Hypernuclei and Antihypernuclei Production in Heavy-Ion Collisions

In these proceedings, an overview of recent hypernuclei measurements in heavy ion collisions is presented. These results include the lifetime, $\Lambda$ binding energy, production yield, and directed flow in heavy ion collisions. These results provide constraints on the hyperon-nucleon interaction, enhance our understanding in hypernuclear structure, and provide insight on the production mechanisms of hypernuclei in heavy ion collisions.Comment: Part of the proceedings for The 19th International Conference of Strangeness in Quark Matter (SQM 2021

Sodium-Glucose Cotransporter 2 Inhibitors and the Risk of Pneumonia and Septic Shock

CONTEXT: Individuals with type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) have an increased risk of pneumonia and septic shock. Traditional glucose-lowering drugs have recently been found to be associated with a higher risk of infections. It remains unclear whether sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitors (SGLT2is), which have pleiotropic/anti-inflammatory effects, may reduce the risk of pneumonia and septic shock in DM. METHODS: MEDLINE, Embase, and ClinicalTrials.gov were searched from inception up to May 19, 2022, for randomized, placebo-controlled trials of SGLT2i that included patients with DM and reported outcomes of interest (pneumonia and/or septic shock). Study selection, data extraction, and quality assessment (using the Cochrane Risk of Bias Assessment Tool) were conducted by independent authors. A fixed-effects model was used to pool the relative risk (RRs) and 95% CI across trials. RESULTS: Out of 4568 citations, 26 trials with a total of 59 264 patients (1.9% developed pneumonia and 0.2% developed septic shock) were included. Compared with placebo, SGLT2is significantly reduced the risk of pneumonia (pooled RR 0.87, 95% CI 0.78-0.98) and septic shock (pooled RR 0.65, 95% CI 0.44-0.95). There was no significant heterogeneity of effect size among trials. Subgroup analyses according to the type of SGLT2i used, baseline comorbidities, glycemic control, duration of DM, and trial follow-up showed consistent results without evidence of significant treatment-by-subgroup heterogeneity (all P(heterogeneity) > .10). CONCLUSION: Among DM patients, SGLT2is reduced the risk of pneumonia and septic shock compared with placebo. Our findings should be viewed as hypothesis generating, with concepts requiring validation in future studies

Potential of Core-Collapse Supernova Neutrino Detection at JUNO

JUNO is an underground neutrino observatory under construction in Jiangmen, China. It uses 20kton liquid scintillator as target, which enables it to detect supernova burst neutrinos of a large statistics for the next galactic core-collapse supernova (CCSN) and also pre-supernova neutrinos from the nearby CCSN progenitors. All flavors of supernova burst neutrinos can be detected by JUNO via several interaction channels, including inverse beta decay, elastic scattering on electron and proton, interactions on C12 nuclei, etc. This retains the possibility for JUNO to reconstruct the energy spectra of supernova burst neutrinos of all flavors. The real time monitoring systems based on FPGA and DAQ are under development in JUNO, which allow prompt alert and trigger-less data acquisition of CCSN events. The alert performances of both monitoring systems have been thoroughly studied using simulations. Moreover, once a CCSN is tagged, the system can give fast characterizations, such as directionality and light curve

Detection of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background with JUNO

As an underground multi-purpose neutrino detector with 20 kton liquid scintillator, Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is competitive with and complementary to the water-Cherenkov detectors on the search for the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB). Typical supernova models predict 2-4 events per year within the optimal observation window in the JUNO detector. The dominant background is from the neutral-current (NC) interaction of atmospheric neutrinos with 12C nuclei, which surpasses the DSNB by more than one order of magnitude. We evaluated the systematic uncertainty of NC background from the spread of a variety of data-driven models and further developed a method to determine NC background within 15\% with {\it{in}} {\it{situ}} measurements after ten years of running. Besides, the NC-like backgrounds can be effectively suppressed by the intrinsic pulse-shape discrimination (PSD) capabilities of liquid scintillators. In this talk, I will present in detail the improvements on NC background uncertainty evaluation, PSD discriminator development, and finally, the potential of DSNB sensitivity in JUNO

