1,559 research outputs found
Neutrinos and Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis
Observations of clusters and super clusters of galaxies have indicated that
the Universe is more dominated by baryons than ever estimated in the
homogeneous cosmological model for primordial nucleosynthesis. Recent
detections of possibly low deuterium abundance in Lyman- clouds along
the line of sight to high red-shift quasars have raised another potential
difficulty that \he4 is overproduced in any cosmological models which satisfy
the low deuterium abundance constraint. We show that the inhomogeneous
cosmological model with degenerate electron-neutrino can resolve these two
difficulties.Comment: 7 pages, latex, 3 figures. To appear in Nucl. Phys. A62
Large-Area Scintillator Hodoscope with 50 ps Timing Resolution Onboard BESS
We describe the design and performance of a large-area scintillator hodoscope
onboard the BESS rigidity spectrometer; an instrument with an acceptance of 0.3
m^{2}sr.
The hodoscope is configured such that 10 and 12 counters are respectively
situated in upper and lower layers.
Each counter is viewed from its ends by 2.5 inch fine-mesh photomultiplier
tubes placed in a stray magnetic field of 0.2 Tesla.
Various beam-test data are presented.
Use of cosmic-ray muons at ground-level confirmed 50 ps timing resolution for
each layer, giving an overall time-of-flight resolution of 70 ps rms using a
pure Gaussian resolution function.
Comparison with previous measurements on a similar scintillator hodoscope
indicates good agreement with the scaling law that timing resolution is
proportional to 1/, where is the effective
number of photoelectrons.Comment: 16 pages, 14 figure
Development of a Large-Area Aerogel Cherenkov Counter Onboard BESS
This paper describes the development of a threshold type aerogel Cherenkov
counter with a large sensitive area of 0.6 m to be carried onboard the BESS
rigidity spectrometer to detect cosmic-ray antiprotons. The design incorporates
a large diffusion box containing 46 finemesh photomultipliers, with special
attention being paid to achieving good performance under a magnetic field and
providing sufficient endurance while minimizing material usage. The refractive
index of the aerogel was chosen to be 1.03. By utilizing the muons and protons
accumulated during the cosmic-ray measurements at sea level, a rejection factor
of 10 was obtained against muons with , while keeping 97%
efficiency for protons below the threshold.Comment: 13 pages, LaTex, 9 eps figures included, submitted to NIM
A search for massive neutral bosons in orthopositronium decay
We have searched for an exotic decay of orthopositronium into a single photon
and a short-lived neutral boson in the hitherto unexplored mass region above
900 , by noting that this decay is one of few remaining
candidates which could explain the discrepancy of the orthopositronium
decay-rate. A high-resolution measurement of the associated photon energy
spectrum was carried out with a germanium detector to search for a sharp peak
from this two-body decay. Our negative result provides the upper-limits
of\mbox{ } on the branching ratio of such a decay in the
mass region from 847 to 1013 , and excludes the
possibility of this decay mode explaining the discrepancy in the
orthopositronium decay-rate.Comment: a LaTeX file (text 7 pages) and a uuencoded gz-compressed PostScript
file (text 7 pages + figures 4 pages
Model Independent Primordial Power Spectrum from Maxima, Boomerang, and DASI Data
A model-independent determination of the primordial power spectrum of matter
density fluctuations could uniquely probe physics of the very early universe,
and provide powerful constraints on inflationary models. We parametrize the
primordial power spectrum as an arbitrary function, and deduce its
binned amplitude from the cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropy
(CMB) measurements of Maxima, Boomerang, and DASI. We find that for a flat
universe with (scale-invariant) for scales h/Mpc, the
primordial power spectrum is marginally consistent with a scale-invariant
Harrison-Zeldovich spectrum. However, we deduce a rise in power compared to a
scale-invariant power spectrum for 0.001 h/{Mpc} \la k \la 0.01 h/{Mpc}. Our
results are consistent with large-scale structure data, and seem to suggest
that the current observational data allow for the possibility of unusual
physics in the very early universe.Comment: substantially revised and final version, accepted by Ap
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