Measurement of the B0-anti-B0-Oscillation Frequency with Inclusive Dilepton Events

The $B^0$-$\bar B^0$ oscillation frequency has been measured with a sample of 23 million \B\bar B pairs collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric B Factory at SLAC. In this sample, we select events in which both B mesons decay semileptonically and use the charge of the leptons to identify the flavor of each B meson. A simultaneous fit to the decay time difference distributions for opposite- and same-sign dilepton events gives $\Delta m_d = 0.493 \pm 0.012{(stat)}\pm 0.009{(syst)}$ ps$^{-1}$.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Physical Review Letter

Highly-parallelized simulation of a pixelated LArTPC on a GPU

The rapid development of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is allowing the implementation of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo simulation chains for particle physics experiments. This technique is particularly suitable for the simulation of a pixelated charge readout for time projection chambers, given the large number of channels that this technology employs. Here we present the first implementation of a full microphysical simulator of a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) equipped with light readout and pixelated charge readout, developed for the DUNE Near Detector. The software is implemented with an end-to-end set of GPU-optimized algorithms. The algorithms have been written in Python and translated into CUDA kernels using Numba, a just-in-time compiler for a subset of Python and NumPy instructions. The GPU implementation achieves a speed up of four orders of magnitude compared with the equivalent CPU version. The simulation of the current induced on 10^3 pixels takes around 1 ms on the GPU, compared with approximately 10 s on the CPU. The results of the simulation are compared against data from a pixel-readout LArTPC prototype

Analysis of the stress-inducible transcription factor SsNAC23 in sugarcane plants

Stresses such as cold and drought can impair plant yield and induce a highly complex array of responses. Sugarcane (Saccharum spp.) is cultivated in tropical and subtropical areas and is considered a cold-sensitive plant. We previously showed that cold stress induces the expression of several genes in in vitro sugarcane plantlets. Here we characterize one of those genes, SsNAC23, a member of the NAC family of plant-specific transcription factors, which are induced by low temperature and other stresses in several plant species. The expression of SsNAC23 was induced in sugarcane plants exposed to low temperatures (4ºC). With the aim of further understanding the regulatory network in response to stress, we used the yeast two-hybrid system to identify sugarcane proteins that interact with SsNAC23. Using SsNAC23 as bait, we screened a cDNA expression library of sugarcane plants submitted to 4ºC for 48 h. Several interacting partners were identified, including stress-related proteins, increasing our knowledge on how sugarcane plants respond to cold stress. One of these interacting partners, a thioredoxin h1, offers insights into the regulation of SsNAC23 activity