Prototype Detector for Ultrahigh Energy Neutrino Detection

Necessary technical experience is being gained from successful construction and deployment of current prototype detectors to search for UHE neutrinos in Antarctica, Lake Baikal in Russia, and the Mediterranean. The prototype detectors have also the important central purpose of determining whether or not UHE neutrinos do in fact exist in nature by observation of at least a few UHE neutrino-induced leptons with properties that are not consistent with expected backgrounds. We discuss here the criteria for a prototype detector to accomplish that purpose in a convincing way even if the UHE neutrino flux is substantially lower than predicted at present.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Astroparticle Physic

A Reservoir Runs Through It: A Legislative and Administrative History of the Six Pueblos\u27 Right to Store Prior and Paramount Water at El Vado

This article explores the Six Middle Rio Grande Pueblo tribes\u27 right to store water at El Vado Reservoir. Although not explicitly authorized in the Act of 1928, the legislative history suggests that implicit in the Act is authority for the Six Pueblos to store water at El Vado. The seventeenth Congress believed the Six Pueblos\u27 land suffered from a rising water table, antiquated irrigation works, and an unreliable river flow. Accordingly, it intended all of the Pueblos\u27 lands within the boundaries of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD) to materially benefit from the Conservancy Project, which included storage at El Vado. The Department of the Interior acted upon the authorizations contained in the 1928 Act by entering into a series of agreements with the MRGCD. Those agreements explicitly recognized the Pueblos\u27 right to store water at El Vado. Additionally, the Pueblos may have a right to store under New Mexico law through the MRGCD\u27s storage permit No. 1690. That permit does not contain any limitation on the type of water rights authorized for storage at the Reservoir. The MRGCD included the Six Pueblos\u27 lands in its permit application No. 0620 and did not exclude them from its permit application No. 1690

Cuoricino Thermal Pulse Classification by Machine Learning Algorithms

Many of the various properties of neutrinos are still a mystery. One unknown is whether neutrinos are Majorana fermions or Dirac fermions. Cuoricino and CUORE are experiments that aim to solve this mystery. Noise reduction in these experiments hinges on the ability to discern among alpha, beta and gamma particle detections using the thermal pulses they create. In this paper, we look at Cuoricino data and attempt to classify pulses, not as alpha, beta or gamma particles, but rather as signal, noise or calibration data. We will use this preliminary testing ground to examine various machine learning algorithms\u27 abilities in this dataset. We will consider and discuss the details of the Support Vector Classifier, Random Forest Classifier, Deep Neural Network, Convolutional Neural Network, and Mini Batch K-Means learning algorithms. Then, we will test the non-neural network algorithms on the data and discuss the results. Finally, we will propose future analysis and work that could be done to improve current results and to begin with particle classification

Predicting Employment Effects of Job Coaching

Providing employment-related services, including supported employment through job coaches, to individuals with developmental disabilities has been a priority in federal policy for the past twenty years starting with the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act in 1984. We take advantage of a unique panel data set of all clients served by the SC Department of Disabilities and Special Needs between 1999 and 2005 to investigate whether job coaching leads to stable employment in community settings. The data contain information on individual characteristics, such as IQ and the presence of emotional and behavioral problems, that are likely to affect both employment propensity and likelihood of receiving job coaching. We control for unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity using fixed effects and instrumental variable models. Our results show that unobserved individual characteristics and endogeneity strongly bias naive estimates of the effects of job coaching. However, even after controlling for these, an economically and statistically significant effect remains.

Improving Cadmium Zinc Telluride Spectrometer Performance and Capabilities.

CdZnTe is the premier semiconductor material for room-temperature gamma-ray spectroscopy and imaging. The high effective atomic number of 52 and high density of 6 grams per centimeter cubed yield excellent detection efficiency; a pixelated detector design allows for 3D position sensitivity and material non-uniformity corrections resulting in <1% FWHM energy resolution at 662 keV; the wide bandgap of 1.61 eV permits room temperature operation. Fabrication improvements and the feasibility of floating-temperature operation are analyzed in this work. Several fabrication changes are tested to mitigate gain nonuniformity in some pixels during operation. Changing the substrate from printed circuit board to ceramic improves operation, maintains spectroscopic performance, and is adopted. Switching the electrode contacts from gold to platinum drastically raises the leakage current and is rejected. Two proprietary fabrication techniques are proposed. The first, fabrication A, raises the leakage, degrades spectroscopic performance, and is rejected. The second, fabrication B, causes greater gain nonuniformity, degrades resolution, and is also rejected. To reduce system power consumption, a temperature correction algorithm is developed that allows data collection at operating temperatures different from the calibration temperature without performance degradation. This begins with isolating the temperature effects to the detector rather than the readout electronics, and demonstrating the accuracy of the electronic baseline as a surrogate for temperature. Considering the temperature effects, linear gain corrections only partially recover spectroscopic performance and cannot account for pixel nonuniformity or energy nonlinearity. Parametric corrections pinpoint specific aspects of system operation susceptible to change with temperature. Peak hold drop, depth of interaction, and gain as a function of depth are individually corrected and recover spectroscopic performance almost entirely. To reduce data requirements, the corrections are reapplied assuming separability between the temperature and original parameter domains, with minimal resolution degradation.PHDNuclear Engineering & Radiological SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135749/1/mileman_1.pd

Testing the Feasibility of a Passive and Active Case Ascertainment System for Multiple Rare Conditions Simultaneously: The Experience in Three US States

Background: Owing to their low prevalence, single rare conditions are difficult to monitor through current state passive and active case ascertainment systems. However, such monitoring is important because, as a group, rare conditions have great impact on the health of affected individuals and the well-being of their caregivers. A viable approach could be to conduct passive and active case ascertainment of several rare conditions simultaneously. This is a report about the feasibility of such an approach. Objective: To test the feasibility of a case ascertainment system with passive and active components aimed at monitoring 3 rare conditions simultaneously in 3 states of the United States (Colorado, Kansas, and South Carolina). The 3 conditions are spina bifida, muscular dystrophy, and fragile X syndrome. Methods: Teams from each state evaluated the possibility of using current or modified versions of their local passive and active case ascertainment systems and datasets to monitor the 3 conditions. Together, these teams established the case definitions and selected the variables and the abstraction tools for the active case ascertainment approach. After testing the ability of their local passive and active case ascertainment system to capture all 3 conditions, the next steps were to report the number of cases detected actively and passively for each condition, to list the local barriers against the combined passive and active case ascertainment system, and to describe the experiences in trying to overcome these barriers. Results: During the test period, the team from South Carolina was able to collect data on all 3 conditions simultaneously for all ages. The Colorado team was also able to collect data on all 3 conditions but, because of age restrictions in its passive and active case ascertainment system, it was able to report few cases of fragile X syndrome. The team from Kansas was able to collect data only on spina bifida. For all states, the implementation of an active component of the ascertainment system was problematic. The passive component appears viable with minor modifications. Conclusions: Despite evident barriers, the joint passive and active case ascertainment of rare disorders using modified existing surveillance systems and datasets seems feasible, especially for systems that rely on passive case ascertainment

Schr\"odinger's Black Hole Cat

In the absence of a fully-fledged theory of quantum gravity, we propose a "bottom-up" framework for exploring quantum-gravitational physics by pairing two of the most fundamental concepts of quantum theory and general relativity, namely quantum superposition and spacetime. We show how to describe such "spacetime superpositions" and explore effects they induce upon quantum matter. Our approach capitalizes on standard tools of quantum field theory in curved space, and allows us to calculate physical observables like transition probabilities for a particle detector residing in curvature-superposed de Sitter spacetime, or outside a mass-superposed black hole. Crucially, such scenarios represent genuine quantum superpositions of spacetimes, in contrast with superpositions of metrics which only differ by a coordinate transformation and thus are not different according to general relativity.Comment: 12 pages, Essay written for the Gravity Research Foundation 2022 Awards for Essays on Gravitatio