Real-time Monitoring for the Next Core-Collapse Supernova in JUNO

Core-collapse supernova (CCSN) is one of the most energetic astrophysical events in the Universe. The early and prompt detection of neutrinos before (pre-SN) and during the SN burst is a unique opportunity to realize the multi-messenger observation of the CCSN events. In this work, we describe the monitoring concept and present the sensitivity of the system to the pre-SN and SN neutrinos at the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), which is a 20 kton liquid scintillator detector under construction in South China. The real-time monitoring system is designed with both the prompt monitors on the electronic board and online monitors at the data acquisition stage, in order to ensure both the alert speed and alert coverage of progenitor stars. By assuming a false alert rate of 1 per year, this monitoring system can be sensitive to the pre-SN neutrinos up to the distance of about 1.6 (0.9) kpc and SN neutrinos up to about 370 (360) kpc for a progenitor mass of 30$M_{\odot}$ for the case of normal (inverted) mass ordering. The pointing ability of the CCSN is evaluated by using the accumulated event anisotropy of the inverse beta decay interactions from pre-SN or SN neutrinos, which, along with the early alert, can play important roles for the followup multi-messenger observations of the next Galactic or nearby extragalactic CCSN.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figure

STAR Beam Energy Scan

One of the main physics goals of the Beam Energy Scan (BES) program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is to study the phase diagram of QCD matter. The STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory has recently completed the second phase of the beam energy scan (BES-II) program. The center-of-mass energy (√sNN) of the Au+Au collisions from the collider mode ranges from 7.7 to 54.4 GeV, while the fixed target collisions included in BES-II extend the energy reach down to 3.0 GeV, which presents an opportunity to probe the medium properties of QCD matter at high baryon density. Recent results from these data will be presented, and the physics implications on the QCD phase diagram will be discussed.Refreshments will be served at 10:30.</p

Recent studies on hypernuclei lifetimes from STAR

The hyperon-nucleon (Y-N) interaction is an essential ingredient in the description of the equation-of-state of high-baryon-density matter. Light hypernuclei (A = 3, 4), being simple Y-N bound states, serve as cornerstones of our understanding of the Y-N interaction. Thus, precise measurements of their lifetimes are important, as they provide stringent tests to hyperon-nucleon interaction models. The yields of light hypernuclei are expected to increase from high to low energy heavy-ion collisions due to the increase in baryon density. As a result, the STAR Beam Energy Scan II program, which spans an energy range of √sNN = 3.0 − 27.0 GeV, is particularly suited for hypernuclei studies. In these proceedings, recent results on the lifetimes of light hypernuclei (3ΛH, 4ΛH, 4ΛHe) measured in √sNN = 3.0 and 7.2 GeV Au+Au collisions are presented. The relative branching ratio R3 of the 3ΛH is intimately related to its lifetime. A new R3 measurement using data from √sNN = 3.0 GeV Au+Au collisions is reported. These results will be compared to previous measurements and theoretical calculations, and the physics implications will be discussed

Reducing Power Consumption of Turbo Code Decoder Using Adaptive Iteration with Variable Supply Voltage

Turbo code becomes popular for the next generation wireless communication systems because of its remarkable coding performance. One of the problem for decoding turbo code in the receiver is the complexity and the high power consumption since multiple iterations of Soft Output Viterbi Algorithm (SOVA) have to be carried out to decode a data frame. In this paper, we address the issues of reducing the complexity and power consumption of turbo code decoder. An approach using cyclic redundancy checking (CRC) to adaptively terminate the SOVA iteration of each frame is presented. This results in system that has variable workload of which the amount of computation required for each data frame is different. Dynamic voltage scaling is then used to further reduce the power consumption. However, since the workload is not yet known at the time when the data is being decoded, optimum voltage assignment is not feasible. In this work, we propose two heuristic algorithms to assign supply voltage for di..