Summary of the Experimental part of the XXXIVth Rencontre de Moriond

I summarise the experimental results presented during the hadronic session of the XXXIVth Rencontre de Moriond.Comment: Moriond summary talk, Les Arcs, March 20-27, 1999, 15 page

Challenges for precision measurements at the LHC

Challenges for precision measurements at the LHC are discussed and a proposal how to move forward to overcome the LHC-specific precision brick-walls is presented.Comment: 4 pages, Presented at the ICISE Inaugural Conference "Windows on the Universe" - Quy Nhon, Vietnam, August 11-17, 201

Charge asymmetries of lepton transverse momenta in Drell-Yan processes at the LHC

Charged lepton transverse momenta in the Drell-Yan processes play an important role at the LHC in precision measurements of the Standard Model parameters, such as the W-boson mass and width, their charge asymmetries and sin^2(theta_W). Therefore, their distributions should be described as accurate as possible by the Monte Carlo event generators. In this paper we discuss the problem of matching the hard-process kinematics of the Monte Carlo generator WINHAC with the parton-shower kinematics of the PYTHIA 6.4 generator while interfacing these two programs. We show that improper assignment of the quark and antiquark effective momenta in the LO matrix element computations may affect considerably the predicted lepton transverse momenta and even completely reverse their charge asymmetries at the LHC. We propose two matching schemes in which the NLO QCD distributions of the leptonic kinematical variables can be well reproduced by the LO WINHAC generator.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figure

Drell-Yan processes with WINHAC

We present the Monte Carlo event generator WINHAC for Drell-Yan processes in proton-proton, proton-antiproton, proton-ion and ion-ion collisions. It features multiphoton radiation within the Yennie-Frautschi-Suura exclusive exponentiation scheme with O(alpha) electroweak corrections for the charged-current (W+/W-) processes and multiphoton radiation generated by PHOTOS for neutral-current (Z+gamma) ones. For the initial-state QCD/QED parton shower and hadronisation it is interfaced with PYTHIA. It includes several options, e.g. for the polarized W-boson production, generation of weighted/unweighted events, etc. WINHAC was cross-checked numerically at the per-mille level with independent Monte Carlo programs, such as HORACE and SANC. It has been used as a basic tool for developing and testing some new methods of precise measurements of the Standard Model parameters at the LHC, in particular the W-boson mass. Recently, it has been applied to simulations of double Drell-Yan processes resulting from double-parton scattering, in order to assess their influence on the Higgs-boson detection at the LHC in its ZZ and W+W- decay channels.Comment: 8 pages; presented at the XXXVII International Conference of Theoretical Physics "Matter To The Deepest", Ustron, Poland, 1-6 September 2013; to appear in Acta Physica Polonica

Luminosity measurement method for the LHC: The detector requirements studies

Absolute normalisation of the LHC measurements with a precision of O(1%) is desirable but beyond the reach of the present LHC detectors. This series of papers proposes and evaluates a measurement method capable to achieve such a precision target. In our earlier paper we have selected the phase-space region where the lepton pair production cross section in pp collisions at the LHC can be controlled with < 1 % precision and is large enough to reach a comparable statistical accuracy of the absolute luminosity measurement on the day-by-day basis. In the present one the performance requirements for a dedicated detector, indispensable to efficiently select events in the proposed phase-space region, are discussed.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figure

Morphological predictors of sleep apnoea severity

Background: Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) does not always depend on obesity but on a certain morphological configuration. The study objective was to verify a hypothesis about a relation between anthropometric features and OSA occurrence and severity. Materials and methods: The study involved 138 patients, who had reported in Department and Clinic of Otolaryngology, Warsaw Medical University, due to suspected OSA. Each patient underwent morphological evaluation according to visual analogue scales. The assessment involved nasal septum morphology evaluation according to a 4-grade scale, palate morphology evaluation according to the 4-grade Friedman scale, whereas the facial profile, oropharyngeal isthmus, and the shape of the nasopharynx were assessed according to our own 3-grade scale. Results: Statistical analysis confirmed the high concordance of the basic polysomnographic parameters with the Friedman scale and the shape of the oropharyngeal isthmus. Conclusions: 1. The modified Mallampati score as well as evaluation of the shape of the oropharyngeal isthmus demonstrated high concordance with the basic polysomnographic parameters. 2. The neck circumference is a significant predictor of the apnoea-hypopnoea index value in males suffering from the OSA syndrom

Location of the narrowest area of the pharynx regarding body mass index and obstructive sleep apnoea severity

Background: Among authors studying morphological determinants of the obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) controversies exist on the location of the narrowest area within the pharynx, critical for development of obstruction. Those disagreements primarily revolve around differences between obese and nonobese OSA patients. Determination whether the location and size of the narrowest area within the pharynx differentiates the obese and nonobese OSA patients. Materials and methods: A population of 55 subjects was investigated after being diagnosed with OSA in the Polysomnography Laboratory of the Department and Clinic of Otolaryngology in the Medical University of Warsaw, Poland. Additionally a head computed tomography (CT) was performed in all the subjects. The CT images were used to do several crucial measurements which described the geometry of the facial skeleton as well as soft tissues of the head. The obtained results were correlated with apnoea-hypopnoea index (AHI) and body mass index (BMI) values. The data were statistically analysed. Results: The distance between the hard palate and posterior pharyngeal wall parallel to the horizontal plane as well as the shortest distance between the soft palate and posterior pharyngeal wall significantly differentiated patients in the subgroups by AHI but not by BMI. Conclusions: Pharyngeal obstruction at the level of the hard and soft palate differentiates patients with severe OSA from patients with mild and moderate OSA regardless of BMI

Luminosity Measurement Method for LHC: The theoretical precision and the experimental challenges

This is the first of the series of papers which present a precision method of the day-by-day monitoring of the absolute LHC luminosity. The method is based on the measurement of the rate of coplanar lepton pairs produced in peripheral collisions of the beams' particles. In the present paper we evaluate the modeling precision of the lepton pair production processes in proton-proton collisions, optimize the measurement region to achieve better than 1% accuracy of the predicted rates, and discuss the experimental challenges to filter out the luminosity monitoring lepton pairs at LHC

The Gamma Factory path to high-luminosity LHC with isoscalar beams

There are two main ways to increase LHC luminosity without upgrading CERN injectors: (1) modification of beam-collision optics and (2) reduction of beam transverse emittance. The former is followed in the ongoing high-luminosity upgrade of the LHC (HL-LHC), while the latter, applicable only to ion beams, is described in this contribution. The reduction of the beam emittance can be achieved by employing a laser-cooling technique to bunches of partially stripped ions at the SPS flat-top energy. In the case the isoscalar calcium beams fulfilling the presentbeam-operation constrains, the transverse beam emittance can be reduced in this way by a factor of 5 during the 8 second long cooling phase. This would allow to reach the nucleon–nucleon luminosity L_NN = 4.2 x 10^34 s^(-1)cm^(-2), which is comparable to the levelled luminosity for the HL-LHC proton–proton collisions, but with reduced pile-up background. The calcium–calcium collisions have several advantages over the proton–proton collisions for the electroweak physics, such as precision measurements of the W-boson mass and sin^2_W, clean observation of the Higgs boson decay into bbar in its photoproduction channel or BSM phenomena. If this scheme is confirmed by the future Gamma Factory proof-of-principle experiment, it could be implemented at CERN with minor infrastructure investments. This contribution is based on Ref. [1