Production and optical properties of liquid scintillator for the JSNS2^{2} experiment

The JSNS$^{2}$ (J-PARC Sterile Neutrino Search at J-PARC Spallation Neutron Source) experiment will search for neutrino oscillations over a 24 m short baseline at J-PARC. The JSNS$^{2}$ inner detector will be filled with 17 tons of gadolinium-loaded liquid scintillator (LS) with an additional 31 tons of unloaded LS in the intermediate $\gamma$-catcher and outer veto volumes. JSNS$^{2}$ has chosen Linear Alkyl Benzene (LAB) as an organic solvent because of its chemical properties. The unloaded LS was produced at a refurbished facility, originally used for scintillator production by the RENO experiment. JSNS$^{2}$ plans to use ISO tanks for the storage and transportation of the LS. In this paper, we describe the LS production, and present measurements of its optical properties and long term stability. Our measurements show that storing the LS in ISO tanks does not result in degradation of its optical properties.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures

B -> Xs l_i^+ l_j^+ Decays with R-parity Violation

We derive the upper bounds on certain products of R-parity- and lepton-flavor-violating couplings from B \ra X_s {l_i}^+ {l_j}^- decays. These modes of B-meson decays can constrain the product combinations of the couplings with one or more heavy generation indices which are comparable with or stronger than the present bounds. From the studies of the invariant dilepton mass spectrum and the forward backward asymmetry of the emitted leptons we note the possibility of detecting R-parity-violating signals even when the total decay rate due to R-parity violating couplings is comparable with that in the standard model and discriminating two types of R-parity-violating signals. The general expectation of the enhancement of the forward backward asymmetry of the emitted leptons in the minimal supersymmetric standard model with R-parity may be corrupted by R-parity violation.Comment: 10 pages, Revtex, 1 table and 2 figure

Superconducting energy gap in MgCNi3 single crystals: Point-contact spectroscopy and specific-heat measurements

Specific heat has been measured down to 600 mK and up to 8 Tesla by the highly sensitive AC microcalorimetry on the MgCNi3 single crystals with Tc ~ 7 K. Exponential decay of the electronic specific heat at low temperatures proved that a superconducting energy gap is fully open on the whole Fermi surface, in agreement with our previous magnetic penetration depth measurements on the same crystals. The specific-heat data analysis shows consistently the strong coupling strength 2D/kTc ~ 4. This scenario is supported by the direct gap measurements via the point-contact spectroscopy. Moreover, the spectroscopy measurements show a decrease in the critical temperature at the sample surface accounting for the observed differences of the superfluid density deduced from the measurements by different techniques

How many photons are needed to distinguish two transparencies?

We give a bound on the minimum number of photons that must be absorbed by any quantum protocol to distinguish between two transparencies. We show how a quantum Zeno method in which the angle of rotation is varied at each iteration can attain this bound in certain situations.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure