Subducted and recycled lithosphere as the mantle source of ocean island basalts from southern Polynesia, central Pacific

L'étude géochimique et pétrographique des basaltes des archipels volcaniques de la Polynésie Française montre que ces roches dérivent d'une lithosphère ancienne ayant subi une subduction et un recyclage. La composition chimique et isotopique des basaltes montre l'existence d'hétérogénéités géochimiques pour la source magmatique : elles s'expliquent par un mélange de la croûte océanique avec une péridotite résiduelle

The Level-0 Muon Trigger for the LHCb Experiment

A very compact architecture has been developed for the first level Muon Trigger of the LHCb experiment that processes 40 millions of proton-proton collisions per second. For each collision, it receives 3.2 kBytes of data and it finds straight tracks within a 1.2 microseconds latency. The trigger implementation is massively parallel, pipelined and fully synchronous with the LHC clock. It relies on 248 high density Field Programable Gate arrays and on the massive use of multigigabit serial link transceivers embedded inside FPGAs.Comment: 33 pages, 16 figures, submitted to NIM

Conception and Validation Software Tools for the Level 0 Muon Trigger of LHCb

The Level-0 muon trigger processor of the LHCb experiment looks for straight particules crossing muon detector and measures their transverse momentum. It processes 40×106 proton-proton collisions per second. The tracking uses a road algorithm relying on the projectivity of the muon detector. The architecture of the Level-0 muon trigger is complex with a dense network of data interconnections. The design and validation of such an intricate system has only been possible with intense use of software tools for the detector simulation, the modelling of the hardware components behaviour and the validation. A database describing the dataflow is the corner stone between the software and hardware components

Background Light in Potential Sites for the ANTARES Undersea Neutrino Telescope

The ANTARES collaboration has performed a series of {\em in situ} measurements to study the background light for a planned undersea neutrino telescope. Such background can be caused by $^{40}$K decays or by biological activity. We report on measurements at two sites in the Mediterranean Sea at depths of 2400~m and 2700~m, respectively. Three photomultiplier tubes were used to measure single counting rates and coincidence rates for pairs of tubes at various distances. The background rate is seen to consist of three components: a constant rate due to $^{40}$K decays, a continuum rate that varies on a time scale of several hours simultaneously over distances up to at least 40~m, and random bursts a few seconds long that are only correlated in time over distances of the order of a meter. A trigger requiring coincidences between nearby photomultiplier tubes should reduce the trigger rate for a neutrino telescope to a manageable level with only a small loss in efficiency.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physic

Polymer-based micro deformable mirror for adaptive optics applications

MOEMS and Miniaturized Systems V; Ayman El-Fatatry; Ed.Next generation giant telescopes as well as next generation instrumentation for 10m-class telescopes relies on the availability of highly performing adaptive optical systems, for studying new fields like circumstellar disks and extrasolar planets. These systems require deformable mirrors with very challenging parameters, including number of actuators up to 250 000 and inter-actuator spacing around 500μm. MOEMS-based devices are promising for future deformable mirrors. However, only limited strokes for large driving voltages have been demonstrated. In order to overcome these limitations, we are currently developing a micro-deformable mirror based on an array of electrostatic actuators with attachment posts to a continuous mirror on top. The originality of our approach lies in the elaboration of a sacrificial layer and of a structural layer made of polymer materials, using low-temperature process. This process allows the realization of high optical quality mirrors on top of an actuator array made with various techniques. We have developed the first polymer piston-motion actuator in order to reach high strokes for low driving voltages: a 10μm thick mobile plate with four springs attached to the substrate, and with an air gap of 10μm exhibits a piston motion of 2μm for 30V. Preliminary comparison with FEM models show very good agreement and design of a complete polymer-based MDM looks possibl