Crystals for high-energy calorimetry in extreme environments

Crystals are used as a homogeneous calorimetric medium in many high-energy physics experiments. For some experiments, performance has to be ensured in very difficult operating conditions, like a high radiation environment, very large particle fluxes, high collision rates, placing constraints on response and readout time. An overview is presented of recent achievements in the field, with particular attention given to the performance of Lead Tungstate (PWO) crystals exposed to high particle fluxes.Comment: To be published in Proc. of the Meeting of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society, DPF2004 (Riverside, USA, August 26th to 31st, 2004

Air-Coupled Surface Wave Transmission Measurement Across A Partially Closed Surface-Breaking Crack In Concrete

Previous researchers have demonstrated that the transmission of surface waves is effective to estimate the depth of a surface-breaking crack in solids. However, most of the results were obtained using a well-defined crack (or notch) in laboratory. In fact, there is a critical gap to apply the theory to surface-breaking cracks in concrete structures subjected to external loadings where the cracks are generally ill-defined, and partially closed. In this study, the authors investigated transmission coefficients of surface waves across a partially closed surface-breaking crack in concrete subjected to monotonically increasing compressive loadings. First, a concrete beam (0.5 X 0.154 X 2.1 m(3)) having two surface-breaking cracks with various crack widths was prepared in laboratory. Second, transmission coefficients of impact-induced surface waves were measured across a surface-breaking crack in the concrete beam with increasing compressive loadings from 0 to 140kN (10% of the ultimate compressive strength of the concrete beam). External post-tensioning was used to apply the compression. For comparison purpose, sensitivity of surface wave velocity to compressive loading was also investigated. As a result, observations in this study reveal that transmission coefficient is a more sensitive acoustic parameter than phase velocity to evaluate a surface-breaking cracking in concrete subjected to compressive loadings.Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineerin

Electroencephalogram evidence for the activation of human mirror neuron system during the observation of intransitive shadow and line drawing actions

This article is available open access from the NCBI website at the link below. Copyright 2013 © Neural Regeneration Research. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Previous studies have demonstrated that hand shadows may activate the motor cortex associated with the mirror neuron system in human brain. However, there is no evidence of activity of the human mirror neuron system during the observation of intransitive movements by shadows and line drawings of hands. This study examined the suppression of electroencephalography mu waves (8–13 Hz) induced by observation of stimuli in 18 healthy students. Three stimuli were used: real hand actions, hand shadow actions and actions made by line drawings of hands. The results showed significant desynchronization of the mu rhythm (“mu suppression”) across the sensorimotor cortex (recorded at C3, Cz and C4), the frontal cortex (recorded at F3, Fz and F4) and the central and right posterior parietal cortex (recorded at Pz and P4) under all three conditions. Our experimental findings suggest that the observation of “impoverished hand actions”, such as intransitive movements of shadows and line drawings of hands, is able to activate widespread cortical areas related to the putative human mirror neuron system.The National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China

Description of Charged Particle Pseudorapidity Distributions in Pb+Pb Collisions with Tsallis Thermodynamics

The centrality dependence of pseudorapidity distributions for charged particles produced in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=130$ GeV and 200 GeV at RHIC, and in Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76$ TeV at LHC are investigated in the fireball model, assuming that the rapidity axis is populated with fireballs following one distribution function. We assume that the particles in the fireball fulfill the Tsallis distribution. The theoretical results are compared with the experimental measurements and a good agreement is found. Using these results, the pseudorapidity distributions of charged particles produced in Pb+Pb central collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.02$ TeV and 10 TeV are predicted.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

Construction of a surface air temperature series for Qingdao in China for the period 1899 to 2014

Abstract. We present a homogenized surface air temperature (SAT) time series at 2 m height for the city of Qingdao in China from 1899 to 2014. This series is derived from three data sources: newly digitized and homogenized observations of the German National Meteorological Service from 1899 to 1913, homogenized observation data of the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) from 1961 to 2014 and a gridded dataset of Willmott and Matsuura (2012) in Delaware to fill the gap from 1914 to 1960. Based on this new series, long-term trends are described. The SAT in Qingdao has a significant warming trend of 0.11 ± 0.03 °C decade−1 during 1899–2014. The coldest period occurred during 1909–1918 and the warmest period occurred during 1999–2008. For the seasonal mean SAT, the most significant warming can be found in spring, followed by winter. The homogenized time series of Qingdao is provided and archived by the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) web page under overseas stations of the Deutsche Seewarte (http://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/overseas_stations/ueberseedoku/doi_qingdao.html) in ASCII format. Users can also freely obtain a short description of the data at https://doi.org/https://dx.doi.org/10.5676/DWD/Qing_v1 And the data can be downloaded at http://dwd.de/EN/ourservices/overseas_stations/ueberseedoku/data_qingdao.txt

An effective ant-colony based routing algorithm for mobile ad-hoc network

An effective Ant-Colony based routing algorithm for mobile ad-hoc network is proposed in this paper. In this routing scheme, each path is marked by path grade, which is calculated from the combination of multiple constrained QoS parameters such as the time delay, packet loss rate and bandwidth, etc. packet routing is decided by the path grade and the queue buffer length of the node. The advantage of this scheme is that it can effectively improve the packet delivery ratio and reduce the end-to-end delay. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can improve the packet delivery ratio by 9%-22% and the end-to-end delay can be reduced by 14%-16% as compared with the conventional QAODV and ARA routing schemes