The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory is a second generation water Cherenkov detector designed to determine whether the currently observed solar neutrino deficit is a result of neutrino oscillations. The detector is unique in its use of D2O as a detection medium, permitting it to make a solar model-independent test of the neutrino oscillation hypothesis by comparison of the charged- and neutral-current interaction rates. In this paper the physical properties, construction, and preliminary operation of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory are described. Data and predicted operating parameters are provided whenever possible.Comment: 58 pages, 12 figures, submitted to Nucl. Inst. Meth. Uses elsart and epsf style files. For additional information about SNO see http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca . This version has some new reference

Time-varying cardiovascular complexity with focus on entropy and lyapunov exponents

Measures of nonlinearity and complexity, such as entropy measures and Lyapunov exponents, have been increasingly employed to characterize dynamical properties in a wide range of biological nonlinear systems, including cardiovascular control. In this chapter, we present recent methodological advances allowing to effectively estimate instantaneous approximate and sample entropy measures, as well as the instantaneous Lyapunov spectrum of a series of stochastic events, i.e., the heartbeats. Because the proposed measures are instantaneously defined by means of probability functions defined within a point-process framework, these indices are able to provide instantaneous tracking of the degree of complexity associated with the physiological system in question. Long-term information is taken into account by expanding the linear, quadratic, and cubic Wiener-Volterra kernels with the orthonormal Laguerre basis functions. Applications on experimental heartbeat interval datasets (i.e., healthy subjects undergoing postural changes and patients with severe cardiac heart failure) are reported

First neutrino observations from the sudbury neutrino observatory

The first neutrino observations from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory are presented from preliminary analyses. Based on energy, direction and location, the data in the region of interest appear to be dominated by 8B solar neutrinos, detected by the charged current reaction on deuterium and elastic scattering from electrons, with very little background. Measurements of radioactive backgrounds indicate that the measurement of all active neutrino types via the neutral current reaction on deuterium will be possible with small systematic uncertainties. Quantitative results for the fluxes observed with these reactions will be provided when further calibrations have been completed