Tracker Operation and Performance at the Magnet Test and Cosmic Challenge

During summer 2006 a fraction of the CMS silicon strip tracker was operated in a comprehensive slice test called the Magnet Test and Cosmic Challenge (MTCC). At the MTCC, cosmic rays detected in the muon chambers were used to trigger the readout of all CMS sub-detectors in the general data acquisition system and in the presence of the 4 T magnetic field produced by the CMS superconducting solenoid. This document describes the operation of the Tracker hardware and software prior, during and after data taking. The performance of the detector as resulting from the MTCC data analysis is also presented

CMS physics technical design report : Addendum on high density QCD with heavy ions

Peer reviewe

UV written planar Bragg grating sensors - an overview of fabrication geometries and applications

The presentation will give an overview of the fabrication process of direct UV written planar Bragg grating sensors and the various geometries and applications investigated over the last several years

Comparison of tumor-informed and tumor-naïve sequencing assays for ctDNA detection in breast cancer.

Analysis of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) to monitor cancer dynamics and detect minimal residual disease has been an area of increasing interest. Multiple methods have been proposed but few studies have compared the performance of different approaches. Here, we compare detection of ctDNA in serial plasma samples from patients with breast cancer using different tumor-informed and tumor-naïve assays designed to detect structural variants (SVs), single nucleotide variants (SNVs), and/or somatic copy-number aberrations, by multiplex PCR, hybrid capture, and different depths of whole-genome sequencing. Our results demonstrate that the ctDNA dynamics and allele fractions (AFs) were highly concordant when analyzing the same patient samples using different assays. Tumor-informed assays showed the highest sensitivity for detection of ctDNA at low concentrations. Hybrid capture sequencing targeting between 1,347 and 7,491 tumor-identified mutations at high depth was the most sensitive assay, detecting ctDNA down to an AF of 0.00024% (2.4 parts per million, ppm). Multiplex PCR targeting 21-47 tumor-identified SVs per patient detected ctDNA down to 0.00047% AF (4.7 ppm) and has potential as a clinical assay

First performance studies of a pixel-based trigger in the CMS experiment

An important tool for the discovery of new physics at LHC is the design of a low level trigger with an high power of background rejection. The contribution of pixel detector to the lowest level trigger at CMS is studied focusing on low-energy jet identification, matching the information from calorimeters and pixel detector. In addition, primary vertex algorithms are investigated. The performances are evaluated in terms of, respectively, QCD rejection and multihadronic jets final states efficiency. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved