Effective Rheology of Bubbles Moving in a Capillary Tube

We calculate the average volumetric flux versus pressure drop of bubbles moving in a single capillary tube with varying diameter, finding a square-root relation from mapping the flow equations onto that of a driven overdamped pendulum. The calculation is based on a derivation of the equation of motion of a bubble train from considering the capillary forces and the entropy production associated with the viscous flow. We also calculate the configurational probability of the positions of the bubbles.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Alignment of the ALICE Inner Tracking System with cosmic-ray tracks

37 pages, 15 figures, revised version, accepted by JINSTALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) experiment devoted to investigating the strongly interacting matter created in nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC energies. The ALICE ITS, Inner Tracking System, consists of six cylindrical layers of silicon detectors with three different technologies; in the outward direction: two layers of pixel detectors, two layers each of drift, and strip detectors. The number of parameters to be determined in the spatial alignment of the 2198 sensor modules of the ITS is about 13,000. The target alignment precision is well below 10 micron in some cases (pixels). The sources of alignment information include survey measurements, and the reconstructed tracks from cosmic rays and from proton-proton collisions. The main track-based alignment method uses the Millepede global approach. An iterative local method was developed and used as well. We present the results obtained for the ITS alignment using about 10^5 charged tracks from cosmic rays that have been collected during summer 2008, with the ALICE solenoidal magnet switched off.Peer reviewe

Low mass dimuon production in proton-nucleus collisions with the NA60 apparatus

During the June 2002 run NA60 collected around 600 000 dimuon triggers in proton-nucleus collisions at 400 GeV. We show that the collected dimuon mass spectra can be understood in terms of known sources. The specific target setup, consisting of Beryllium, Indium and Lead targets, simultaneously exposed to the beam, allowed us to study the nuclear dependence of the production cross-section of the omega and phi resonances. The elementary nucleon-nucleon production cross-sections at 400 GeV for the rho, omega and phi mesons are also presented. By using the eta-Dalitz decay, dominating the mass range below 450 MeV, we, furthermore, extracted the eta production cross-section and its nuclear dependence. The results are discussed in the framework of previous measurements, mostly obtained in different decay channels, performed by NA27, HELIOS-1 and CERES-TAPS

The NA60 silicon pixel telescope

The NA60 experiment studies the production of open charm and prompt dimuons in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at the CERN SPS. The main goal of NA60 is the study of various possible signatures of the transition from hadronic to deconfined partonic matter, e.g. anomalous charmonium suppression, dimuons from thermal radiation and modifications of vector meson properties. Reaching these goals is facilitated by the use of new state-of-the-art silicon detectors in the vertex region. Downstream of the target and inside a 2.5T dipole magnetic field a pixel telescope measures the charged tracks originating from the collisions. The full pixel telescope consists of 16 planes with 96 ALICEILHCb pixel detector assemblies in total. This paper describes the setup of the pixel telescope, results from tests as well as the expected implications of the operation of the silicon detectors in the harsh radiation environment of the NA60 experiment, with heavy-ion collisions. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved