From vertex detectors to inner trackers with CMOS pixel sensors

The use of CMOS Pixel Sensors (CPS) for high resolution and low material vertex detectors has been validated with the 2014 and 2015 physics runs of the STAR-PXL detector at RHIC/BNL. This opens the door to the use of CPS for inner tracking devices, with 10-100 times larger sensitive area, which require therefore a sensor design privileging power saving, response uniformity and robustness. The 350 nm CMOS technology used for the STAR-PXL sensors was considered as too poorly suited to upcoming applications like the upgraded ALICE Inner Tracking System (ITS), which requires sensors with one order of magnitude improvement on readout speed and improved radiation tolerance. This triggered the exploration of a deeper sub-micron CMOS technology, Tower-Jazz 180 nm, for the design of a CPS well adapted for the new ALICE-ITS running conditions. This paper reports the R&D results for the conception of a CPS well adapted for the ALICE-ITS.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, VCI 2016 conference proceeding

Cosmological black holes and the direction of time

Macroscopic irreversible processes emerge from fundamental physical laws of reversible character. The source of the local irreversibility seems to be not in the laws themselves but in the initial and boundary conditions of the equations that represent the laws. In this work we propose that the screening of currents by black hole event horizons determines, locally, a preferred direction for the flux of electromagnetic energy. We study the growth of black hole event horizons due to the cosmological expansion and accretion of cosmic microwave background radiation, for different cosmological models. We propose generalized McVittie co-moving metrics and integrate the rate of accretion of cosmic microwave background radiation onto a supermassive black hole over cosmic time. We find that for flat, open, and closed Friedmann cosmological models, the ratio of the total area of the black hole event horizons with respect to the area of a radial co-moving space-like hypersurface always increases. Since accretion of cosmic radiation sets an absolute lower limit to the total matter accreted by black holes, this implies that the causal past and future are not mirror symmetric for any spacetime event. The asymmetry causes a net Poynting flux in the global future direction; the latter is in turn related to the ever increasing thermodynamic entropy. Thus, we expose a connection between four different "time arrows": cosmological, electromagnetic, gravitational, and thermodynamic.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures in Foundations of Science (2017

Symmetries, Spinning Particles and the TCFH of D=4,5 Minimal Supergravities

We find that spinning particles with suitable couplings propagating in certain supersymmetric backgrounds of $D=4$, $N=2$ and $D=5$, $N=1$ minimal supergravities are invariant under symmetries generated by the twisted covariant form hierarchies of these theories. We also compare our results with the symmetries of spinning particles generated by Killing-Yano forms which are responsible for the separability properties of some gravitational backgrounds.Comment: 12 page

Asteroseismology of delta Scuti stars in open clusters: Praesepe

The present paper provides a general overview of the asteroseismic potential of delta Scuti stars in clusters, in particular focusing on convection diagnostics. We give a summarise of the last results obtained by the authors for the Praesepe cluster of which five delta Scuti stars are analysed. In that work, linear analysis is confronted with observations, using refined descriptions for the effects of rotation on the determination of the global stellar parameters and on the adiabatic oscillation frequency computations. A single, complete, and coherent solution for all the selected stars is found, which lead the authors to find important restrictions to the convection description for a certain range of effective temperatures. Furthermore, the method used allowed to give an estimate of the global parameters of the selected stars and constrain the cluster.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. Accepted for publication in Communications in Asteroseismolog

Experimental study of a fiber Bragg grating accelerometer for seismic measurement

This paper presents a fiber Bragg grating accelerometer prototype for seismic applications, including accelerometer scheme, calibration method and accelerometer resonance frequencies. The acceleration calibration and measurements were obtained from the laser beam deflection method. A series of experiments were carried out and results shows an accelerometer sensitivity of 8.07 mV/g (where 1g= 9.81 m/s2) at 0.5 Hz and 2.63 mV/g at 50 Hz, the measured range scale goes from 0 to 35 m s-2

Analysis of a biaxial fiber Bragg grating accelerometer intended for seismic applications

This paper describes a fiber Bragg grating based biaxial accelerometer prototype intended for seismic applications. The work includes the accelerometer structural scheme, optical scheme, sensibility, frequency response and the laser beam deflection method used for calibration. Results of this work show that the device is suitable for seismic measurements because its measurement range goes from 0.5 Hz to more than 20 Hz in frequency and from 0 g to 1.2 g in acceleration amplitude