Gator: a low-background counting facility at the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory

A low-background germanium spectrometer has been installed and is being operated in an ultra-low background shield (the Gator facility) at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy (LNGS). With an integrated rate of ~0.16 events/min in the energy range between 100-2700 keV, the background is comparable to those of the world's most sensitive germanium detectors. After a detailed description of the facility, its background sources as well as the calibration and efficiency measurements are introduced. Two independent analysis methods are described and compared using examples from selected sample measurements. The Gator facility is used to screen materials for XENON, GERDA, and in the context of next-generation astroparticle physics facilities such as DARWIN.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, published versio

Self-consistent Approach to Off-Shell Transport

The properties of two forms of the gradient expanded Kadanoff--Baym equations, i.e. the Kadanoff--Baym and Botermans-Malfliet forms, suitable to describe the transport dynamics of particles and resonances with broad spectral widths, are discussed in context of conservation laws, the definition of a kinetic entropy and the possibility of numerical realization. Recent results on exact conservations of charge and energy-momentum within Kadanoff-Baym form of quantum kinetics based on local coupling schemes are extended to two cases relevant in many applications. These concern the interaction via a finite range potential, and, relevant in nuclear and hadron physics, e.g. for the pion--nucleon interaction, the case of derivative coupling.Comment: 35 pages, submitted to issue of Phys. Atom. Nucl. dedicated to S.T. Belyaev on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Few references are adde

Nerve Detection in Ultrasound Images Using Median Gabor Binary Pattern

International audienceUltrasound in regional anesthesia (RA) has increased in pop-ularity over the last years. The nerve localization presents a key step for RA practice, it is therefore valuable to develop a tool able to facilitate this practice. The nerve detection in the ultrasound images is a challeng-ing task, since the noise and other artifacts corrupt the visual properties of such kind of tissue. In this paper we propose a new method to address this problem. The proposed technique operates in two steps. As the me-dian nerve belongs to a hyperechoic region, the first step consists in the segmentation of this type of region using the k-means algorithm. The second step is more critical; it deals with nerve structure detection in noisy data. For that purpose, a new descriptor is developed. It combines tow methods median binary pattern (MBP) and Gabor filter to obtain the median Gabor binary pattern (MGBP). The method was tested on 173 ultrasound images of the median nerve obtained from three patients. The results showed that the proposed approach achieves better accuracy than the original MBP, Gabor descriptor and other popular descriptors

Renormalization in Self-Consistent Approximations schemes at Finite Temperature I: Theory

Within finite temperature field theory, we show that truncated non-perturbative self-consistent Dyson resummation schemes can be renormalized with local counter-terms defined at the vacuum level. The requirements are that the underlying theory is renormalizable and that the self-consistent scheme follows Baym''s $\Phi$-derivable concept. The scheme generates both, the renormalized self-consistent equations of motion and the closed equations for the infinite set of counter terms. At the same time the corresponding 2PI-generating functional and the thermodynamical potential can be renormalized, in consistency with the equations of motion. This guarantees the standard $\Phi$-derivable properties like thermodynamic consistency and exact conservation laws also for the renormalized approximation schemes to hold. The proof uses the techniques of BPHZ-renormalization to cope with the explicit and the hidden overlapping vacuum divergences.Comment: 22 Pages 1 figure, uses RevTeX4. The Revision concerns the correction of some minor typos, a clarification concerning the real-time contour structure of renormalization parts and some comments concerning symmetries in the conclusions and outloo

Coulomb Distortion Effects for (e,e'p) Reactions at High Electron Energy

We report a significant improvement of an approximate method of including electron Coulomb distortion in electron induced reactions at momentum transfers greater than the inverse of the size of the target nucleus. In particular, we have found a new parametrization for the elastic electron scattering phase shifts that works well at all electron energies greater than 300 $MeV$. As an illustration, we apply the improved approximation to the $(e,e'p)$ reaction from medium and heavy nuclei. We use a relativistic ``single particle'' model for $(e,e'p)$ as as applied to $^{208}Pb(e,e'p)$ and to recently measured data at CEBAF on $^{16}O(e,e'p)$ to investigate Coulomb distortion effects while examining the physics of the reaction.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, PRC submitte

Impacts of Mid-Level Biofuel Content In Gasoline on SIDI Engine-Out and Tailpipe Particulate Matter Emissions

In this work, the influences of ethanol and iso-butanol blended with gasoline on engine-out and post three-way catalyst (TWC) particle size distribution and number concentration were studied using a General Motors (GM) 2.0L turbocharged spark ignition direct injection (SIDI) engine. The engine was operated using the production engine control unit (ECU) with a dynamometer controlling the engine speed and the accelerator pedal position controlling the engine load. A TSI Fast Mobility Particle Sizer (FMPS) spectrometer was used to measure the particle size distribution in the range from 5.6 to 560 nm with a sampling rate of 1 Hz. U.S. federal certification gasoline (E0), two ethanol-blended fuels (E10 and E20), and 11.7% iso-butanol blended fuel (BU12) were tested. Measurements were conducted at 10 selected steady-state engine operation conditions. Bi-modal particle size distributions were observed for all operating conditions with peak values at particle sizes of 10 nm and 70 nm. Idle and low-speed / low-load conditions emitted higher total particle numbers than other operating conditions. At idle, the engine-out particulate matter (PM) emissions were dominated by nucleation mode particles, and the production TWC reduced these nucleation mode particles by more than 50%, while leaving the accumulation mode particle distribution unchanged. At an engine load higher than 6 bar net mean effective pressure (NMEP), accumulation mode particles dominated the engine-out particle emissions, and the TWC had little effect. Compared to the baseline gasoline (E0), E10 does not significantly change PM emissions, while E20 and BU12 both reduce PM emissions under the conditions studied. Iso-butanol was observed to impact PM emissions more than ethanol, with up to 50% reductions at some conditions. In this paper, issues related to PM measurement using the FMPS are also discussed. While some uncertainties are due to engine variation, the FMPS must be carefully maintained in order to achieve repeatable measurement results

Particle production in quantum transport theories

The particle production in the intermediate energy heavy ion collisions is discussed in the framework of the nonequilibrium Green's functions formalism. The evolution equations of the Green's functions for fermions allows for the discussion of the off-shell fermion propagator and of the large momentum component in the initial state. For the case of a homogeneous system numerical calculations of the meson production rate are performed and compared with the semiclassical production rate.Comment: 45 pages, figures included, uses FEYNMAN macro

Born's rule from measurements of classical signals by threshold detectors which are properly calibrated

The very old problem of the statistical content of quantum mechanics (QM) is studied in a novel framework. The Born's rule (one of the basic postulates of QM) is derived from theory of classical random signals. We present a measurement scheme which transforms continuous signals into discrete clicks and reproduces the Born's rule. This is the sheme of threshold type detection. Calibration of detectors plays a crucial role.Comment: The problem of double clicks is resolved; hence, one can proceed in purely wave framework, i.e., the wave-partcile duality has been resolved in favor of the wave picture of prequantum realit