The NASA MSFC Electrostatic Levitation (ESL) Laboratory: Summary of Capabilities, Recent Upgrades, and Future Work

The NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) electrostatic levitation (ESL) laboratory has a long history of providing materials research and thermophysical property data. A summary of the labs capabilities, recent upgrades, and ongoing and future work will be provided. The laboratory has recently added two new capabilities to its main levitation chamber: a rapid quench system and an oxygen control system. The rapid quench system allows samples to be dropped into a quench vessel that can be filled with a low melting point material, such as a gallium or indium alloy. Thereby allowing rapid quenching of undercooled liquid metals. The oxygen control system consists of an oxygen sensor, oxygen pump, and a control unit. The sensor is a potentiometric device that determines the difference in oxygen activity between two gas compartments separated by an electrolyte, which is yttria-stabilized zirconia. The pump utilizes coulometric titration to either add or remove oxygen. The system is controlled by a desktop control unit, which can also be accessed via a computer. This system allows the oxygen partial pressure within the vacuum chamber to be measured and controlled, theoretically in the range from 10-36 to 100 bar. The ESL laboratory also has an emissometer, called the High-Temperature Emissivity Measurement System (HiTEMS). This system measures the spectral emissivity of materials from 600degC to 3,000degC. The system consists of a vacuum chamber, a black body source, and a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer (FTIR). The system utilizes optics to swap the signal between the sample and the black body. The system was originally designed to measure the hemispherical spectral emissivity of levitated samples, which are typically 2.5mm spheres. Levitation allows emissivity measurements of molten samples, but more work is required to develop this capability. The system is currently setup measure the near-normal spectral emissivity of stationary samples, which has been used to take measurements of ablative materials, rocket nozzle coating materials, and materials for spacecraft instruments

XCone: N-jettiness as an exclusive cone jet algorithm

We introduce a new jet algorithm called XCone, for eXclusive Cone, which is based on minimizing the event shape N -jettiness. Because N -jettiness partitions every event into N jet regions and a beam region, XCone is an exclusive jet algorithm that always returns a fixed number of jets. We use a new “conical geometric” measure for which well-separated jets are bounded by circles of radius R in the rapidity-azimuth plane, while overlapping jet regions automatically form nearest-neighbor “clover jets”. This avoids the split/merge criteria needed in inclusive cone algorithms. A key feature of XCone is that it smoothly transitions between the resolved regime where the N signal jets of interest are well separated and the boosted regime where they overlap. The returned value of N -jettiness also provides a quality criterion of how N -jet-like the event looks. We also discuss the N -jettiness factorization theorems that occur for various jet measures, which can be used to compute the associated exclusive N -jet cross sections. In a companion paper [1], the physics potential of XCone is demonstrated using the examples of dijet resonances, Higgs decays to bottom quarks, and all-hadronic top pairs.United States. Department of Energy (Offices of Nuclear and Particle Physics Contracts DE-SC00012567 and DE-SC0011090)Simons Foundation (Investigator grant 327942)United States. Department of Energy (Early Career research program DE-SC0006389)Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Sloan Research Fellowship)Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (Paul E. Gray Endowed Fund

Aortopulmonary Window with Interrupted Aortic Arch and Pulmonary Artery Sling: Diagnosis by Echocardiography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Case Report and Literature Review

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/71570/1/j.1540-8175.1999.tb00796.x.pd

The NASA MSFC Electrostatic Levitation (ESL) Laboratory - Summary of Capabilities, Recent Upgrades, and Future Work

No abstract availabl

Jet Substructure at the Tevatron and LHC: New results, new tools, new benchmarks

In this report we review recent theoretical progress and the latest experimental results in jet substructure from the Tevatron and the LHC. We review the status of and outlook for calculation and simulation tools for studying jet substructure. Following up on the report of the Boost 2010 workshop, we present a new set of benchmark comparisons of substructure techniques, focusing on the set of variables and grooming methods that are collectively known as "top taggers". To facilitate further exploration, we have attempted to collect, harmonise, and publish software implementations of these techniques.Comment: 53 pages, 17 figures. L. Asquith, S. Rappoccio, C. K. Vermilion, editors; v2: minor edits from journal revision

Jet Shapes and Jet Algorithms in SCET

Jet shapes are weighted sums over the four-momenta of the constituents of a jet and reveal details of its internal structure, potentially allowing discrimination of its partonic origin. In this work we make predictions for quark and gluon jet shape distributions in N-jet final states in e+e- collisions, defined with a cone or recombination algorithm, where we measure some jet shape observable on a subset of these jets. Using the framework of Soft-Collinear Effective Theory, we prove a factorization theorem for jet shape distributions and demonstrate the consistent renormalization-group running of the functions in the factorization theorem for any number of measured and unmeasured jets, any number of quark and gluon jets, and any angular size R of the jets, as long as R is much smaller than the angular separation between jets. We calculate the jet and soft functions for angularity jet shapes \tau_a to one-loop order (O(alpha_s)) and resum a subset of the large logarithms of \tau_a needed for next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy for both cone and kT-type jets. We compare our predictions for the resummed \tau_a distribution of a quark or a gluon jet produced in a 3-jet final state in e+e- annihilation to the output of a Monte Carlo event generator and find that the dependence on a and R is very similar.Comment: 62 pages plus 21 pages of Appendices, 13 figures, uses JHEP3.cls. v2: corrections to finite parts of NLO jet functions, minor changes to plots, clarified discussion of power corrections. v3: Journal version. Introductory sections significantly reorganized for clarity, classification of logarithmic accuracy clarified, results for non-Mercedes-Benz configurations adde

Cytochrome P450 CYP1B1 activity in renal cell carcinoma

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is the most common malignancy of the kidney and has a poor prognosis due to its late presentation and resistance to current anticancer drugs. One mechanism of drug resistance, which is potentially amenable to therapeutic intervention, is based on studies in our laboratory. CYP1B1 is a cytochrome P450 enzyme overexpressed in a variety of malignant tumours. Our studies are now elucidating a functional role for CYP1B1 in drug resistance. Cytochrome P450 reductase (P450R) is required for optimal metabolic activity of CYP1B1. Both CYP1B1 and P450R can catalyse the biotransformation of anticancer drugs at the site of the tumour. In this investigation, we determined the expression of CYP1B1 and P450R in samples of normal kidney and RCC (11 paired normal and tumour and a further 15 tumour samples). The O-deethylation of ethoxyresorufin to resorufin was used to measure CYP1B1 activity in RCC. Cytochrome P450 reductase activity was determined by following the reduction of cytochrome c at 550 nm. The key finding of this study was the presence of active CYP1B1 in 70% of RCC. Coincubation with the CYP1B1 inhibitor alpha-naphthoflavone (10nM) inhibited this activity. No corresponding CYP1B1 activity was detected in any of the normal tissue examined (n = 11). Measurable levels of active P450R were determined in all normal (n = 11) and tumour samples (n = 26). The presence of detectable CYP1B1, which is capable of metabolising anticancer drugs in tumour cells, highlights a novel target for therapeutic intervention

The TESS Grand Unified Hot Jupiter Survey. II. Twenty New Giant Planets

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission promises to improve our understanding of hot Jupiters by providing an all-sky, magnitude-limited sample of transiting hot Jupiters suitable for population studies. Assembling such a sample requires confirming hundreds of planet candidates with additional follow-up observations. Here, we present twenty hot Jupiters that were detected using TESS data and confirmed to be planets through photometric, spectroscopic, and imaging observations coordinated by the TESS Follow-up Observing Program (TFOP). These twenty planets have orbital periods shorter than 7 days and orbit relatively bright FGK stars ($10.9 < G < 13.0$). Most of the planets are comparable in mass to Jupiter, although there are four planets with masses less than that of Saturn. TOI-3976 b, the longest period planet in our sample ($P = 6.6$ days), may be on a moderately eccentric orbit ($e = 0.18\pm0.06$), while observations of the other targets are consistent with them being on circular orbits. We measured the projected stellar obliquity of TOI-1937A b, a hot Jupiter on a 22.4 hour orbit with the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect, finding the planet's orbit to be well-aligned with the stellar spin axis ($|\lambda| = 4.0\pm3.5^\circ$). We also investigated the possibility that TOI-1937 is a member of the NGC 2516 open cluster, but ultimately found the evidence for cluster membership to be ambiguous. These objects are part of a larger effort to build a complete sample of hot Jupiters to be used for future demographic and detailed characterization work.Comment: 67 pages, 11 tables, 13 figures, 2 figure sets. Resubmitted to ApJS after revision