2,421 research outputs found
Assessment of fissionable material behaviour in fission chambers
A comprehensive study is performed in order to assess the pertinence of fission chambers coated with different fissile materials for high neutron flux detection. Three neutron scenarios are proposed to study the fast component of a high neutron flux: (i) high neutron flux with a significant thermal contribution such as BR2, (ii) DEMO magnetic fusion reactor, and (iii) IFMIF high flux test module.
In this study, the inventory code ACAB is used to analyze the following questions: (i) impact of different deposits in fission chambers; (ii) effect of the irradiation time/burn-up on the concentration; (iii) impact of activation cross-section uncertainties on the composition of the deposit for all the range of burn-up/irradiation neutron fluences of interest. The complete set of nuclear data (decay, fission yield, activation cross-sections, and uncertainties) provided in the EAF2007 data library are used for this evaluation
Detection/estimation of the modulus of a vector. Application to point source detection in polarization data
Given a set of images, whose pixel values can be considered as the components
of a vector, it is interesting to estimate the modulus of such a vector in some
localised areas corresponding to a compact signal. For instance, the
detection/estimation of a polarized signal in compact sources immersed in a
background is relevant in some fields like astrophysics. We develop two
different techniques, one based on the Neyman-Pearson lemma, the Neyman-Pearson
filter (NPF), and another based on prefiltering-before-fusion, the filtered
fusion (FF), to deal with the problem of detection of the source and estimation
of the polarization given two or three images corresponding to the different
components of polarization (two for linear polarization, three including
circular polarization). For the case of linear polarization, we have performed
numerical simulations on two-dimensional patches to test these filters
following two different approaches (a blind and a non-blind detection),
considering extragalactic point sources immersed in cosmic microwave background
(CMB) and non-stationary noise with the conditions of the 70 GHz \emph{Planck}
channel. The FF outperforms the NPF, especially for low fluxes. We can detect
with the FF extragalactic sources in a high noise zone with fluxes >=
(0.42,0.36) Jy for (blind/non-blind) detection and in a low noise zone with
fluxes >= (0.22,0.18) Jy for (blind/non-blind) detection with low errors in the
estimated flux and position.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure
A Bayesian approach to filter design: detection of compact sources
We consider filters for the detection and extraction of compact sources on a
background. We make a one-dimensional treatment (though a generalization to two
or more dimensions is possible) assuming that the sources have a Gaussian
profile whereas the background is modeled by an homogeneous and isotropic
Gaussian random field, characterized by a scale-free power spectrum. Local peak
detection is used after filtering. Then, a Bayesian Generalized Neyman-Pearson
test is used to define the region of acceptance that includes not only the
amplification but also the curvature of the sources and the a priori
probability distribution function of the sources. We search for an optimal
filter between a family of Matched-type filters (MTF) modifying the filtering
scale such that it gives the maximum number of real detections once fixed the
number density of spurious sources. We have performed numerical simulations to
test theoretical ideas.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. SPIE Proceedings "Electronic Imaging II", San
Jose, CA. January 200
On the regularity of the covariance matrix of a discretized scalar field on the sphere
We present a comprehensive study of the regularity of the covariance matrix
of a discretized field on the sphere. In a particular situation, the rank of
the matrix depends on the number of pixels, the number of spherical harmonics,
the symmetries of the pixelization scheme and the presence of a mask. Taking
into account the above mentioned components, we provide analytical expressions
that constrain the rank of the matrix. They are obtained by expanding the
determinant of the covariance matrix as a sum of determinants of matrices made
up of spherical harmonics. We investigate these constraints for five different
pixelizations that have been used in the context of Cosmic Microwave Background
(CMB) data analysis: Cube, Icosahedron, Igloo, GLESP and HEALPix, finding that,
at least in the considered cases, the HEALPix pixelization tends to provide a
covariance matrix with a rank closer to the maximum expected theoretical value
than the other pixelizations. The effect of the propagation of numerical errors
in the regularity of the covariance matrix is also studied for different
computational precisions, as well as the effect of adding a certain level of
noise in order to regularize the matrix. In addition, we investigate the
application of the previous results to a particular example that requires the
inversion of the covariance matrix: the estimation of the CMB temperature power
spectrum through the Quadratic Maximum Likelihood algorithm. Finally, some
general considerations in order to achieve a regular covariance matrix are also
presented.Comment: 36 pages, 12 figures; minor changes in the text, matches published
versio
SAT based Enforcement of Domotic Effects in Smart Environments
The emergence of economically viable and efficient sensor technology provided impetus to the development of smart devices (or appliances). Modern smart environments are equipped with a multitude of smart devices and sensors, aimed at delivering intelligent services to the users of smart environments. The presence of these diverse smart devices has raised a major problem of managing environments. A rising solution to the problem is the modeling of user goals and intentions, and then interacting with the environments using user defined goals. `Domotic Effects' is a user goal modeling framework, which provides Ambient Intelligence (AmI) designers and integrators with an abstract layer that enables the definition of generic goals in a smart environment, in a declarative way, which can be used to design and develop intelligent applications. The high-level nature of domotic effects also allows the residents to program their personal space as they see fit: they can define different achievement criteria for a particular generic goal, e.g., by defining a combination of devices having some particular states, by using domain-specific custom operators. This paper describes an approach for the automatic enforcement of domotic effects in case of the Boolean application domain, suitable for intelligent monitoring and control in domotic environments. Effect enforcement is the ability to determine device configurations that can achieve a set of generic goals (domotic effects). The paper also presents an architecture to implement the enforcement of Boolean domotic effects, and results obtained from carried out experiments prove the feasibility of the proposed approach and highlight the responsiveness of the implemented effect enforcement architectur
Cosmic Microwave Background Images
We aim to present a tutorial on the detection, parameter estimation and
statistical analysis of compact sources (far galaxies, galaxy clusters and
Galactic dense emission regions) in cosmic microwave background observations.
The topic is of great relevance for current and future cosmic microwave
background missions because the presence of compact sources in the data
introduces very significant biases in the determination of the cosmological
parameters that determine the energy contain, origin and evolution of the
universe and because compact sources themselves provide us with important
information about the large scale structure of the universe.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. This preprint replaces a previous one posted in
arXiv under the title 'An introduction to compact source detection in cosmic
microwave background images'. The change of title was forced by the
publishing journa
- …