RAPID WEBGIS DEVELOPMENT FOR EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

The use of spatial data during emergency response and management helps to make faster and better decisions. Moreover spatial data should be as much updated as possible and easy to access. To face the challenge of rapid and updated data sharing the most efficient solution is largely considered the use of internet where the field of web mapping is constantly evolving. ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action) is a non profit association founded by Politecnico di Torino and SITI (Higher Institute for the Environmental Systems) as a joint project with the WFP (World Food Programme). The collaboration with the WFP drives some projects related to Early Warning Systems (i.e. flood and drought monitoring) and Early Impact Systems (e.g. rapid mapping and assessment through remote sensing systems). The Web GIS team has built and is continuously improving a complex architecture based entirely on Open Source tools. This architecture is composed by three main areas: the database environment, the server side logic and the client side logic. Each of them is implemented respecting the MCV (Model Controller View) pattern which means the separation of the different logic layers (database interaction, business logic and presentation). The MCV architecture allows to easily and fast build a Web GIS application for data viewing and exploration. In case of emergency data publication can be performed almost immediately as soon as data production is completed. The server side system is based on Python language and Django web development framework, while the client side on OpenLayers, GeoExt and Ext.js that manage data retrieval and user interface. The MCV pattern applied to javascript allows to keep the interface generation and data retrieval logic separated from the general application configuration, thus the server side environment can take care of the generation of the configuration file. The web application building process is data driven and can be considered as a view of the current architecture composed by data and data interaction tools. Once completely automated, the Web GIS application building process can be performed directly by the final user, that can customize data layers and controls to interact with the

QCD calculations for jet substructure

We present results on novel analytic calculations to describe invariant mass distributions of QCD jets with three substructure algorithms: trimming, pruning and the mass-drop taggers. These results not only lead to considerable insight into the behaviour of these tools, but also show how they can be improved. As an example, we discuss the remarkable properties of the modified mass-drop tagger.Comment: Talk presented at various conferences including: ESI Program on Jets and QFT, Beyond the LHC Nordita Workshop, Boost 2013, QCD@LHC 2013, LC 2013 and Radcor 201

Observation of Solitonic Vortices in Bose-Einstein Condensates

We observe solitonic vortices in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate after free expansion. Clear signatures of the nature of such defects are the twisted planar density depletion around the vortex line, observed in absorption images, and the double dislocation in the interference pattern obtained through homodyne techniques. Both methods allow us to determine the sign of the quantized circulation. Experimental observations agree with numerical simulations. These solitonic vortices are the decay product of phase defects of the BEC order parameter spontaneously created after a rapid quench across the BEC transition in a cigar-shaped harmonic trap and are shown to have a very long lifetime.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Solitonic Vortices in Bose-Einstein Condensates

We analyse, theoretically and experimentally, the nature of solitonic vortices (SV) in an elongated Bose-Einstein condensate. In the experiment, such defects are created via the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, when the temperature of a gas of sodium atoms is quenched across the BEC transition, and are imaged after a free expansion of the condensate. By using the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, we calculate the in-trap density and phase distributions characterizing a SV in the crossover from an elongate quasi-1D to a bulk 3D regime. The simulations show that the free expansion strongly amplifies the key features of a SV and produces a remarkable twist of the solitonic plane due to the quantized vorticity associated with the defect. Good agreement is found between simulations and experiments.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Electroweak lights from Dark Matter annihilations

The energy spectra of Standard Model particles originated from Dark Matter annihilations can be significantly altered by the inclusion of electroweak gauge boson radiation from the final state. A situation where this effect is particularly important is when a Majorana Dark Matter particle annihilates into two light fermions. This process is in p-wave and hence suppressed by the small value of the relative velocity of the annihilating particles. The inclusion of electroweak radiation eludes this suppression and opens up a potentially sizeable s-wave contribution to the annihilation cross section. I will discuss the impact of this effect on the fluxes of stable particles resulting from the Dark Matter annihilations, which are relevant for Dark Matter indirect searches.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Contribution to the conference proceedings of TAUP 2011, Munich - Germany (5-9 September 2011

How to Suppress Dark States in Quantum Networks and Bio-Engineered Structures

Transport across quantum networks underlies many problems, from state transfer on a spin network to energy transport in photosynthetic complexes. However, networks can contain dark subspaces that block the transportation, and various methods used to enhance transfer on quantum networks can be viewed as equivalently avoiding, modifying, or destroying the dark subspace. Here, we exploit graph theoretical tools to identify the dark subspaces and show that asymptotically almost surely they do not exist for large networks, while for small ones they can be suppressed by properly perturbing the coupling rates between the network nodes. More specifically, we apply these results to describe the recently experimentally observed and robust transport behaviour of the electronic excitation travelling on a genetically-engineered light-harvesting cylinder (M13 virus) structure. We believe that these mainly topological tools may allow us to better infer which network structures and dynamics are more favourable to enhance transfer of energy and information towards novel quantum technologies.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Towards an understanding of jet substructure

We present first analytic, resummed calculations of the rates at which widespread jet substructure tools tag QCD jets. As well as considering trimming, pruning and the mass-drop tagger, we introduce modified tools with improved analytical and phenomenological behaviours. Most taggers have double logarithmic resummed structures. The modified mass-drop tagger is special in that it involves only single logarithms, and is free from a complex class of terms known as non-global logarithms. The modification of pruning brings an improved ability to discriminate between the different colour structures that characterise signal and background. As we outline in an extensive phenomenological discussion, these results provide valuable insight into the performance of existing tools and help lay robust foundations for future substructure studies.Comment: 52 pages, 18 figures. Version to be published in JHEP: added an Appendix about Y-trimming and addressed several points raised by the refere

Lattice QCD Production on Commodity Clusters at Fermilab

We describe the construction and results to date of Fermilab's three Myrinet-networked lattice QCD production clusters (an 80-node dual Pentium III cluster, a 48-node dual Xeon cluster, and a 128-node dual Xeon cluster). We examine a number of aspects of performance of the MILC lattice QCD code running on these clusters.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 6 pages, LaTeX, 8 eps figures. PSN TUIT00