input multiplexer and adder used in calibration protocols. Filter coefficients and multiplexer settings can be set and adjusted by control software while an experiment is running. The input is sampled at 64 MHz; the sampling frequency in the filters can be divided down under software control to achieve a good match with filter characterisics. Data reported here were sampled at 500 kHz, chosen for acoustic cantilevers with resonant frequencies near 8 kHz. Inputs are digitized with 12 bits resolution, outputs with 14 bits. The experiment software is organized as a client and server to make it easy to adapt the controller to different experiments. The server encapusulates the details of controller hardware organization, connection technology, filter architecture, and number representation. The same server could be used in any experiment, while a different client encodes the particulars of each experiment.Comment: submitted to Review of Scientific Instrument

Primary Cardiac Angiosarcoma: A Fatal Disease

A 42-year-old man with a cardiac tamponade underwent an urgent pericardiotomy that showed tumoral tissue, covering the surface of the right atrium. The tumor was then partially excised, and the histological examination revealed the presence of a moderately-differentiated angiosarcoma. The patient was then referred to the oncology unit and scheduled for a chemotherapy schedule including Epirubicin (60 mg/m2, on days 1 and 2) plus Ifosfamide (2000 mg/m2, on days 1 to 3) and Uromitexan (2000 mg/m2 at hours 0, 4, 8 after IFO). All drugs were administered every three weeks. After two cycles, a restaging work-up revealed a partial remission. The treatment was continued for another two cycles. A new evaluation by cardiac MRI evidenced a local and distant (lung) progression of disease. The patient died after three months. This paper confirms that cardiac angiosarcoma is a fatal disease, and the prognosis is usually 6–11 months from time of diagnosis

Use of microbial fuel cells for soil remediation. A preliminary study on DDE

DDE (2,2-bis (p-chlorophenyl)-1,1-dichloroetylene) is a very persistent and bioaccumulative pesticide and its residues are continuously found in the environment. Among the green remediation strategies for soil recovery, terrestrial Microbial Fuel Cells (MFC) are arousing great interest in scientific community. MFCs transform energy stored in the chemical bonds of organic compounds into electrical energy thanks to exo-electrogen microorganisms naturally occurring in soil, which catalyse oxidation and reduction reactions in the area between two graphite electrodes. This work reports preliminary data on the use of MFCs for promoting soil decontamination from DDE. Several experimental conditions (e.g. addition of compost and open/closed circuit) were applied for assessing how to improve MFC performance in favouring DDE removal. MFCs promoted a significant DDE removal (39%) after 2 months, while at the same time any pesticide decrease was observed in the batch condition. Compost addition stimulated microbial activity and improved MFC performance for a longer time

The EEE Project

The new experiment ``Extreme Energy Events'' (EEE) to detect extensive air showers through muon detection is starting in Italy. The use of particle detectors based on Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPC) will allow to determine with a very high accuracy the direction of the axis of cosmic ray showers initiated by primaries of ultra-high energy, together with a high temporal resolution. The installation of many of such 'telescopes' in numerous High Schools scattered all over the Italian territory will also allow to investigate coincidences between multiple primaries producing distant showers. Here we present the experimental apparatus and its tasks.Comment: 4 pages, 29th ICRC 2005, Pune, Indi